There's never a bad time to tell
everyone you know that you live with depression. They all live with
that shit too.
It is, of course, a question of
degrees, and a question of how we manage it. Some of us manage it way
better than others. I have had times in my life of not managing at
all. In my late teens and early 20's, depression ate my soul. It
wanted my body, too, but I didn't let it have it.
DEPRESSION is a terrific word. It
really does capture the experience of having an elephant sitting on
your life force. Maybe nothing so cute as an elephant. But something
big and heavy is pressing you down, and you don't feel like you are
even in there anymore, really. You've been pressed away.
I've been lucky, in that meds and
therapy worked when things were very bad, and now, exercise and
breathing and mindfulness do a pretty good job keeping the elephant
cute and manageably-sized. Sometimes when I'm running on the
treadmill and a particularly inspirational 80's pop hit comes on I
run even faster and my blood beats in my brain: I'm alive, I made
it, I got through and I do it and I do it for that little
back-in-the-day Me who didn't know if she was going to get through. I
run and run for her.
Unsurprisingly, or
maybe surprisingly, but probably not, working as a performer can
bring a lot of dark shit right back to you. I don't exactly
understand the brain chemistry of it, but I have theories. The kind
of performing I do seems to cause a big rush of chemicals to flow
through me, so that, afterwards, I'm high as a skyscraper off my own
brain. But the next day, especially a few hours before my next show,
it's like the skyscraper was never there.
At first, I don't
think I really understood what a weird cycle I was on. Showbiz! my
mind said, and I went on drinking coffee, eating sugar, checking my
email in bed and doing whatever-the-fuck.
I keep a show
journal. I journal before each show, done it for years. I started it
to clarify my thoughts, get my head in the game, write out any new
jokes, priorities for the show, but then I started to notice that
entry after entry started with something similar to I don't want
to be here/ I don't want to do this show/ I'm so unhappy. After
flipping through pages and pages of this garbage, I thought, what the
shit?
The shit seems to
be that my brain goes through a cycle of some kind of pre-show
depression and post-show euphoria. Nowadays I think of my brain as
cleaning house to make way for the post-show chemical party. But it
took at least a year or two of journalling for me to really see the
pattern. And of course, now that I've seen it, the mood swings are
less dramatic. The euphoria is less, sure, a little, but that's fine,
it was kinda crazy in there anyway. And the depression is less. That
is the most exciting thing.
Here I am at the
Edinburgh Fringe again. Last time I was here, two years ago, it was
hard, mood-swing-wise. I didn't feel in control of the chemicals in
my brain. But I've done a few of these big long festivals now. It's
all about self-care and exercise and journalling and rest. Does that
make me boring and uncool? Of course it does! Does it make me sane in
my brain? Yes, it does that too!
And I run. I run
for the Me who couldn't run. Then I get up in front of people and we
hit the highs and lows together. We do it for those who can't. We all
do it for those who can't. We run for everyone.