I can look at my parents’ responses, today, and track their ghostly echoes back to my childhood. Their responses to me as an adult have changed very little from their responses to me as a child, which in many ways is how they still, inevitably, regard me. That’s why our own parents’ behaviour can trigger responses in us, as adults, that seem, in adult terms, to be wildly inappropriate. They are inculcated, hardwired, if you like, into our personal belief systems. They become the scripts according to which we lead our lives. And they are very difficult, without conscious effort, to change, which is where the hard work of therapy comes in.
My father, years after the event, remains baffled by Jonathan’s and my decision to end our marriage. At the time, he was plainly disbelieving. Our continuing friendship confused him more, not less. When I said that we separated because we were very unhappy, he said, ‘What does unhappiness have to do with it?’
He was not being provocative. It is, for him, a perfectly logical question. While he understands the more obvious emotions such as grief or happiness, he does not get the spaces in between, the delicate nuances of unhappiness or happiness, the body language and unspoken behaviour that make up at least eighty per cent of communication. Emotions such as unhappiness, isolation, lack of intimacy, growing apart; all these may as well be a foreign language.
Before I knew that my dad had Asperger’s, I used to think that he simply didn’t care. I grew used to it, eventually, by ceasing to hope that he would ever engage with me emotionally, but there is in that very hopelessness a huge well of loneliness. It was not that I thought that he did not love me because he showed me that he did, in all sorts of practical ways. It was simply that I knew that he did not know me, and furthermore did not appear to want to. He took no interest in me that was not, at its heart, purely pragmatic; knew nothing of my hopes or dreams, my fears or difficulties. Such conversations as we had were brief, emotionless exchanges; we dealt in facts not feelings.
He is apt to have an impact, to more humorous effect, on other people too. All my life, my father has behaved in quite astonishingly tactless ways, at least according to normal social conventions. If a guest at a dinner party at his house turns down a pudding on the grounds that they have put on weight recently, he will simply agree with them.
‘I’ve got so fat,’ they cry, in mock despair.
‘Yes, you have,’ he says, eyeing the expanse of their stomach.
He takes them at their word and is perplexed by the nuances of language and behaviour that dictate that he should disagree with them when what they say is so self-evidently true.
But, just as most social behaviour is learned, so the person with Asperger’s will gradually learn to deal with the puzzling antics of human beings. This, certainly, is the case with Dad. He has mellowed and become easier as he has aged, but he has had eighty years to become familiar with our ways. I say ‘our’ not in a pejorative way but because it is, I suspect, like arriving on earth and only speaking Martian.
Soon after I became ill, a therapist asked me what my relationship was like with my father. I found I could not answer her. I could say, ‘I love him and he loves me,’ but more than that was impossible. Before I was ill, I had never sat down alone with my father and talked to him about anything of importance. And when I say, never, I don’t mean it as a dramatic exaggeration. I mean, never, not once. So I called my father and asked him to come and visit me, I said that I needed to talk to him because I did not know who he was. I was crying.
There was a long silence. I could almost hear his mind attempting to compute this strange and, in our family, positively bizarre request. Eventually he said, ‘I am your father and I love you.’
Which is, as I said, what I had always known. The only thing about him I had always known. There is also, in that statement, all the beautiful logic and simplicity of the Aspergic mind.
So he came to lunch with me, by himself (in itself an extraordinary event), as he was to do for many weeks afterwards. I was too ill to leave my flat by then so Dad made the journey to London by train. I would watch him walking slowly up the road to my flat, wearing his flat tweed cap and clutching (always) a bunch of flowers. The sight of him made me cry. He looked so near, so dear and familiar and yet I knew from long experience just how far away he actually was.
Over those lunches, I tried to get to know him by asking him a series of questions.
First, I asked him how he would describe himself.
This is what he said.
‘I am a man who has no imagination.’
He did not mean that he has no creative imagination, although he hasn’t. He meant that he lacks the ability to imagine how other people might feel and without imagination, there can be no empathy. If you cannot imagine another person’s pain, you are unlikely to feel any sympathy for it.
He said, ‘I don’t understand what it is that people talk about. I have never, for example, understood jokes. When somebody tells a joke, I watch everybody really carefully. And when they laugh, I laugh too.’
This does not mean that he does not have a sense of humour. He does, but it is always formed around a play on words—which is a particular characteristic of Asperger’s. Jokes, as he says, are lost on him. So are abstract concepts such as despair. I had never told my parents that during my most severe period of depression, I tried to kill myself. I wrote about it, in a newspaper, instead.
Here are the opening lines of that newspaper article, published in the Daily Telegraph.
Exactly one year ago today, I tried to kill myself. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as I felt at the time), I am blessed with an iron constitution. At 3.20 a.m., I woke up. Through some sick irony (who says the heavens don’t have a sense of humour?), it was the same time, to the minute, that I had been waking for a year before I was finally diagnosed with clinical depression.
