Depression And (Re)Discovering Reading
Some of my earliest memories involve sitting with a book — mostly alone, mostly in the home of one of our neighbors. While I was growing up, my elder sister, who was terminally ill, would be in hospital most of the time and apart from a few occasions when my parents took me along, I would be sent to our neighbour’s home. Theirs was a family devoted to reading — they would be reading at the dining table while having breakfast or lunch, or in the living room or anywhere else. They were the first to introduce me to books, to reading, and to the pleasure of getting lost in a world that I was unaware of before I started the book. Their home was teeming with books, old newspapers, and magazines, and it was relatively easy to find something that interested me.
Reading (or just flipping pages and looking at illustrations until I learnt how to read) became an avenue to get away from my surroundings and a situation which I didn’t fully understand — it became easier to keep reading all day rather than wondering why my parents weren’t at home or why they didn’t speak to me when they were. Eventually, I learnt that one could keep thinking about books and stories even when one wasn’t reading. Fading picture books, fables, illustrated versions of anecdotes from the Bible, old newspapers — everything was fine as long as it was there, even if I had read it before.
As I became older, books became the world I thought I belonged to, and the “real” world — essentially everything else, became part of the day I had to somehow get through. I remember being eight or nine, when I stumbled upon my neighbour’s stash of old Hardy Boys mystery novels — and was engrossed for days (it amazed me years later, when I discovered that author wasn’t actually one person and it was in essence, a writing factory using the same name to keep publishing several books a year; and I remember feeling vaguely betrayed by this). I enjoyed academics — because it seemed like an extension of reading — at least until the point when I was expected to do well at school and could no longer devote as much time to reading.
Reading became a way to cope with the loss of a sister I never knew and a loss that I didn’t realize I was experiencing. I just had to take a book, get into a room and shut the door. Reading helped me through it all, and everything in my life revolved; to be accurate, still revolves around it.
A couple of years back, over a period of six months, I found myself struggling to read. I would peer at the same lines over and over again, get angry and abandon books midway. I started having anxiety attacks every morning while leaving home for work or when I was taking flights or when I had to call someone. The phone ringing or an email notification on my phone would make me want to burst into tears. I hated getting out of bed and would spend most nights awake because I hated the thought of waking up. I started procrastinating, spending entire days at work staring at the computer screen, letting work pile up and attending to it only when it absolutely needed to be done. I tried to rationalize all of this by thinking it was a temporary phase — this was a difficult time at work, I had moved four countries over a two-year period and just needed to find my bearings. Maybe a quiet holiday where I could just read and do nothing else would help.
I tried all of this and nothing seemed to help. In my desperation, I started spending all my spare time in bookstores. I felt the safest and probably, the least anxious, in bookstores and would end up going twice, thrice a week; leaving office in the middle of the day and just landing in a bookstore. I would desperately buy several books — hoping that there would be something I would feel like reading. I would struggle to choose a book, and as a result, would end up buying way more books than I could possibly hope to read in a reasonable period of time, and the speed at which I was accumulating books far exceeded the rate at which I could read. This had the perverse effect of making me more anxious, as the sight of the pile of unread books would make me more desperate.
I did all of this in Singapore — a country, where books are probably more expensive than any other place in the world; and while I was living in a house where space was so scarce, that the books just ended up piling on the bed and the floor. When I wanted to read an author or explore a new subject, I would struggle to make up my mind and would end up buying four or five books at once.
This habit became worse while buying books on Kindle because shelf space (or the lack of it) wasn’t a concern and I would buy fifteen books at a time and then wonder why I ever thought that some of those books would interest me. Also, this made even lesser sense because the only way I could really finish or relate to a book was if I read a physical book — something that I could hold and actually flip pages back-and-forth, reading the same lines over and over again until I understood.
I would abandon books right, left and center. I tried to rationalize this by statements such as “reading a book is akin to a conversation where the author is the one speaking, and the onus of keeping the audience engaged is on her / him”. The truth was that I just couldn’t read. When I would give up on a book, or somehow manage to finish one — I would be faced with the immense task of choosing another (out of the ever-growing pile of unread books) and I would sit for hours staring at the pile, wondering what to start next. I would inevitably conclude that there was nothing there which I wanted to read, and hence would want to go to the bookstore again. Sometimes I felt as if the “I” who had bought these books some weeks ago, was not the “I” who was now deciding what to read.
There were times I wanted to read vast, complex 900-page tomes with several characters, backstories, historical events; and then a couple of hours later would want something shorter, something simpler — engaging but not emotionally overwhelming; something that would make me care for the characters, but not make me sad or happy. In summary, I was a reading wreck, if there exists such a term.
In my desperation to motivate myself to read again and to enjoy it, I took a split-second decision to register myself to attend a literature festival that was in a different country which was a five-hour flight away at a time when the thought of a twenty-minute cab ride made me anxious. I was hoping that being surrounded by books and authors I admired and respected, would make me feel better, would make me belong. On the day of the flight, I could not make myself get out of bed; the thought of being amongst people seemed overwhelming and the idea of being amidst books when I felt so dysfunctional seemed impossible. I could not even take the decision of cancelling the tickets and just ended up not taking the flight.
