On The Literary Device
Reading about mental illness on the internet can be a jarring, even dissonant experience. Most of it comes in two distinct and incompatible types, like two engineers building a train line with different gauges hoping somehow everything will sort itself out when they meet in the middle.
The first, significantly larger, is the personal essay. What earns you a hundred bucks on DailyLife is a refined version of the torrent of grief that was Livejournal in its heyday, back to irc channels and BBS stretching all the way to a no-doubt miserable set of vacuum tubes. A sort of atomised sadness, the best of these describe an individual’s efforts to come to terms with lowered expectations. They might include an anecdote from childhood, idyllic or otherwise, but with an eye to the simplicity of the past. Then difficult relationships, challenges finding a sense of adult identity. Some abuse- drugs or otherwise, and if you’re already well known for something an explanation of how that thing didn’t ever really fill the hole. Then realisation, the work to be done, and the comfort in knowing you are not alone.
The purpose, perhaps, to reach a point at which so many of them exist there is nowhere else for them to go but up, to push through some ceiling and drip through the brickwork until somebody notices. Based on my own assumptions, these are largely written by people under thirty years of age.
The second, and less frequent, is the official announcement. These come well prepared and with notice, a media release with the key points verbatim. We acknowledge there is a problem, we must raise awareness. Talk to each other, ask questions. It is OK to do so. Based on my own assumptions, these are largely written by people over thirty years of age.
Depression is fond of the literary device. Notable racist Winston Churchill was fond of the black dog, an animal that wandered back and forth through most of his adult life. David Foster Wallace once described the sensation of standing on the ledge of a burning building, frozen in the choice between retreating to the flames or plummeting to the street below.
A key function of storytelling is to make sense of the world, and there is no need more pressing than to explain why things go wrong for no good reason. Fighter pilots had their gremlins, my grandmother, her fairies. This is my effort.
I have a profound and debilitating fear of alarm clocks. An uncommon but well documented phobia sometimes called ‘Hook’s Syndrome’, I’ve been affected by it since I was a teenager. The condition can strike with differing degrees of intensity, but the triggers are the same. A single clock is not usually cause for concern, but the phobic may take steps to avoid the sound of ticking. This desire is exacerbated if the clock is placed in a high-stress environment.
The main concern for the phobic is to discern whether the clock in question is an alarm clock, and if so when it will strike. This information is, for various reasons, often difficult to ascertain, and so the phobic experience a persistent low-level fear in expectation of that moment. When it does occur, feelings of dizziness, confusion and nausea often follow.
Some of the afflicted, so grimly fixated on the sound, begin to see clocks that aren’t really there. Welded to pedestrian crossings, placed in bunches on restaurant tables- even swaying from the lapel of a winter coat. The phobic is then put in the difficult position of anticipating, and responding to, these invisible devices, and often experience great difficulty explaining what it is they’re so afraid of.
My therapist told me I should ‘try to define the language of my own suffering’. She also, very unfairly, didn’t do it for me even when I asked nicely. So I’m trying to put the work in, see if I can do it. Maybe it’ll help.
