Splinters Of Happiness

It's snowing. The kind of snow that is both gentle and comes in spits and dribbles…fine snow. Sitting here writing to the snow reminds me of the pandemic, but I am missing the squirrels.

THE DEPRESSION. I am not supposed to call it my depression anymore. It is "the" depression, and I have decided it is masculine. Maybe another depression that I've had is feminine, but this is a masculine one. Luca Brasi (who I always want to call Lu Cabrasi) said "and let their first child be a masculine one".

The spits and dribbles are constant now. It is grey. The trees are bare skeletons of themselves. I hate it. But the sunny days, the crisp crystalline days that are lacking the cover of the clouds, insulating, the oh so cold after a snowstorm, brilliant white - blinding white, make up for it. They remind me of my manias.

I write with a deliberateness that I haven't had in a long while. Maybe because it is all so fresh, or maybe it is because I haven't written in at least a year, and I have so much to say. What have I learned over the past year, or has it been a wasteland? And maybe it is just because I am typing on this old computer instead of texting on my phone.

I read a book called Fatelessness. It is a Holocaust book written from the perspective of a 15-year-old boy. Its naïve narrator, Georg tries to understand the crazed world around him, make sense of the rules. He is an anthropologist of the camps. In the end he bursts out with agony because he cannot explain what it was like to people who had not been there. He found that all people wanted to hear about was the horror. His experience includes what I call splinters of happiness; the hour before "Appell" when soup was delivered and the sun shone just so, golden hour. "For even there next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the 'atrocities' whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable".

Not in any way to compare myself to a Survivor, yet this leaves me wondering if there is something familiar in his observation about splinters of happiness in the camps with the depressions I have endured.

Splinters of happiness as Georg describes it is that golden hour when slave labour in the camp is done and there is nothing to do before the thin soup is served but watch the sun start to set. It is a glimmer.

For me it describes how glee or laughter affects me when I am depressed. Each happiness is sharp like a splinter; It hurts somewhere unfathomable. For example, watching a child happily playing in the snow would hurt emotionally, even physically. It is a wretchedness.

The difference is in the preposition: the happiness amidst the pain, the pain of happiness.

There is something unsettling in Georg's observation — that even in a landscape engineered for suffering, there remained fragments of something resembling happiness. It makes me wonder whether sorrow and joy are not opposites at all, but two expressions of the same essential human force. Perhaps joy becomes unbearable in depression because it illuminates the very places sorrow has already carved out. (A la Khalil Gibran)

The Talmud states, "Happiness has been turned into sorrow; joy and suffering have become joined together". Moed Katan 17a.

The splinters of happiness pierce because they hit what is still alive. Maybe that is why those moments stay with us? They mark the border where numbness ends and feeling begins; where survival becomes less about avoiding pain, more about recognizing the complexity of the opposite of numbness.

This is not my first Depression. This is the 38th year since the bipolar emerged. I have had a Depression at least once a year apart from 8 years after my dad died when I was stable. Approximately 30 depressions varying from 6 weeks to 10 months. I stopped keeping accurate track when I was 35. But to that point I had spent a total of 10 years in a depression; 1/3 of my life.

My early depressions were agonizing. Undiagnosed, 13 years old, terrified of everything, pushing pushing pushing myself to just keep going. How did I manage? I thought it was normal to feel pain, so I kept going until my diagnosis at 27, 14 years later. Those were devastating times.

After the diagnosis, I relaxed. There was finally an explanation to why I was "So! Sensitive!", as my Oma had called me. My depressions softened, I knew I would be taken care of. Once it had a name of a serious mental illness, I stopped pushing and fighting.

Those 14 years of pushing pushing pushing scarred me deeply. Traumatized, to use a term abused by overuse. Sometimes, even when I am stable, I feel happiness like a splinter, and I have familiar suicidal ruminations. "Bad Thoughts", my mother euphemizes. But that is nothing compared to the weekend during this past depression that I spent reeling in loops of intrusive suicidal ruminations. Ones that I constantly and consciously had to make efforts not to act on.

But I know those thoughts aren't real. They are merely a barometer of my mental health. More equals worse, less equals better. That is a constant I can rely on when I am looping. Another constant is the amount of energy and effort that has gone into preserving my life by family and loved ones. I have obligations to fulfil. I am no longer the 13-year-old fighting this fight alone, others have invested in me, they are counting on me.

Oh look! A squirrel!!!

FIN.