Content note for mentions of suicide.
I haven’t been swimming in years, but from what I remember, the feeling of floating above the water, weightless on your back, drifting aimlessly is what depression most resembles. That is, until the obstacles of life start dragging you under. Then, you start thrashing just to keep your head above water and your mind starts flooding with anxious thoughts.
I believe that is why I cling to Judaism, and those within the community, as anchors, instead of drifting and drowning alone. Thousands of years of struggle and strife, and the Jewish community strives and thrives as a tribe in a world that has tried to erase it, yet this culture has adapted and renewed itself time and again. That stability in the face of constant overwhelming oppression made me want to convert to Judaism; to understand how this culture developed the tools for not only survival but also success, flourishing instead of floundering by ruminating on the ruins of the rumble of Zion and countless destructions of communities throughout the globe. I stand outside of this tribe, not only looking for acceptance into it, but wondering, how is this community not drowning in depression?
No one gives you any real guidance on how to handle depression. My antidepressants, therapy, and support systems keep most of my demons at bay. I’m not depressed, but I’ve been sleeping rougher since being weaned off Seroquel and started on Abilify. Seroquel was the bane of my existence for the last month and kickstarted a period of intense stress at work. I took the drug at the wrong time and it laid me flat at a conference, where a member of my company’s board of directors saw me pass out in my chair. Several days tardy to work had me meeting the same board member in the elevator, which resulted in a write-up with an “employee progress plan.”
That’s the sedation effect of Seroquel; it makes one groggy in the morning and it’s difficult to focus until caffeine floods your system. Makes it easy to sleep through alarms. If you take it too early, you wake up at three in the morning; too late and you sleep through several alarms. Many times, I used it to escape into sleep after a stressful day, week, or incident. Sometime for entire weekends. Not often, but sometimes. It’s a delicate balance. I’ve taken or been around the drug most of my life.
My mother takes Seroquel for her type-one-bipolar disorder. I took it on and off for a while in my teenage years, most likely for off label use. I’ve always had trouble sleeping, and was placed back at a lower dose when I was going through the throws of diagnosis of what was eventually revealed to be bipolar disorder-type-two. My maternal grandmother, who also shares bipolar disorder with her daughter, and with me, attempted suicide with an overdose of Seroquel. It won’t stop your heart, but if you pop enough of them, it will make you vomit and sleep deeply through it, like my grandmother did. Luckily, or unluckily for her, she was found before she choked to death. She never continued with therapy after her diagnosis
I went off the medication toward the end of my first semester of my sophomore year, during a period of living down and out after I had a falling out with my parents. I then endured an increasingly complicated series of events that lasted almost three years. Thereafter, I returned to relative emotional stability. Now, two years later, Seroquel is attempting to suffocate my career, slowly, misstep-by-misstep.
Lucky for me, my mensch of a supervisor advocated for me, telling his boss and the board member I was a solid worker and that this progress plan would set-up me as a come-back kid of sorts, with a series of easy wins and progress. A sleep study diagnosed me with sleep apnea. Depression combined with a condition that makes you physically exhausted from a lack of quality sleep results in a barely functioning adult.
I feel sick writing this. You can feel depression come on, like a sickness, like a common cold. It creeps into you. You grow weaker. You feel, I feel, energy slowly drifting from me, and the battery of anxiety attacks beat me into submission. I remember every mistake, every error, every hurtful action, every crime that my confidantes and my secular priest called a therapist has exonerated me from. My mind is my abuser and by body withers, paralyzed from the battery of my consciousness. Any surge of energy comes from the high of mania that sends me buzzing aimlessly after half-baked schemes or into fight or flight panic attacks confessing to close friends and family for sins long past. I know depression and its gangster twin anxiety. I bare the scars they imprinted on my brain. I know them well; I’ve known them my entire life.
I feel more exhausted than I have felt since the pandemic started. My apartment is slowly falling apart, though it’s nowhere near the void of an apartment I lived in during my last summer in Bowling Green.
I remember cave crickets the size of quarters that bled tiny pools of blood of green ichor. I remember the growing number of roaches whose presence seemed to confirm the simultaneous decay of my environment and my mind. My mother always cautioned me against leaving food out or dishes in the sink. Roaches are symbols of failure and filth. They were the only ones to greet me and accompany me in the void. Did I summon them with my lack of care? Or was it the unplugged refrigerator containing festering meat that bled black bile in the sweltering summer heat a floor above? Or was it the moldy food in the sink in the basement apartment below, with the cool moist darkness that invited them?
Now, I live in a calm apartment that my mom helps me clean weekly. I no longer live in that void, I’m home. I’m in Louisville, graduated with a Bachelor’s in journalism. I’m medicated, in therapy, with a job. I have a support system and an apartment. I’ve rebuilt my life.
