I would eat breakfast.
Then the inevitable would happen. I couldn’t make the decision whether to have a bath and get dressed or go back to bed. I was overwhelmed by even the mere thought of daily ablutions and wardrobe decisions.
This was highly ironic because I was in the fashion business so the primary unifom was all black. I would say to myself, Robyn, all around the world, people are getting ready for work and you can too. You have a business to run and you are divorced and all alone. Nobody is going to pay your bills. However, bed would beckon once again and my mighty cheerleading moment would dissolve and fall upon my own deaf ears.
My body would refuse to co-operate with my brain.
This was the beginning of my marriage to chronic depression. No courtship. No wedding. No honeymoon. Just the devotion and the drudgery of a scullery maid.
How do you begin to put a date on when depression starts?
I certainly was a melancholy child. When I was seven, my heart would begin to race whenever I heard Judy Garland belt out “The Man That Got Away.” I would start to tremble and become paralyzed with pain as the music and lyrics seemed to take over my tiny body.
Puberty found me acne faced but well endowed. My strange appetite for torch songs continued and I would spend copious amounts of time in my bedroom lip synching to these morose “chansons” while I practiced my imaginary answers for all of those imaginary interviews that would take place when fame came knocking at my door.
My “real” life was increasingly becoming the life that existed only in my head.
My other “outside” life could best be described as lugubrious.
I was totally at one with all depressing literature especially Tennessee Williams and his neurotic southern belles, I played Maggie in a high school production of “Cat on a hot tin Roof”, and just the slight thought of a birch tree would make me swoon and want to accompany those infamous three sisters on their journey to Moscow.
My mother called me her little Sarah Bernhardt as I began to perfect my very own personal flair for all things melodramatic.
Cut to university, I am an English major with great hopes of a career in the theater. Once again I am not connecting. I am guessing at how a happy person behaves. I feel desperately alone. Everything about life terrifies me and men do not have the slightest interest in me.
I quit university. I find it provincial and I want to be a New Yorker.
I live in Stoney Creek.Everything in my soul yearns to be where people are sophisticated and well read. I am twenty three years old and a virgin. Who is a virgin in 1979? It is the decade of free love.
I feel no man will ever desire me.
Depression is the loneliest game in town. It has only one friend. Its name, suicide. This constant comrade never leaves your side. Its vicious undermining ways are always there ready to swoop in at any given moment to make sure you never get too big for your own britches. You are a failure, it whispers. Your lipstick is not the right shade, it teases but most of all, it thunders loudly in your ear, you are a complete and utter fraud and there is no place for you on this earth.
I begin to work at various and sundry jobs.
The seventies quickly gave way to the eighties. Reagan is President and I am grossly underemployed (this was soon becoming a trend in my life). I have always thought of myself as being some sort of a warrior fighting in the trenches for the good of the pink ghetto and this I justified was the real reason why I had never lived up to my true potential.(Who does?). I have now realized at the ripe old age of fifty six, that this lack of ambition has been one of the many ways that depression sabotages its victims and renders them sans “cojones” in the world of the rich and successful.
" I should have become a lawyer", I would moan.
"The world breaks everyone, and after you are broken, some become stronger at the broken places", wrote Ernest Hemingway.
Himself, not exactly a poster child for mental health. However, kudos to him for such utopian thinking.
Finally, manna arrived from heaven in the form of a job offer in New York City. My sojourn was cut short by my inability to raise key money for an apartment. Key money meaning illegal funds for services not rendered. And, secondly by being totally manipulated by a beautiful and loving but severely angst ridden woman, my mother.
You are your genetics.I would later spend thirteen and a half years in psychotherapy trying to understand my family’s dynamics as well as carefully unraveling its mysterious and tragic plethora of mental illnesses.
So thirty five years later, I would look back and clearly see the third and foremost reason why I could not make this dream manifest into concrete reality. While, I was making fun of my mother, unbeknownst to me, we were both suffering from the same monstrous disorder,
Anxiety.
Much to everyone’s delight and surprise I did attract a gentleman caller and since I had been conditioned in my own screwed up pavlovian way to think that no one else would ever ask, I couldn’t accept his marriage proposal fast enough.
I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy and did my time in a big house in the suburbs, like most good wives do.
My mother succumbed to cancer at fifty seven. Upon her death bed, she gave me her permission and blessing to enjoy my own life.
And in an oddly bittersweet way I have. I find the cycle of life fascinating in the way that sometimes a parent has to die in order that their progeny can make their way to the light of day. I wish there was more to learn about life when you’re driving a BMW than there is when you’re standing in the rain waiting for the bus, but sadly there isn’t.
I divorced. Had lovers and discovered like we all do that happiness is fleeting and ageing is not for the faint of heart. For the last two years, my depression has ceased being the main and focal part of my life and the cacophonous sounds of suicide have subsided.
I still yearn for many things. Old dreams die, new ones are born. I still find windmills to tilt at. Every once in a while, I fall prey to the mass Armageddon way of North American thinking that seems to be all pervasive these days.
I have regrets.
That’s when gratitude, grace and God come in and do their magic.
F. Scott Fitzgerald penned that “there are no second acts in American life”.
I am certain that we baby boomers will prove him wrong.
As for me, the little girl standing in the doorway has watched while the grown woman has valiantly stepped through the door and walked onto the field of life.
No more living “totally” in my head.
No more “watching from the stands”, for me.
I have come to play.
At last.
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