Christal
Cooper
Article
3,466 words
Styrofoam head artwork by Christal Rice Cooper caccoop@aol.com
And Mitzi C Fleming mitzcfleming@gmail.com
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excerpts given copyright privilege by individual authors and Seal Press.
Guest
Blog Post By Christal Rice Cooper
My Experience of Shades of Blue
When I first read about Shades of Blue: Writers on Depression, Suicide, and Feeling
Blue (Seal Press, 2015) via Facebook I knew that I had to read
the book – not to do a review or write a feature story but for myself and my
well being.
I have bi-polar depression, obsessive-compulsive
disorder, anxiety, and a mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder and have
been battling this almost all of my life.
I have been on medication for these issues for over 22 years and I am still
on meds.
My husband is in the military and we have lived
in Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma, Illinois, Florida, and now Alabama.
Alabama has been a dark place and a dark
experience for me, which has intensified all my different levels of mental illness.
It wasn’t until I moved here that I have
experienced the stigma of mental illness. The stigma is not due to understanding – no
one can understand mental illness unless they’ve walked in the shoes of mental
illness. The stigma comes from
deliberate ignorance and refusal to accept mental illness as a valid disease,
and instead choose to judge. “That wife is crazy. We need to stay away from her.”
It was in this dark place physically, mentally,
emotionally, and spiritually when I encountered Shades of Blue. This encounter made me find comfort
in this dark place but at the same time this comfort never diminished the
horror and excruciating torment that mental illness thrives. The comfort comes from the fact that I realized
I wasn’t weird, flawed, undervalued, marginalized or that something was wrong
with me. As a result, I experienced a
sense of empowerment that could not be explained, especially when I am still in
this darkness.
Halfway through the Shades of Blue, I decided
that this needed to be a story and queried the editor Amy Ferris if
she would consider an interview. Her
response was yes and I was ecstatic.
Shades of Blue is an anthology of 34
writers who have experienced two things – severe depression and suicidal tendencies.
The contributors are Barbara Abercrombie, Sherry
Amatenstein, Regina Anavy, Chloe Caldwell, Jimmy Camp, Zoe FitzGerald Carter,
Debra LoGuerico DeAngelo, Marika Rosenthal Delan, Hollye Dexter, Beverly
Donofrio, Beth Bornstein Dunnington, Matt Ebert, Betsy Graziani Fasbinder, Pam
L. Houston, Mark S. King, David Lacy, Caroline Leavitt, Patti Linsky, Karen
Lynch, Lira Maywood, C.O. Moed, Mark Morgan, Linda Joy Myers, Christine Kehl
O’Hagan, Jennifer Pastiloff, Angela M Giles Patel, Ruth Pennebaker, Alexa
Rosalsky, Elizabeth Rosner, Kathryn Rountree, Kitty Sheehan, Jenna Stone, Judy
White, and Samantha White.
I
hadn’t heard from Amy Ferris and due to time constraints it looked like the
interview would not go through as planned.
I set Shades of Blue to the side and said I would wait to write this
feature until Amy’s schedule would allow her to respond to my interview
questions.
Then on Tuesday January 19, 2016 all of that
changed when I met my dear friend and artist Mitz at our weekly meetings at the
local restaurant. We meet every Tuesday
to discuss my mental state, the arts, her amazing artistic and compassionate
gifs, and our faith.
She left and I stayed behind to sketch some
faces when I met Hadley and her daughter, who were having a late breakfast at
the table next to me. 
Hadley told me her other daughter committed
suicide by shooting herself in the heart in May of 2015.
We talked about all the things people who refuse
to accept mental illness as a valid illness tend to say about those who commit
suicide: “They are cowards.” “They are
selfish.” “They are not in their right
mind!’
I told her that most people who commit
suicide are not selfish – quite the contrary – they feel that without them on
this earth life would be better for those they love.
Most people who commit suicide are not cowards –
it takes courage – bad courage though it may be – to actually go through a
suicide – and this courage once again stems from the person feeling that he or
she is not worthy of life or simply wanting to end the torment. The individual never wants to die they just
want the torment to die and then be able to find peace.
I told Hadley about my pastor Reverend
Terry Taylor who developed manic depression and after three years of struggling
to find some kind of relief and to no avail he went to his downstairs basement
and hung himself in April of 1996.
