We're All Mad Here

Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens when a person looses her mind. The word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

You associate madness with Zelda Fitzgerald in all her rich, gorgeous, cerebral disturbedness; or maybe you think of it as something that members of the Aureliano Buendia family sank into at the end of One Hundred Years Of Solitude. Madness is delightful to the beholder - scary in a way, but still fun to watch - a sport for spectators and rubberneckers who can't avert their eyes from the awfulness that they know they shouldn't be witnessing. Madness is Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton duking it out in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; it's Edie Sedgwick in all her anemic, anorexic beauty trying to do herself in with amphetamines and pearls, dancing on a table posing for Vouge. It's Kurt Cobain in every Nirvana video, looking like a man who is sick, who needs help and wears his desperation on his sleeve like a badge of cool.

But in reality depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up. Depression is - especially these days - an overused term, but nothing like drinking all night with a lampshade on your head and going home to put a gun in your mouth and paint the wall with your brains. It's not the elegance of Cio-Cio's dying in Madame Butterfly as she bleeds to death on the stage over her White man. It's not the double suicide in Romeo and Juliet; that is the domain of madness alone.

Depression is being the girl that feels, no matter how much ink I use up writing all of this down. Remember, when you are at the point of doing something as desperate and violent as sticking a cold dirty barrel in your mouth, or chugging a handfull of sleeping pills and a big bottle of vodka, or sitting in your bathtub with a razor floating to the bottom of the crimson tide, think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know that it is not worth any of the great art that comes as its by-product.