Swallowing Bog Water
A personal account of creeping depression
I landed a job in a small city in Ireland right out of my undergraduate degree. It made my hometown newspaper. The paper was an anemic once-a-week publication that barely justified its own existence. Most weeks, not much happens in Placentia (yes, that's it's name), Newfoundland, population 3,800, largest town for an hour’s drive in any direction. And what does happen, you’ll hear about faster, with juicier details, through the tangled webs of interweaving gossip networks. Yet the newspaper persisted.
I loved our little newspaper because I love things that are official and prestigious and impressive-seeming. Having a newspaper elevated my hometown, or so I felt. In any event, my going to Ireland to work at a humanities research institute made the local news, improbably.
It’s easy, when you grow up in a little town, for small successes to be inflated. I was smart and I was talented, but it was a level of smart and talented that wouldn’t have passed great notice in a big city, where there would be thousands of equally smart and talented people, thousands smarter and more talented. But I didn't live in a city of millions — I lived in a town of hundreds, on an isolated and sparsely populated island.
Anyway, there I was in the newspaper's photo, lounging in my parents’ backyard, having just concluded the interview. I was going to Ireland and I was going to dazzle them. I was 22 and I’d never really failed at anything in my life. I look so damn smug in that picture, grinning at the horizon in a show me what you’ve got fashion, like the cocky scion of a wealthy industrialist who’s got plans. I’d just won the university medal in English, which meant the English department considered me the top major to graduate that year. I was taking the summer between degree and job to live at home and finish writing my second novel. My second novel, for god’s sake. (I finished the first one near the end of high school. I immediately considered it juvenalia, put it in a drawer, and referred to it as “my practice novel.”)
But the Waterford Institute of Technology in Waterford, Ireland is where I… I was going to write “faceplanted,” but that implies a violent stop, a smack where you kiss the dirt, bloody mouth and broken nose and whatever else. A faceplant might teach a puffed-up jackass like me a lesson. Nope, I failed in Ireland, but I kind of… got stuck in a bog and slowly slipped below the surface, too proud to really call out to anyone who might hear me — “hey, I’m going under, a little help, maybe?” Wasn’t I the golden child of unbelievable promise and precocious achievement? Shouldn’t I have used my great mental gifts to freaking levitate my way out of the muck?
My cousin’s a psychiatrist. She once told me I was the most psychologically buoyant person she knew, bouncing back from any disappointment or bleak mood. Unsinkable.
So what sunk me?
Waterford is known for its crystal and not much else. The crystal, in turn, is known for its characteristic weight and sparkle, which results from the lead oxide included in its manufacture (I took the Waterford Crystal factory tour five times in less than a year).
The town itself? It’s a shabby port that often slips the Irish mind and seldom enters minds elsewhere, despite being Ireland’s fifth largest city and its oldest. It’s just kinda… there. City motto: urbs intacta manet, Waterford remains the untaken city.
It’s a shame because there are things about Waterford that are charming. Or, at least, kinda interesting. Much of its medieval wall is still intact, and I walked past a section of it every morning on my way to the office. There’s a squat Viking tower right downtown. The pedestrianized high street is pretty nice. As a rube from Newfoundland, I certainly enjoyed my Saturday afternoons roaming it. It’s the only place outside of Dublin where they brew Guinness (something about similarities in the chemistry of the water — Suir thing, the billboards read, the Suir being the gigantic river gushing past the city, pronounced almost like “sure”). It’s the warmest, sunniest, and driest part of that whole soggy chilly island. There are even palm trees and miles of golden sandy beaches not far from town!