I told her for an individual to go through the
mental torment that mental illness sufferers go through and not want to even
think of suicide – that is when he or she is not in his or her right mind. Maybe instead of saying he or she was not in
her right mind we need to say “he or she was emotionally damaged.”
She told me her daughter, the mother of twin
boys (now age 5), was very emotionally damaged and had conquered numerous
things.
I don’t know the full story – but I do know that
mental illness is a process packed full of stimuli telling the person he or she
is in darkness regardless if the sun is outside shining or not. And even when that person goes out into the
sunshine, she still is in the darkness because the depression is within the
person and not without. The depression
is there regardless of our circumstances or situations. Though sometimes our circumstances and situations can be welcoming distractions, the depression is
still there.
But after reading Shades of Blue something
else is within me: the messages Shades
of Blue is singing in my spirit’s ears:
You are not crazy! You are not stupid! You are not ignorant! You are not dumb! You are in your right mind! What you have is a valid disease! You matter!
I’ve also come to the point in my life
where I tell myself, “Hey, it’s okay if
people don’t like me; if they don’t want to spend time with me; if they don’t want
to be my friend; and if they think I’m weird.”
But at the same time I hear another voice that
says, “You have done nothing wrong. You have done nothing to deserve this kind of
isolation.”
People have a right to like me or not like me
and they should never be condemned for whatever they decide to do. But at the same time I should never be
condemned for who I am, especially if it is based on the diseases I
have.
How can two things that contradict each other be
true? Thus the mystery of mental
illness. Shades of Blue helped me
realize that these two different worlds in my one big real world can exist and
co-exist - without feeling condemnation
for my fellow-women and without feeling condemnation for myself.
Amy Ferris
And the truth is, the balls-out truth is
this: those of us who suffer from bouts
of depression, who don’t believe we’re good enough, who can barely make it out
of bed some days, who struggle with self-esteem and the whole concept of
self-love . . .when we use our own pain and suffering so that we can understand
another person’s heart . . .it doesn’t eliminate our pain, or make it vanish,
or go pouffff – but it does make it bigger than ourselves; it makes it worth
the struggle. I look at folks I know
–some very personally, some on the periphery – who have gone through hell and
back a million times, and they use their life every day to inspire, encourage,
and awaken the good and greatness in others because they know what it was like
to be flat-out broken, broken into little pieces.
Page
2-3
Mark King
This is the story that haunts my waking
hours. It is a story with many ghosts.
It started when AIDS began its murderous
march through my community, when gay men learned the intimacies of death, when
so many perished we couldn’t properly grieve for them all. And when our hearts were crushed from the
weight of mortal questions that such very young men were never meant to answers.
Those answers, all these decades later,
still elude me. This is what remains.
Page
11
Angela M Giles Patel
So nothing pisses me off more than to see
someone talk about how they used to take medication for depression or anxiety,
but now they don’t have to anymore because they discovered yoga or running or
god. The idea that somehow they have
managed a victory that is important enough to broadcast, that what they have
accomplished can be outlined and followed, is misleading at best. And although they won't say it explicitly,
the implied judgment is clear: if you
are not enlightened enough to be able to survive without medication, something
is wrong with you.
No shit.
Something is wrong with me.
What is wrong with me is not a bump in
the road, or a case of the blues, and it is not something that can be addressed
by the right herbal tea. It is not a
pothole, it is a fucking canyon – one I can only navigate with help. This is why I have to take two burgundy-colored
capsules every morning. If I don’t, my
mind turns against me. It’s not that I
failed to become enlightened, it’s simply who I am. The kicker is that I am enlightened enough to
know that who I am is someone whose mind can fail to be her friend.
I hate taking the medication. The idea that I cannot fully function without
it breaks my heart on a regular basis, but I can’t stop taking it. I’ve tried.
It isn’t pretty. I hate my
dis-order and my dis-ease enough that I occasionally allow myself to become
tricked by depression. I am not sure who
said it first, but they are right – depression lies. One of the biggest lies it tells is the one
that starts with the idea that medication is unnecessary. Maybe it is optional for someone who just
needed a little boost to get through a rocky period, but for those of us who
are clinically diagnosed with depression, proper medication is critical. To suggest otherwise is a failure to
understand the true nature of the problem.
