I knew then that I could never kill this vine of depression, and so all I wanted was for it to let me die. I was not strong enough to stop breathing. It went on glutting itself on me when there seemed nothing left to feed it. Its tendrils threatened to pulverize my mind and my courage and my stomach, and crack my bones and desiccate my body. I felt myself sagging under what was much stronger than I first I could not use my ankles, and then I could not control my knees, and then my waist began to break under the strain, and then my shoulders turned in, and in the end I was compacted and fetal, depleted by this thing that was crushing me without holding me. I knew that the sun was rising and setting, but little of its light reached me.
When I tried to think clearly about this, I felt that my mind was immured, that it couldn't expand in any direction. At the worst stage of major depression, I had moods that I knew were not my moods: they belonged to the depression, as surely as the leaves on that tree's high branches belonged to the vine. It had had a life of its own that bit by bit asphyxiated all of my life out of me. My depression had grown on me as that vine had conquered the oak it had been a sucking thing that had wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I. The vine had twisted itself so entirely around the scaffolding of tree branches that its leaves seemed from a distance to be the leaves of the tree only up close could you see how few living oak branches were left, and how a few desperate little budding sticks of oak stuck like a row of thumbs up the massive trunk, their leaves continuing to photosynthesize in the ignorant way of mechanical biology.įresh from a major depression in which I had hardly been able to take on board the idea of other people's problems, I empathized with that tree. It was hard to say where the tree left off and the vine began.
In twenty years, a huge vine had attached itself to this confident tree and had nearly smothered it. I returned, not long ago, to a wood in which I had played as a child and saw an oak, a hundred years dignified, in whose shade I used to play with my brother. The birth and death that constitute depression occur at once.
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