Headache

When I arrived home from work today, the very first thing I did was dash around to the front of the house.

Today, you see, is a very special day. 

Today is Ocean at the End of the Lane Day. 

I came relatively late to the Neil Gaiman party. I'd heard of American Gods, and had friends who mentioned that he lived in Minneapolis and would talk about his books constantly, but I never read him. Because no one ever suggested that I should. When I finally got around to reading him, I was hooked within the first twenty pages. I devoured everything I could get my hands on that he had written. His short stories. His novels. The graphic novels made out of his novels. The audiobooks. His young adult fiction. I read everything of his that I could borrow from the library or steal from one of my friends or find the cash to buy out of my tiny monthly book budget. 

I was late to the Neil Gaiman party, but once I arrived I put on my party hat, threw a fistful of glitter in the air, got wasted, and insisted everyone sing Call Your Girlfriend and dance with me. 

Right. Ocean at the End of the Lane. 

When I skittered around to the front porch there was the box, as promised. I barely responded to my neighbors, sitting out front enjoying the sunshine. I snatched up the box, hurried into my house, and very nearly burst into tears. 

Yup. I was very nearly crying over a new book. A book I hadn't even read yet. A book that was still in the packaging. If anyone saw me, they'd wonder if I needed to have my head examined. 

***

It was, inevitably, a comic book that saved my life.

Depression isn't about sadness. It's not the blues. It's not feeling bummed out. Or morose. Or dispirited. Or just plain old unhappiness. In fact, depression, for me, was never about feeling. We laugh (I laughed) at the depiction in Twilight of Bella Swan sitting spaced out in a chair as months rolled by, but I am deeply ashamed to admit that that is exactly how I experienced depression. 

Depression was never about feeling. It was about not feeling. It was about numbness. About day after day of sheer, grinding, nothingness. If I felt anything it was anxiety or worry.  I think I would have taken getting worked up into a lather about something just for the change. But I just . . . couldn't. Instead I went to work, came home, and sat for hours in front of the television, not reading, not thinking, not writing, not doing anything I enjoyed because if I just sat there I could shut off my brain and not think about why I wasn't feeling anything. 

My mental health issues had been building for years. I was always an anxious kid, and my parents would tell me constantly to just stop worrying. As if it was a choice. As it was, I spent most of my life with gradually building anxiety and depression that were never addressed. They built up so slowly that before I realized it, I had tucked my heart away inside of a glass jar. And it was fine in that jar, no one could hurt me as long as it was in there, but I couldn't feel anything and worse--I couldn't remember a time when I had felt something.

It was, quite simply, terrifying.

I was deeply, borderline desperately, unwell. But I didn't know it. I had never thought of myself as the kind of person who would contemplate suicide, but suddenly there I was, standing on just the other side of the line separating me from that level of despair.  Now, writing this, for the first time I realize how unwell I was and how fucking good I was at hiding it. Depression was insidious. Its onset was so gradual that I couldn't talk about it, couldn't recognize it for what it was. And I couldn't make it better. And I couldn't imagine a future where I felt anything.

So, the winter of 2011 in the North Country. The lack of sunlight is enough to make anyone a little potty, but added to loneliness, depression, and anxiety, and I was a fucking disaster. And I was very, very good at hiding it. On the outside I was a successful, put-together, well-liked, respected young professional. Inside I was just a mess.

And for whatever reason, I decided that the thing to do during that period of my life was read Neil Gaiman's Sandman. 

What a stupid idea. 

Sandman is many things, like all of Gaiman's writing. It is layered and witty and sad and funny and deeply frightening. It is not a wintertime comic. It is not a comic to read while you're suffering from undiagnosed clinical depression. 

I read it anyway. 

I fell apart. 

I went to pieces during the first volume, Preludes and Nocturnes. During a scene in A Hope in Hell I set the comic down and wept. I cried for longer than I had cried at any one time in years. And when I was finished, when the hiccups I had given myself settled down, I picked it up and kept reading. I finished the whole series in the course of a week, more reading than I had done at any one time during the previous year. 

It sounds silly and dramatic and sophomoric to say that a comic book saved my life. I know that. But I also know that when I read that one specific line in A Hope in Hell and started crying during a completely mad, fantastic, absurd story, that I felt something for the first time in months. I wouldn't have my real Come to Jesus moment about my mental health for another nine months but reading Sandman put microscopic cracks in the jar where I was keeping my heart.

***

The highest compliment that I can give a television show, a book, a movie is "I cried so hard I gave myself a headache." It's the experience I had two years ago, sitting on my bed reading A Hope in Hell and feeling something for the first time in months. 

I finished Ocean at the End of the Lane between when I started writing this blog and now. And it was brilliant. And beautiful. And deeply moving. And completely mad and terrifying and a thousand other things that I've come to expect from Neil Gaiman's writing. And I cried so hard I gave myself a headache. Partially, I expect, because it's that good.

It's also, I expect, because these days many more things are making me cry. And that's a hopeful thing.