Pages
26-27
Debra LoGuerico DeAngelo
By my twenties, I’d weathered several bad
relationships and a disastrous marriage.
I went for counseling to talk about my emotionally abusive husband. I ended up talking about my mother. In one session, I spread out photos of me
from birth until present. The therapist
studied my photographic timeline and made an observation: “You’ve always been sad.”
Sad?
What does that even mean? This is how I’ve always felt. I can’t comprehend any other way to
feel. If you’re colorblind, you don’t
imagine colors you can’t see. It’s
impossible. You just accept that this is
how the world looks, and that’s that.
What the hell are “red,” “green,” or “happy”? My therapist labeled my lifelong sadness
“infantile depression.” At least it gave
my chronic low-grade longing a contest.
Every “mother” I ever had, including my actual parent, abandoned
me. No wonder I was so wary of getting
attached to anyone. I was still
protecting myself.
Pages
72-73
Elizabeth Rosner
Within a year of her (my mother’s) death,
my first novel was published to a few days of great fanfare. A week later, on what was to be the first day
of my multi-city book tour, terrorists flew two jetliners into the World Trade
Center. More falling, much more falling
down. It was only in a delayed reaction
many months later that I realized I had felt forced to disregard my own
tremendous sadness in order to defer to the larger, much larger, tragedy of
9-11. As a daughter of two Holocaust
survivors, this kind of deference to other tragedies was second nature to me.
Pages
80-81
Hollye Dexter
I stand up straight, pretending to be in
control, “I see you’re wanting to have a tantrum,” I say, my voice shaking,
“but you may not scream at me. You can
have your feelings by yourself, and talk to me when you’re calm.” I walk out and shut his bedroom door behind
me, my heart thrumming through my chest.
And then my four-year-old child, who still wears pull-ups at night,
screams this behind his closed door, “I
hate myself! I hate myself! I want to die!”
My knees crumble beneath me as I clutch
the doorjamb for support. I can’t breathe. He is too young to know what these words
mean. No, these aren’t his words. My son is screaming what has been inside my
head every day for months. He screams
out everything I have been suppressing.
I can no longer hide what is happening inside myself, inside the walls of
this “Happy House,” inside the confines
of my marriage. The jig is up.
I hesitate at his door, compose myself
then push it open. He sits on the floor,
his face red and sweaty, his eyes wild and confused. I pick him up and rock him.
“We never say ugly things like that about
anyone, especially not ourselves. Okay?”
He nods.
“Your Mommy and Daddy love you so
much. We prayed for you to come to our
lives. You are an answered prayer – our
precious gift,” I say, “and the fact that
we are all even here on this Earth is a miracle. Our lives are a gift.” I hold him close against me, wiping his tears
and my own with the sleeve of my shirt, unable to say any more. With every word, I am learning a hard
lesson. Am I going to live my life as a
hypocrite, expecting my children to believe in the value of their lives, when
inside I believe mine is worthless?
No. I cannot live this way any
longer. I am no longer to let another
generation of children grow up as damaged as I am. Doing my best is no longer good enough. I have to do better than my best. I have to find a way to heal myself, for only
in doing that can I heal my family.
Pages 91-92
Pages 91-92
Karen Lynch
When I was seven, my mother taught me how
to kill myself. She said you must hold
the gun firmly to your temple and squeeze the trigger without hesitation. Don’t be a wimp about it. The bullet will pierce the soft flesh of your
temple, travel through the occipital lobe, and take out the executive suite of
your brain. Maybe she didn’t say
“executive suite,” but her words made me picture a Wall Street financier doing
the deed in his private office bathroom.
Mom said those who failed to follow these simple instructions risked
leaving themselves alive and hideously deformed. “Hideously,” she emphasized.
Page
116.
Chloe Caldwell
On the plane from Albany, New York, to
Portland, Oregon, I deleted my heroin dealer’s phone number. It wasn’t the first time I’d done that – more
like the fifteenth – and each time I’d felt a strange resistance. I knew that I would miss my heroin dealer,
who’d been only too happy to help me ruin myself. I loved people that enabled my
irresponsibility. In hindsight, he was
my doctor. And I was a happy patient.
Page
124.
Ruth Pennebaker
Mother continues to be depressed off and
on for the rest of her life. Her
relationship with me is painfully bad – or just painful, period, for both of
us.