And the people are my people. Well, kind of. I worked at the Centre for Newfoundland and Labrador Studies. It's there because, in some ways, parts of Newfoundland were a colony of Waterford and surrounding counties. For much of the Avalon Peninsula (the most densely populated part of Newfoundland), including a good chunk of the capital, St John’s, a majority of people's ancestry can be traced to a fifty mile radius of Waterford City. Those settlers weren’t 19th century famine refugees. They were 18th century economic migrants, arriving by choice to make money. Many returned to Ireland after two or three years, making them more like very long-haul commuters than anything else, a tradition Newfoundlanders have continued ever since. Others stayed, though, and rapidly became culturally and politically dominant in some regions, including mine. The pre-famine culture of Waterford and its environs was largely preserved in the bays and coves where I grew up. Hence, the theory went, Newfoundland was worthy of study by scholars of Irish history and culture because we preserved elements of Irish culture that had been lost in Ireland itself. Hence, my job existed. I was to help connect Irish scholars to Newfoundland material.
(If you're curious: famine refugees in the later 19th century largely passed Newfoundland by. Immigration had slowed to a trickle by 1830 and never really picked up again, because it's honestly not a place well-suited for a large population — the island has been a net exporter of people for the last 180-or-so years).
In any event, people in Waterford spoke like the people in my hometown. They even tagged their sentences with the ubiquitous and versatile b’y, a Waterfordian tic the rest of Ireland occasionally mocks. The rest of Canada mocks Newfoundlanders for it, too — but I never knew anyone other than Newfoundlanders even did it until I arrived. My father visited me in Waterford and people thought he was from Cork, the next county over, even though my direct patrilineal ancestor left Ireland in the 1780s.
Me, though, they guessed I was American. I grew up with my tongue whitewashed by Saturday morning cartoons and network news. Teachers who twisted our dialect around the rules of “proper” speech. I didn’t know enough to resist this until I was maybe nineteen or twenty, when it was too late. So I grabbed onto the opportunity to reacquire something close enough to my ‘true’ dialect through immersion in a place far from condescending or toxic Canadian attitudes toward Newfoundland accents. The result: I left Ireland speaking a cartoonish aspirational mish-mash that sounded Irish to American ears and American to Irish ears but was, in fact, an artificial nowhere language created by my own insecurities and desires.
Anyway. That’s all by way of context. The important thing: I was so damn lonely in that city.
What was my job? I don’t rightly know, even now. I was supposed to assist researchers at the Institute if they were curious about Newfoundland, or if their projects included Newfoundland. I think I did that part pretty well. I knew a lot of history and culture, could tell people what books they needed to read. At 22, I was an ardent Newfoundland cultural nationalist who vaguely regretted our giving up self-government in 1949 to become part of Canada. I knew my stuff. But it’s not like I was swamped with inquiries. Maybe I helped a dozen people over the course of my time there. I had a room to myself — the “centre” of my job title, which was a few bookshelves, two computers, a few chairs, and a table. I’d wander the hallway of the converted convent and former orphanage, not sure what to do with myself. I’d spend ages studying the giant map of the island of Newfoundland in the hallway outside the one-room centre, contemplating how Fortune Bay looks like a whale’s tail. I’d go on Google Earth and collect geographical trivia. Did you know the distance from Toronto, Ontario, to Havana, Cuba, is roughly the same as the distance from Toronto, Ontario, to St. John’s, Newfoundland? Youtube had just come into existence and I watched many videos. I’d close the door and masturbate through my pants. I’m burying that fact two thirds of the way through this paragraph but to be honest I did this a lot. I guess I needed the dopamine. I’d go to the cafeteria and get a chocolate bar and a thick, tarry coffee. I gained weight. I looked out the window at the people on their smoke breaks and I considered taking up smoking so I might find a way to make friends.
I wanted to be a good employee. I wanted to please. I just didn’t know how. Or, maybe, I knew how, but I just couldn’t seem to make myself into the kind of person who turned that intention into action. I had only ever worked in a highly structured environment. School, basically. I was very good at school. Give me a specific assignment with a deadline and an expectation of evaluation to follow and I will knock that sucker out of the park. Give me a room with a computer in a humanities department and vague open-ended mandate and I will…. Sit in that room, somehow unable to be the energetic self-starter I knew my reference letters described me as.
