For Victor Hugo, depression was an infernal torture chamber: “I bear the dungeon within me…I have darkness in my soul.” For Sylvia Plath, who courageously fought but ultimately lost to her demons, despair was a “dark, airless sack.” For Vincent Van Gogh, depression was a debilitating disease that made him feel “bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep, dark well.”
But where does this mystifying malady come from?
Like most mental illnesses, depression is a complex convergence of nature and nurture. Sometimes it’s biological, embedded in our genetics and brain structure; other times, it’s chemical, a medically remediable deficit of certain neurotransmitters; still other times, it’s the devastating result of stress and trauma.
But depression can also result from distorted thought patterns, from that cruel, castigating inner critic who ceaselessly whispers, “You’re not good enough: you’re a loser.”
In his poignant portrait of depression Something in the Woods Loves You, poet Jarod Anderson explores how distorted thought patterns paint his mental sky black and fuel his melancholy moods. Part lyrical love letter to nature, part mental illness memoir, Something in the Woods Loves You traces Anderson’s descent into the dark well of depression—and how nature helps him climb out. The book is divided into four sections—winter, spring, summer, fall—and each chapter is grounded in the contemplation of a specific plant or animal.
In the first chapter “Blue Heron,” the titular bird becomes a symbol for self-determination and deliberate slowness. Anderson recognizes his meaning for the bird isn’t its universally accepted dictionary definition. His meaning is his meaning—it’s a subjective interpretation.
Yet this isn’t to say life is irredeemably meaningless, a chasm of incoherent objects and events.
Making meaning is a miraculous collaboration between subject and object. An object can only have the meaning we attribute to it. As Anderson writes:
“What, then, is a blue heron?
They live about fifteen years. They stand about four feet tall. They walk the shoreline, delivering an overt message to me about quiet contemplation and self-determination.
The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning. It will be that meaning until you decide it means something else. That’s how meaning works. It’s a subjective act of interpretation.
You might get the impression that I’m saying herons are meaningless, but that’s not what I’m saying at all. When I see a heron and interpret its behavior as a reminder for me to slow down and think about what actually matters in my life, that is what that heron means. Meaning, like many crafts, happens in collaboration between maker and materials.
There’s nothing nihilistic about this.
A human alone in the wilderness has neither fur nor fangs but does have the ability to build shelter. Our nature understands that we must build what we need. Community. Tools. Shelter. Meaning.
The heron allows me to build the meaning I need for the moment I need it. Making meaning in this way is like creating harmony with two voices. I sing my portion. The heron sings hers. The harmony is woven and meaning exists in the world.”
My worst depressive episode occurred when I was 25 during a 6 month stint of unemployment. Without something to occupy my hours, I felt adrift. Like a raft lost at sea, I floated aimlessly, no rudder to direct me. There was no sign of shore in any direction—just the endless sea.
I started suffering horrible insomnia. I could go days without sleeping. Sleeping consumed my every thought (“Would I be able to sleep that night? Or would I spend the torturous midnight hours tossing and turning in teary frustration, begging for the sweet oblivion of sleep to finally shut off my mind?). I stopped having an appetite. The simplest tasks felt Sisyphean: getting out of bed, doing laundry. I couldn’t find respite from the ruthless voice inside my mind.
“You’re a loser, an unloveable, unforgivable loser.”
“Your life is nothing, less than nothing. What have you accomplished? You have no house, no career and you’re 25.”
I distinctly remember thinking 25 was old, that 25 represented an irrefutable milestone of adulthood. According to HBO’s Girls, I should have been living in a glamorous Manhattan loft, sipping martinis and writing a New York Times bestselling book—not out of a job at my parents’ house (my depression-deformed brain conveniently ignored the fact that Hannah could only live in New York and pursue a notoriously underpaid profession like writing because she had her parents’ support).
Of course this seems laughable now. Today at 35, I can see 25 is so young. Yet at the time, I was blind to the unrealistic criteria by which I judged myself.
Rather than create my own meaning, I adopted society’s story. “You are what you do.” “You must earn your worth.” “If you don’t go into an office everyday, you’re a freeloading loser.” The stories became the cage in which I imprisoned myself, my own nightmarish torture chamber.
For Anderson, depression is ultimately a crisis of meaning-making. Instead of construct our own meaning (“Unemployment is a temporary set of circumstances.” “Whether or not I work/what I do for a living doesn’t determine my worth.”), we uncritically accept the stories of others:
“The trouble starts when we forget about our participation in the creation of harmony, of meaning. When we remove our agency in meaning-making, we start to think in absolutes. We are our jobs. We are defined by the car we drive. Our objective worth is reflected in the way our parents or our peers treat us. We don’t lend our voices to harmony. We buy our harmonies pre-sung in tidy plastic packages.”
Depression presents biased judgements as indisputable facts.
It insists we’re worthless losers who have failed to justify our existence.
It claims we’re unworthy of love, compassion, grace and gentleness.
It imprisons us in the funhouse mirror of our minds far removed from all reason and logic.
It filters our perspective through the distorted lens of a bell jar.
It maintains existence is void of meaning—life is only suffering, bleak gray skies and sorrowful storms.
At its most menacing, it can convince us we deserve to die at the bottom of that deep, dark well.
But this is an interpretation and not the truth.
There are objective facts that govern our universe: relativity, Newton’s laws of motion, the Pythagorean theorem. These facts are universally agreed upon and not simply the product of opinion. But most things in the world—poems, songs, novels, the glittering galaxy of stars in the sky, our parents’ divorce, our dog’s death, life itself—have no objective meaning. The miracle of being human is we can challenge prevailing stories and make meaning for ourselves:
“The heron only represents self-determination when I need her to. That doesn’t diminish the heron’s power. It simply highlights my own.
There are objective facts in the world. Of course there are. But our concept of self, our significance, our sense of whether or not we deserve to take up space in the universe or experience joy and contentment—these are not questions of fact, they are questions of meaning.”
For Anderson, creating meaning requires our active participation. Surreal skies, forest green cypresses, a field of red poppies—these materials of the everyday can only be meaningful if we make the effort to notice them:
“There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.
Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find the magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.”
In the leaden landscape of depression, Anderson’s world is wiped of all wonder. There is no grandeur, no awe, no astonishment. But strolling through the Ohio woods, nature enlarges his perspective and rekindles his sense of the miraculous. The heron isn’t just a bird, a dull feature of a mundane Midwestern landscape—it’s a majestic creature that has wandered the earth for 1.5 million years, an otherworldly descendant of dinosaurs that once lived among wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers.
It might—the heron seems to suggest—be worthwhile to climb out of the well:
“There was the bird, but not just a bird.
The encounter was a bridge to when nature was family.
It was my storybook wizards.
It was science as magic, nature as art.
It was priceless and essential, yet it had no use for my money or imagined prestige.
I could feel that the heron was alive in the same way I was alive.
I couldn’t deny that the world that made the heron made me too, that we were of the same time and context, and somehow, in that moment, it didn’t feel possible that I was made to be miserable and afraid, to be measured by bank statements and resumes, not when there were living poems, descended from dinosaurs, walking beneath the silent trees just as they had long before the first written language.
The heron told me that my better days were not beyond reach and that the world was more than pain, bitter news, and sleepless nights.
There are wonders here.
Things worth experiencing, worth knowing.
Magic hidden in plain sight.”