It went on in a similarly candid (some might say brutal) vein but, after he read the article, the only thing my father said was that he thought it was a fine piece of writing, and that he was pleased to see that I was getting work again. He did not ask me how I had felt about trying to kill myself, about the illness or even about the ways in which I was coping. He said nothing at all about the actual subject in hand.
Some people might think that odd. I simply think it is my dad. Since my illness and the time we spent together, we have become closer. He telephones me without being prompted. We see each other often. We do the crossword together. I don’t confide in him because to do so would only frustrate me and revive the terrible certainty I have felt since I was a child that my dad is simply a mirage; the closer you get to him, the further he recedes.
My father was not a normal father if normal means leading his children confidently, emotionally as well as practically, into and through the ways of the world. Put that together with my mother’s inclination to depression and it has meant, I think, that my brothers and I each stumbled into the world in our own ways. We are travellers with no sure guides; a pattern only heightened by our peripatetic and disrupted childhood growing up in so many different countries.
I think, though, that my parents, like most parents, did the best that they could, so in looking back at our relationship, I don’t mean to imply blame. Blame is the least helpful and most destructive of all the emotions. It solves nothing. What is needed is acceptance and understanding. If I am to be free of depression, I need to be aware of the unpleasant truths that took me there in the first place. If I can understand the origins of my responses and the ways in which they are flawed or detrimental to my happiness, I might stand a better chance of changing them. The truth, as the saying goes, will set you free.
Alice Miller, psychoanalyst and the author of The Drama of Being a Child puts it best when she describes the uses of analysing the past and the formative experiences of our childhoods:
It cannot give us back our lost childhood, nor can it change the past facts. No one can heal by maintaining or fostering illusion. The paradise of preambivalent harmony,
for which so many patients hope, is unattainable. But the experience of one’s own truth, and the postambivalent knowledge of it, make it possible to return to one’s own world of feelings at an adult level—without paradise, but with the ability to mourn. And this ability does, indeed, give us back our vitality.
15
Who Am I?
The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
Mark Twain
Ah, yes, vitality—the very opposite of depression. It is the life force, the energy that makes us care about our own existence and enables us to struggle on through life, even when it is difficult. It is that, rather than the loss of abstracts such as happiness or contentment that is the true marker of the illness.
The only saving grace of the acute, catatonic stage of severe depression is that we are no longer self-conscious enough to care. We no longer have any consciousness of self. We don’t know who we are. We are as lost to ourselves as we are to you. Once out of that phase, we are as conscious as you are of our behaviour, and fairly powerless to do anything about it.
The terrible truth about depression, and the part of its nature that terrifies me the most, is that it appears to operate beyond reason; feelings happen to you for no apparent cause. Or rather, there is usually an initial cause, a ‘trigger’ as they say in therapeutic circles, but in severe depression the feelings of sadness, grief, loneliness and despair continue long after the situation has resolved itself. It is as if depression has a life of its own, which is perhaps why so many sufferers refer to it as a living thing, as some sort of demon or beast.
Trying to appeal to us as the people we used to be, or referring to some character trait that we once possessed is also liable to send us into despair. When I was still quite unwell but attempting to patch together some semblance of a life, I went to a party. It was an annual event at Christmas given by close friends and I had promised that I would attend, even though I was scared beyond measure. I had always loved it, a relaxed affair filled with good humour.
In my previous incarnation I was a party creature par excellence. Perhaps they thought I still was. Perhaps I thought I still was. I don’t know. I do know that some part of me believed that if I could only recreate the girl who used to love parties, I could recapture myself.
So I went. It took me hours to get ready; hours spent getting dressed, only to undress again. Most of that time was spent in tears, not through any profound sense of self-pity but because I could not match myself to the person I had become. Every garment I put on looked odd to me. I could not find a fit between my inner and my outer self. Even wearing my most familiar clothes, I looked like a stranger.
In the end I decided on a pair of black trousers, black high-heeled boots and a simple but nondescript jacket; the dress, you might say, of anonymity, of no particular type or persuasion.
At the party, for an hour or so, I managed perfectly well. I talked, I listened, I laughed but all the time I was conscious that I was watching myself. ‘See,’ I seemed to be saying to myself, ‘you can do this. You can join in with life. You can talk and walk and pass yourself off as Sally.’
Then I found myself face-to-face with somebody I don’t know terribly well, but who I had, professionally at least, been very familiar with. We talked for a while and then she said, ‘Are you all right?’
I said that I was.
She said, ‘It’s just that you seem so nervous and agitated. You used to be so calm.’
She went on like this for some time, marvelling at the character change in me until I was forced to admit that I had been ill with depression. ‘But you’re all right now,’ she said in the bright, dismissive tone of somebody who doesn’t want their mood sapped by any talk of illness.
