COLUMN: Columnist tries to cheer up despite depressing topic
When my editor told me that I was supposed to write about depression this week, it made me feel, well, depressed. Depression really isn’t a joke, and trying to make fun of it is about as tasteless as poking fun at cancer or a car wreck.
But duty calls, and after moping around for a week and eating an entire thing of gummy frogs, the time has finally come to work my way out of my unfortunate funk and write a column.
My most recent journey out of dejection has taught me some things, and so I am going to devote this week’s column to the causes of and possible solutions to depression. And, should I overstep the bounds of propriety, I ask that you save your terrible letters for my editor.
Depression is essentially an issue of perception. Suppose, for instance, your manager at Best Buy is always asking you to put balloons on the sale table because – looking at your diminutive frame and slightly feminine air – he just perceives that you’ve got a knack for interior design. Such a situation could, hypothetically, make you depressed.
Of course, the impending cold doesn’t help. We may talk about the beautiful colors of the leaves and about how good we look in sweaters, but each and every one of us knows that it is a lie meant only to disguise the terrible truth of the matter.
In Cache Valley, fall is little more than a brief pre-game show appended to what is inevitably going to be another winter worthy of the record books. I’m not going to admit this, and neither are you. But in so doing, each of us inadvertently stumbles upon one the most basic of ways to combat depression: denial.
When I woke up last Friday to a fresh set of love handles, I didn’t decide to skip all of my classes and sleep my way into an emotional coma. Instead, I made a mental note to replace the obviously faulty lighting in my bathroom and I went on with my day.
Sometimes these things come upon us. Each of us has at some point awoken (or not, as the case may be) to an alarm that refuses to work, a new set of love handles or to find ourselves embroiled in a seemingly impossible war in Iraq. These things just happen, and the best medicine isn’t to be found in attempting to solve them or even in ignoring them; it lies only in looking squarely at the situation at hand and vehemently denying its existence.
It is all so simple and so masculine in its approach that it almost seems like no solution at all. And that is the problem with it. Only the smallest cases of depression affecting the smallest minds – my own, for instance – can actually be solved by pretending they aren’t happening.
More serious cases require support groups, the occasional prescription and Christina Aguilera albums. And here is where the funny stops. These are all, of course, impossible to laugh about.
Most things are funny because we know enough to form a stereotype, but not enough to really get it. When I ask people how to make a cat float, it’s funny because I’ve never actually experimented with root beer, two scoops of ice cream and a cat. Depression is a different story altogether.
We’ve all been down at one time or another. And while the causes are different, the feeling is the same. So when we imagine someone who, despite their best efforts, can’t just listen to Christina Aguilera and feel better, we’re sorry for them. Maybe I am, as an English major with no real skills or job prospects, a little sensitive about the whole thing. But when it comes to depression, I think that sensitive is a good thing to be.
So let’s all try our best to chin up, cheer up and look forward a funnier column in a couple of weeks.
Zach Pendleton is a senior majoring in English. Comments or questions
can be sent to
zpendleton@cc.usu.edu.