All I know, in every inch of my being, is
that I will never, ever be anything like her.
I won’t be a housewife, a mother who tells her children she’s given up
everything for them. I won’t live in
windswept, small towns that obviously turn women into depressives, bank
robbers, and rabbit-hutch abusers. And I
will do anything, I tell myself, not to be depressed like her.
So I deliberately try to become
everything she isn’t and travel where she’s never gone. I marry a smart, ambitious man. I go to law school and graduate high in my
class. I ditch law and become a
writer. I have two children but continue
to work full time. I live on the East
Coast, spend time in Europe, come back to big cities in Texas, all the pushing
and striving, writing books and newspaper columns and magazine pieces. Standing
still would be like death to me.
But
you know, I am more like my mother than I want to believe. And depression is a patient stalker, waiting
for its time.
Page
132.
David Lacy
After my ex-wife moved out, I felw to my
hometown to visit family and friends nearly every toher weekend.
This was difficult because I was terrified
of flying. As soon as we reached
cruising altitutdes, I’d order two miniature bottles of tart airline chardonnay
for the one-hour flight between Southern and Northern California. The wine, of course, chased the pre-flight
Xanax, dusty pills that slid out of a bottle with a warning label that read, DO
NOT MIX WITH ALCOHOL.
Page
136.
Sherry Amatenstein
I am a therapist. When a patient expresses suicidal ideation, I
invariably preach, “there is always another choice.”
And I believe that to the bottom of my
UGGs.
Still . . .
In my heart of hearts, soul of souls, I
don’t dismiss that one day I might down a bottle of pills. I have no imminent plans and don’t foresee it
happening, bu I will never say never because never is a scarily long time.
Many times patients have cried in
desperation: “How can you help me? You don’t understand what depression feels
like!”
I tell them: “I don’t know exactly what your depression
feels like. But I do know what it is to
lose all hope.”
Page
153
Kitty Sheehan
I no longer wish someone had told me
about depression sooner in my life. I
cherish the wisdom gained from learning how hard it is to pin it down. It’s stealthy. It can spend years patiently sneaking up on
you. Then it may hide itself in a
bottle. It doesn’t care how long it has
to hang around; it waits. If you ignore
it, it busies itself by spreading its web into more corners of your life,
blotting out light as it goes.
But you can get a broom and knock it
down. If no one has helped you name this
feeling, say it to yourself. It’s
okay. There is help available, so much
help. Tell someone, and boom, just like that, you aren’t alone,
which can be a miracle.
Page
182.
Samantha White
My mother’s hobbies were running away
from home, cutting her wrists, and overdosing on pills and booze.
The first time I called an ambulance for
her, I was seven years old.
By the time I decided to take myself out,
I’d had lots of time to study her and her failed techniques.
I was pretty sure I knew how to do it right.
Page
183.
Matt Ebert Have you ever tried to commit suicide and
failed? I have. The last time it was so laughable, I told it
in joke form when I laid it out to my friends.
Truthfully, suicide is a deep-inside-bone-crushing thing. That rain-slicked Seattle bridge, the poison
sumac and the blackberry bushes, a can of gasoline and a lit cigarette, all the
dope in my system, the fact that if I hadn’t already been half-crocked on booze
and pills, I would never have bounced and tumbled and lived.
Page
202
Regina Anavy
Picture a spiral. You are on top, going along in your usual
pattern. A thought intrudes, a moment of
doubt, guilt, or self-reproach. Your spirits drop. You move lower, to the next rung of the
spiral. As your mind turns inward and
your thoughts become more constricted, your options seems to narrow. You suddenly flash in vivid detail on every
error committed in your past: spiteful
words uttered on impulse that you cannot take back; imp0uslive acts you cannot
erase. You begin to obsess about
relationships that have drifted away – all your fault, of course. And you weren’t always the perfect child, the
perfect sibling, the perfect worker, lover, or friend. Oh, the mistakes you have made. Your life is one big mistake, from the minute
you were born. You spiral down and down
into the blame and shame of your life.
This negative-feedback loop of depression
had been a familiar part of my psyche for as long as I could remember. Usually, I would find my way back up and come
out on top of the spiral. However, in
1971, my luck ran out and I had a full-blown breakdown.
Page
230
