Other people’s words about … depression. And baking.
I was diagnosed with depression, but it didn’t feel like depression … [What] I felt was very, very afraid. I felt like I’d been poisoned. I felt like there had been an avalanche in my head and I’d been shunted along by some awful force, to some strange place, off the map, where there was nothing I recognised and no one familiar. I was totally lost.
From ‘Saved by Cake’
by Marian Keyes
Marian Keyes’s description, in Saved by Cake, of living with depression — a depression which descended on her unexpectedly in the middle of her life and which has not since lifted — is truly horrifying. She describes, in the paragraph I’ve quoted above, and in further paragraphs that I haven’t quoted here, the kind of depression that verges, I think, on psychosis. The depression has invaded her mind. It is the stuff of nightmares.
Keyes writes of turning to baking cakes in desperation — because, she writes, she finds that baking is a distraction from her depression. But there is a terrible distinction between distraction and cure, and Keyes is fully cognisant of this. Tragically, distraction is the only tool available to her.
Keyes’s depression has, it seems to me, shut her mind down, closed her off from the rest of the big, wide world.
View from the edge of the big world
I think that’s the thing that strikes me most about this kind of depression. Because the world we live in is a big, wide world, and I can’t imagine a life in which I couldn’t see and wonder at its very bigness.
I don’t consider myself a particularly upbeat person. I often feel trapped in my own mind, stuck in my own gloomy, inner perceptions. But it’s been a long, long time since I felt entirely shut off from the big, wide world around me. And for that, I am intensely, immensely grateful.
Big world, big sky, big ocean
Lately I’ve been reading about …
- … how the ever-resourceful writer Ann Patchett strayed into the territory of children’s book writing
- … why we really should rethink eating animals (personally, I still struggle with this one)
- … why cultivating honesty may be a better way of living and loving than cultivating cheerfulness
twenty-one words 
I’ve been learning recently about how our microbiome can affect mood. It seems most of us have compromised gut bacteria from meds, food and other influences. Pretty interesting, esp. if it may yield an answer for us. https://www.viome.com/blog/anxiety-depression-your-gut-microbiome-blame
I’d read something along those lines recently, too, Eliza. Isn’t it strange how everything is perhaps interconnected within our bodies — mood, health, joy, sorrow, sickness?
It is pretty amazing, yes, and that sometimes a simple change in diet can correct complex health problems. The research offers great hope.