Still Life: A Memoir of Living Fully With Depression by Gillian Marchenko

Author:Gillian Marchenko
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Christian Ministry, Counseling & Recovery, Mood Disorders, Religion, Personal Memoirs, Self-Help, Biography & Autobiography, Depression
ISBN: 9780830843244
Publisher: IVP Books
Published: 2016-04-11T00:49:29.587000+00:00

Part Three

BREAK-

T HROUGHS

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fourteen

Thaw

The cure for the pain is the pain.

Rumi

C an you tell when you are happy now?” Melanie asks me one

Friday morning.

“Um, no? Well, I don’t know. I still don’t feel much of anything.”

“Why is that?”

“I’m not sure. When depressed, I ignore emotion. After a while,

I think I stopped feeling. It’s another self-protecting mechanism,

probably the main one. If I don’t feel, I won’t feel anything bad. “

“But you won’t feel anything good, either.”

“I know.”

We sit across from one another, my attempts at bravery starting

to crumble as Melanie pokes at a sore spot with her proverbial

therapist stick.

“Here’s a thought. You know what happiness feels like, right?

You remember joy?”

I nod, stilling my hands, which have been fidgeting with a string

on my pants. This level of self-examination requires no movement,

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110

Still Life

concentration, pushing through the fear climbing up my spine.

Happiness? An image of hugging Polly crystallizes, her eyes

smiling, and a small sensation that a moment like that produces if

I allow it, a lifting of organs, air filling my lungs, the flirting of a fly darting around my rib cage. Joy.

I think of someone I admire complimenting a piece of my

writing, or a mom approaching me after I speak, telling me I helped

her not to feel alone. I see a once seven-year-old Zoya dancing in

her ballet recital, dressed from head to toe in white, her arms flut-

tering as she sashays across the dance floor, and me, sitting there

laughing and crying, astounded that something, someone, who

came out of me could do something like that in front of a group of

people. I remember Sergei and I seated at opposite ends of the

couch on a mundane afternoon, him pausing from reading and

looking up to say, “I’m in love with you, you are funny and quirky

. . . and you look good, too,” and me sneaking upstairs for a few

moments to write his words in a journal. Moments of joy descend

in a warm whoosh, like those raindrop showers you see in swanky

homes. The memories drench me to the tips of my toes. I know

happiness, right?

“When you recognize joy or happiness, I want you to attend to

your senses. What’s your body doing? How does it feel? Focus on

the feeling for a couple minutes.”

My lip trembles. I start to cry.

“Why are you crying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, well, for now do it with happy emotions. We need to get

you used to feeling again. I want you to see that feeling good isn’t

connected to something bad.”

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Thaw

111

Now that I have been “working the program for a while, the worst

part of my fight with depression is no longer the actual episode.

It is the fear of the next fall.

When you suspect you are getting better—enough to watch

what you are eating, enjoy your kids, have sex with your husband

and have an actual orgasm. When you start to be a friend to have

a friend, the scariest thing is those first few steps towards the next fall. That ache begins. You know you are going over.

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