I’m struggling with a way to portray this that doesn’t sound like a failure of management. And maybe that’s partly what it was. If someone just down the hall would have been the boss I now know I needed so badly, maybe I wouldn’t have sat there like a lump, soaking up resources and so rarely justifying my existence. I had two men I reported to, kind of. One of them was sweet and gentle, a poet, but he was in charge of the entire Humanities wing of the Institute. The Centre for Newfoundland and Labrador Studies was of special interest to him, but he couldn’t babysit me. The other was a fellow at the business school, located several miles up the road. Eventually he took a more direct role. I think he did this when he realized I was just fucking sitting there doing nothing most of the time.
But something horrifying happened to me between my arrival in Ireland and his intervention a few months later. I somehow lost the ability to follow through. The local Catholic group wanted me to research and write an article about the construction of the basilica in St John’s, Newfoundland, the skyline-dominating edifice that was, briefly, the largest religious building in the New World. I agreed and sat in my chair and didn’t do it. I took minutes at the annual meeting of the Centre’s board, its steering committee, whatever you’d call it. My notes were pretty good, but it took me ages to start typing them up into proper minutes, and by then my memory of the meeting, full of people I’d met twice, once, zero times, was faded. I don’t remember if I completed this task. They decided my BA (hons) in English was sufficient for me to teach a first year communications course, even though I’d never taken a communications course. It was a disaster; I could barely keep the room of rowdy eighteen year olds down to a dull roar. I was supposed to receive extra pay for that and I was so ashamed of my lack of ability and my failure that I didn’t finish the paperwork to get that money. I figured — they must regret hiring me, but maybe if I cost them less money they won’t hate me.
I would meet with this second kind-of boss from the business school and bring a notebook and write down everything he said. In one of our later meetings, he let frustration with me flare. Some caustic remark about me making sure I did more than scribble things down in my notebook and then forget about them. It was deserved. I felt miserable and chastened. I did not change my errant ways, even though I was starting to hate myself because of them.
I can look back now and diagnose it pretty easily. I was depressed and adrift, without a safety net. No friends, no family, no support structure. There was literally an ocean between me and all of those things. I was alone on an entire continent. No wonder I became depressed. Depression robs you of your ability to do. But it’s not like that knowledge, twelve years later, can travel back in time and do my younger self any good, as I slipped deeper and deeper into the mire, stupid smile painted on my face the whole time.
On weekends when I was particularly sad and lonely, I’d take a train to Kilkenny, about forty minutes north. Kilkenny is very beautiful and it made more sense to be alone there, because I did not live there and could not be expected to have any friends there. But most weekends, for the first few months, I’d wander Waterford alone. I used to be involved with the theatre in Newfoundland; one weekend I walked by a theatre in Waterford and wondered how I might audition for a production, but I never figured out how. In some other dimension, there’s a me that did that simple work, got into a play, started going to cast parties, and actually engaged with the arts community that I know was there, visible to me, as if on the other side of a pane of glass.
What about sex. What about it? I had not been on a date since I was 19. I had not been kissed since I was 19. A couple of times, I went to the nightclub that, one night a week, was kind of, unofficially, the gay bar in Waterford (the town only had about 40,000 people; one gay night a week at a willing nightclub isn’t that bad). I’d buy a gin and tonic and make a circuit of the room, find different walls and posts to lean against, hope that maybe I looked attractive enough for someone to approach me. I could not strike up a conversation with a stranger — inconceivable. No one ever talked to me, and I’d finish my drink, feel some sort of awful feeling that even now I can’t quite name, and then I’d leave, go home, watch TV, fall asleep. Alone.
I started to wonder if I was covered in scales that everyone could see but me.
This was 2005. Smartphones didn't yet exist — the first iPhone was two years away. There were, obviously, no hook-up apps. I did not have a computer of any description in my apartment. Sometimes on the weekends I’d go to an internet cafe and buy an hour and write on my livejournal, send emails home (facebook was not yet a thing), but I was performing wellness without even really knowing the phrase. Everyone expected me to succeed brilliantly in Ireland — I was in the paper, wasn’t I? So I put my best foot forward, put the best face on things, omitted details that would suggest other, darker narratives. I did not say: friends, family, I am very lonely. I am a failure at my job. I can’t accomplish simple tasks that are well within my abilities. I am not building a life in this new city. I am not meeting new people. I am not blossoming. I am rotting, I am rotting, I am rotting, and I don’t know how to fix it.