It was as if the more I tried, the more difficult things became — like I was a predator chasing a prey whose primary object was to elude me and it seemed to be doing a far better job than I was.
While all of this was happening, I was struggling with other things, all of which even a cursory google search would identify as symptoms of depression — the inability to focus or carry out even simple tasks, never wanting to get out of bed, shying away from public interactions, feeling eternally plagued by self-doubt — but more than all these, it was the inability to read that hurt the most. It was as if depression possessed the ability to render me dysfunctional by ruining my capacity and desire to enjoy the act I enjoyed most and derived most meaning from — which too, if you think of it, is a classic depression symptom.
Maria Popova, the founder and curator of the Brainpickings blog (more on that later) describes “the most withering aspect of depression as the way it erases the memory of wellness, and how the thick nightfall of depression smothers all confidence in dawn”. In my experience, depression had seized control of the one source of light that could dispel this darkness. It was questioning and challenging my sense of what it meant to be me and being unable to read disoriented me more than I could have believed possible.
I could analyze and understand, in theory, everything that was happening, but knowing did precious little to make me feel better. All I could do was continue this struggle to be able to read again and hope that something would work. After nothing I could do myself worked, I decided to seek professional help and it took multiple counselling sessions to help me find ways of coping — changing habits in my life that weren’t helpful, finding a counter-balance to work, opening up and talking about my childhood; and somehow finding ways to learn to read again.
The Brainpickings posts were a life-saver. I have been reading these posts for years — on weekends and whenever I wanted a break from work; but now these acquired new meaning. They were short enough that I could stay engaged, and feel, in a way, less lonely. There were days I spent reading all of the posts on children’s books and illustrated books; and was enthralled. It was like learning to be a child again; as if I was seeing books for the first time. I felt like I could regain a normal childhood by reading those books on grief and loss, ones which I wish I had read as a child, on learning to open oneself and allowing oneself to heal, on poetry (one of my pet peeves in life has been an inability to relate to poetry).
On Brainpickings, I also discovered an illustrated book called “This is a Poem that Heals Fish” and I decided to try reading poetry again. I discovered Mary Oliver’s work and would spend hours reading it, wanting to hold on to the phrases, knowing that these were available to me whenever I needed to know I wasn’t alone or when I felt like being in the woods or listening to the birds but couldn’t physically do that. I started reading short stories which could keep me engaged, and rediscovered Alice Munro, and Edna O’Brian.
I was consciously looking for books which would not be too dark or depressing. Yet, I picked up Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad stories, which were a revelation. For a month, everybody who met me had to listen to me talk about those. I would never read anything that remotely resembled self-help, but those books helped me relate to the Slow Movement and mindfulness. I was born two decades after the sixties and knew nothing about the hippie movement, other than it being a sort of a quaint curiosity when visiting certain places. But now, I could wholly understand where a desire to not follow rules, to want to be with nature, and in some ways, become primitive, could stem from. David Grossman’s “Someone to Run With” and Jennifer Egan’s “The Invisible Circus” helped me think through the pain of what losing my sister really meant.
Since depression continued to haunt me, I ended up looking for and reading a lot of articles on this on the internet — and knowing how much of a digital trail we leave and how most machine learning algorithms work — expressing an interest only meant that I was plied with more and more links on similar subjects. This was exasperating as I would go from feeling validated to hopeless — all in the duration of a few clicks.
Then, I chanced upon Olivia Laing’s “The Lonely City” and felt that the first lines on loneliness as viewed from an apartment window which only overlooked other apartment windows were written for me — about “the particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people” and “like depression, running deep in the fabric of a person”. The notion of loneliness being a communal feeling had me captivated, as did how one could derive purpose and meaning from something so insidious, channelling it (even if subconsciously) into art and creativity — helped me feel less negative. I will always remember this book as the one I could read without forcing myself to, without losing focus and which made me feel low and cry in a manner that seemed strangely comforting. I started reading more about creativity, and writing, and what it means to be an outcast — and went through an entire series of books on writing (which I had acquired during one of my bookstore binges), reading these slowly — and discovered that these were making me read differently and that was a revelation in itself. I discovered journaling and using writing as a healing tool, and was encouraged by my therapist to try this, and it seemed to work.
I am sure everybody who struggles with depression has their own list of tasks and activities which they derived pleasure from earlier, but are now impossible and seem overwhelming. Maybe being unable to read would be rather trivial if one were to rank-order the effects of depression in terms of their ability to debilitate life. I still have days where reading anything seems impossible (in fact when doing anything seems insurmountable) — but have now learnt to let these pass; and feel more secured that leaving the world of books for a while doesn’t lead to permanent exile and I can always find my way back — even if it is via a long, unexpected detour.
© Abhishek Gupte 2019