Anyone with depression is a veteran of wars with their own mind. Some are only drafted for one tour due to a major trauma or life changing event, like a death, then return to normalcy. For those with major depression, the war is an endless campaign. We are all veterans, and my closet comrade was Adam Simmons, who saved me from ending my own life.
I was living alone in Knoxville and for a variety of reasons. I could give you a reason for the for the meltdown, but I think the truth was that suicidal ideation manifests from a recurring psyche wound that reopens under stress. After college I moved to Knoxville, Tennessee for a job with AmeriCorps. According to the Americorp.gov, “Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) is an anti-poverty program designed to provide needed resources to nonprofit organizations and public agencies to increase their capacity to lift communities out of poverty.” The massive caveat is that the program expects its “volunteers” to live in poverty and subsist off state government program such as SNAP and Medicaid. In Tennessee, Medicaid (TennCare) is given out, as described by Tn.gov, to, “mostly low-income pregnant women, parents or caretakers of a minor child, children and individuals who are elderly or have a disability.” I still applied and was denied. This left me without insurance until the open healthcare enrollment period, where I received the cheapest, substandard healthcare option. It was only accepted within one healthcare system, Cherokee Healthcare. This drastically reduced my therapy options. The therapist I finally found didn’t accept my insurance, despite working at Cherokee and being informed she was in-network by the insurance company. Thus, I lost my insurance, and therefore my ability to get hold of medication and see a trauma therapist.
I was not a good fit at my initial site, and so requested to switch sites. However, the VISTA program decided to simply “release” me from the program entirely. I was job-searching, without insurance, and alone. This stress re-opened the wound of suicidal ideation. I try to cleanse the wounds in my mind through therapy and medication every time this particular concept rears its ugly head. Lacking the tools this time around, my wound festered. Each time this wound emerges, the rationale changes. Most of the time its simply a fixation, a strong fascination with the famous suicides of others. On other occasions it’s an intense desire for the pain I’m feeling to disappear and for my life to end, but with no plans to take my life myself. The most dangerous bouts of suicidality are a recklessness that puts my life in danger. In Knoxville, that took the form of gunning it as fast as I could up and down mountainous terrains in a PT Cruiser.
At the front my of mind was the subject of suicide, along with not wanting to admit what felt like defeat and a desire to rebuild my life away from the security of what felt like the infantilizing influence of my family. I’m not sure how serious these flirtations with suicide were, but the two options facing me were suicide or going home. Adam’s friendship and his council kept me postponing the date.
Adam Simmons is my kin in several demographics. He is autistic, Jewish, and is diagnosed with a depressive disorder. I met him through his now-fiancé, who was in a sibling program to me in AmeriCorps. His mother is an ethnic Jew who converted and married into an evangelical set of Christianity, and his upbringing in the church was less than ideal. That caused Adam a great deal of what is referred to as “church trauma.” His suicidal intent was at its apex when he attempted to end his life after he ceased believing in G-d in his junior year of high school. Adam took a fistful of pills when he concluded G-d didn’t exist. He woke up at Vanderbilt psychiatric wing in Nashville, where he slowly recovered.
After years of therapy and power antidepressants Adam was stable. He relayed this story openly to me, not as a success story, but to say that suicidal depression is manageable. Adam is the one person I’ve met where I can sit down and share my problems and receive active listening in return. Parents don’t always provide active listening in the manner of a great friend, but a brother does. My mother supports me by helping in practical ways. She helps me clean my home, schedule my appointments, and tend to my errands. My stepfather helps with my finances. Together the two help me obtain a higher standard of living and a higher quality of life. Listening without judgement is not in the nature of my parents; they judge and they guide.
Adam, my brother not of blood, but of spirit and mentality, knows my innermost secrets and still affirms that I have a good nature. How dare I doubt my reason for life when he sees worth in me? Is our friendship not better than the connection of Jonathan and David? Is he not like Jonathan, patient and merciful? Kind and gentle? Am I not David, similar to that poet King of the Hebrews, in that I have self-awareness of my sins and my faults before the eyes of G-d? How much more merciful and benevolent would David have been if Jonathan had been spared the Philistines’ blade? I believe Jonathan would have consoled and comforted that flawed favorite of G-d into a better version of himself. Was it not the kindness of Jonathan that caused David when he was pursued with feverish and furious violent intent by Saul to spare the fallen first king of a united Israel? Perhaps, David saw the face of his friend, his blood brother, in that of the vulnerable transgressing tyrant? Maybe, but I do thank G-d that my Jonathan was spared the Philistines sword called depression.
Adam consoled and counseled me to go home; to accept my mother’s help fully and to relocate to Louisville, my hometown. He encouraged me to invest in building up a support system that was easier to gain access to in Kentucky. I think it makes sense that a Jew saved my life. The community has undergone so much trauma and the reliance of communal support has always been its saving grace through so many thousands of years of turmoil, why wouldn’t communal support be my savior as well?
After I’m done converting, I think I will take a good solid Hebrew name: Adam.