Escape. It felt like my only option. I applied to several masters of arts programs back in Canada. I always intended to get a MA. Professor of English Literature was my ultimate ambition. I was only taking the year off because I developed a persistent twitch under my right eye during the final semester of my undergraduate degree. My guts felt like they were dissolving in acid when I looked at the pile of half-finished grad school applications. Take a year off to work, I thought, banana in hand (potassium, you see), eye twitch going like crazy. There’s no special prize for getting a PhD before you’re thirty.
But now… I knew. I needed to go back to school. School was a thing I knew how to do. I knew how to succeed there. I knew how to make my superiors like me. I knew how to make friends. School ground me down, but I wasn’t lonely there. I wasn’t useless.
Six months into my time in Ireland, I received an email offering me a place in the University of Western Ontario's Masters of Arts program. They would cover my tuition plus $13,000 a year of financial support, no strings attached, tax free, with the chance for teaching work to make more. It was my birthday and a long weekend. I was visiting the Brontë parsonage in Haworth, Yorkshire. I was staying in a Victorian mansion that had been converted to a hostel, across a steep narrow valley from the parsonage. It cost me one pound for twenty minutes of internet time. It felt like the best pound I'd ever spent. I was escaping to grad school. I was going back to a place where I knew how to flourish. I was going to be OK. This period of dismal failure was just a hiccup, a blip.
But I wasn’t OK, and it wasn’t a blip. I swallowed some bog water, during my time spent sinking in the mire, and it has never left me. Things were never the same.
So now it is thirteen years later. These problems persist. They are never so bad that I totally fall apart. But they never leave me, either. My ability to do is permanently on the fritz, sometimes working but never reliable. I got through a Masters of Arts and most of a PhD by manufacturing crisis after crisis. Every deadline had to be an emergency. Every seminar a cause for panic. Panic I sought out. Because panic made me work — it temporarily shocked me out of whatever mental disease I contracted in Ireland. Fake panics like defibrillators but for my brain instead of my heart.
But that doesn’t work forever. You start to burn out. And every crisis you manufacture, every fake panic you engineer for yourself just to force yourself to do something, means the next fake panic is less effective. I realized at some point in my PhD that I just wasn’t afraid of the consequences anymore. I was calling my own bluff, which was fatal to the entire system. If fear is the only thing that makes you work, but you no longer feel afraid, then you need to devise a new strategy pretty quick.
I never have, is the thing.
I wish I was building toward some happy ending. Some epiphany where I realized what was broken in my brain and a simple solution to fix it. Whoever I was before Ireland — he was sometimes lazy, sometimes shirked his work, but he generally had no impediment between intention and action. He was capable and untroubled. The person I am now is so often a voice in a mind YELLING instructions at a body. DO THE LAUNDRY. DO THE LAUNDRY. DO THE LAUNDRY. DO THE LAUNDRY. DO THE LAUNDRY. And the body sits like a lump, not doing the laundry.
So if there’s no hopeful happy ending coming up, why am I writing this? Well. The act of writing helps. This has been a problem since I was 22 years old. I’m 36 as of this writing. I have only started to talk about it. Maybe if I had been honest about my struggles from the start, there actually would be something uplifting at the close of this essay.
Mental health problems come in many varieties and degrees of severity. I’ve never been suicidal or had thoughts of self-harm. I’ve never had alarming psychotic symptoms. Whatever’s wrong with me is mild enough that I can kinda function, mostly. But there is definitely something wrong, because I can remember what it was like before that something wrong. Figuratively, I walk with a limp. There are days when my frustration at myself for being this way becomes overwhelming. There are days when I hate myself because of it.
So, 14 years after I should have done this, I'm reaching out to a therapist. There is no satisfying conclusion here. Just as there is no satisfying conclusion to mental health — merely an ongoing process of gradually getting better (hopefully).
Stay tuned.