It was then that I knew that I wasn’t, how profoundly I was not all right, so I went and found a close friend and asked him to drive me home.
‘What is it? What’s happened?’ he kept asking as I sobbed, incoherently, all the way back to my flat.
‘I used to be,’ I kept repeating. ‘I used to be. Don’t you see? I tried so hard and I couldn’t be me. I’ll never be me again. I’ll never regain myself.’
He was as distressed as I was but I could see that, as hard as he tried, he had no idea what I was talking about.
‘You are you,’ he kept repeating. ‘Of course you’re you. You’re just a bit down, that’s all.’
‘Would me have left a party early and cried all the way home because I am no longer me?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know,’ he said, with a sigh before sinking into a baffled silence.
Later, he called. ‘Are you feeling better?’
I wanted to say, better than what? But I didn’t. His only wish for me was happiness. So I said, ‘Yes, thank you. I’m feeling much better.’ And all the time I was saying it I was wondering what would be the best way to kill myself.
I couldn’t stand being me, or the person I had become, but I did not know how I could get back to being myself. And that, I think, is why some depressives take their own lives, and why their friends and family are so perplexed when they do. ‘But he seemed so much better. He said he was fine. I know he’s been depressed but he seemed to have pulled out of it. He went to a party. The last time we spoke, he said he was feeling better.’
You see, we want to be better, we want to be ourselves, and it is not through any lack of trying that we fail. But we do fail, because we are deep inside an illness. And it is that failure, and that struggle, that sends us into a despair so terrible that we would rather not exist.
It is the glass wall that separates us from life, from ourselves, that is so truly frightening in depression. It is a terrible sense of our own overwhelming reality, a reality that we know has nothing to do with the reality that we once knew. And from which we think we will never escape. It is like living in a parallel universe but a universe so devoid of familiar signs or life that we are adrift, lost.
Sometimes, somebody can reach through that glass wall and pull us back. Sarah called me after the party to see how I was. She had noticed my sudden disappearance. I told her what had happened, about the ‘used to be’.
She was furious, angrier than I had ever heard her. ‘Stupid woman. What an idiotic thing to say. She knows you’ve been really ill. Of course you’re not the same at the moment. All I can say is, she used to be quite intelligent.’
I laughed. It was not so much what Sarah said, as that she understood. She took my reality and put it with her own. And by doing so, she gave me a hand back into life.
There is a notion that depression is a positive event, that it is not so much a question of a breakdown as a breakthrough to a freer, less fractured sense of self. While this is comforting, it is too often an easy, romanticised interpretation of an original idea from the psychiatrist R. D. Laing who said, ‘Madness need not all be breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.’
I think Laing is right, or can be right, but the danger here is in misinterpreting his idea and thinking that major depression is simply a brief interlude, a short, sharp transformation that shocks us into a new and positive state of being. A matter, say, of a couple of difficult months.
The idea carries, too, definite echoes of morality, of a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ state, which sends us right back to the idea that depression is some sort of moral weakness or dangerous character flaw.
It implies that the very experience of severe depression somehow makes us better people, that with it come great dollops of compassion, wisdom, kindness and general self-improvement. No gain without pain, and all that.
This is even worse when it is taken into the arena of other mental or emotional illnesses such as alcoholism, where the recovered alcoholic is sometimes referred to as the ‘reformed’ alcoholic, as if the person in question merely needs to see the error of his or her ways. This happens so often that there is a phrase in the recovery movement that states: ‘We are not
bad people trying to be good. We are sick people trying to get better.’
Mental illness is not a question of good or bad, or even before and after character makeovers—as anybody who has ever experienced it knows. Depression may force us to reconsider our thinking, our behaviour and our very identities but it is not a transformation that happens overnight—or even one that necessarily happens at all. Nor is that ‘potential liberation’ that Laing describes without its own pain and anguish. It takes a long time to change, sometimes a lifetime, and requires intensely hard work.
I know that’s not an attractive thought in a culture that demands instant and immediate results but it’s the truth. Anyone—therapist, shrink, doctor or healer—who claims otherwise, is either a misguided fool or a liar. Every one of us who has ever been sick knows the urgent desire to be better, right here, right now. Nobody wants that more than the depressive locked into a state of intolerable mental and emotional pain.
Laing’s breakthrough can and does happen. There can, post-depression be, ‘a sense of renewal’. I know I’m not the person I used to be. I’m not better or worse but I am more awake, more conscious if you like. I’m more aware of the texture of my days, the light and the dark that shades them. I waste less time, in worry, in fear, in anger, in pleasing people I don’t like and don’t wish to like. I spend more time with people I love and doing the things that I love such as gardening, reading, hanging out with friends. Work now takes second place. I don’t mean that I work any less hard but success or even failure have lost the importance they once had. If I mess up, I mess up. I try to remember to have, as somebody once said to me, ‘a human experience rather than a perfect experience’.
Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression Page 17
