Desarrollo prototipo electrónico del bastón

As both a writing process and a laboratory for ideas, “The Depression Journals” became a resource for the essay that follows. I came to think of my practice of memoir as a research method, as a way of address- ing debates about memoir in both academia and the public sphere and about the medical model of depression that dominates the expansive subgenre of depression memoirs. While I could have written a critical essay that analyzed the genre, the results seemed rather predictable (a combination of critique and endorsement that would be another vari- ant on Sedgwick’s “kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic”).14 Although the book includes some discussion of the huge subgenre of depression memoirs, my turn to practice exemplifies the activist principle of pre- senting criticism in the form of a productive or alternative suggestion. It seemed more interesting to enter the fray about memoir by actually writing one, in the reparative spirit of figuring out what memoir can do for public discourse rather than being exclusively concerned with cri- tiquing where it fails.

“The Depression Journals” was initially prompted, as so many mem- oirs are, by the desire to tell a story that didn’t seem to be represented despite the proliferation of depression discourse in the public sphere. It picks up where the mainstream Prozac memoirs leave off, giving me a chance to tell a story whose focus is not primarily medication and its effects. It’s not that drugs are not present—I did take antidepressants during the two years that are chronicled—but they are not central to the story I wanted to tell. Those partial to a medical model might read my account as the story of how Prozac failed me, especially when ad- ministered without adequate supervision, and how the right medica- tion set me on the path to a cure. (In the interest of full disclosure, I gradually weaned myself off imipramine after a year and have not taken antidepressants since.) But although the drugs may have played a significant role, I’m more interested in the changes I had to make to sustain their effects. For that reason, I also don’t pursue in detail my

early family history; although my father’s manic- depression is crucial, I wanted to address its impact on the present, including my own strongly held convictions about the social causes of mental illness.

Instead the story is about daily life and about how anxiety and what gets called depression are ordinary feelings embedded in ordinary cir- cumstances. I wanted to capture how depression feels—the everyday sensations that don’t immediately connect to any larger diagnosis or explanatory framework, whether medical or social. The first section in particular focuses on the everyday life of depression, its minutiae and often boring effects. The temporality is ongoing, perhaps excruci- atingly relentless, but also dull and chronic. In order to get at the felt experience of depression without using clinical labels, I tried as much as possible to avoid terms such as depression and anxiety, although the instances in which I didn’t succeed in eliminating them are also telling about the challenges of finding vocabulary. Careful readers will note the presence of alternative terms such as the somewhat antiquated de-

spair, a relative of early Christian acedia, which is taken up in the essay

that follows, and dread, a word that has special meaning for me be- cause it is used with some frequency by George Eliot and analyzed by Neil Hertz (in George Eliot’s Pulse), both of whom were central to my dissertation. Another keyword is respite, which I use to describe mo- ments of relief from despair aptly captured by the word’s legal origins in the delay of a prison sentence. “The Depression Journals” implicitly argues for terminology and definitions that emerge from the practice of writing, which adds emotional and personal meanings to historical and scientific ones. Another value of memoir is that it avoids demographic generalizations in favor of detailed case histories, although the case history is a genre whose relation to scientific method is complex, since it can be used to complement statistical evidence (and clinical terms) as much as to displace or challenge them. Moreover, my version of the case history resists its tendencies toward the melodramatic and the sen- sational by seeking to represent feelings as ordinary or flat.15

“The Depression Journals” is also about the ordinary practices that helped me survive feelings of despair and even transform them or com- bat them. It provides some suggestions for daily living, but in the form of a story rather than the formulaic self- help genre, with its lists of things to do or generalizations from case histories. The daily routines of self- care and of moving the body—swimming, yoga, dinner with

friends, visits to the dentist, or just getting out of bed in the morning— are modest forms of transformation, but my experience, and writing about it, taught me that they are nonetheless meaningful. In its some- times banal attention to detail, my writing chronicles a relation to self and to the world that is established through the physicality of both body and home as forms of sensory environment. Habit—the develop- ment of everyday routines, practices, and connections—became an im- portant concept in the essay that follows but first made itself known in my own bodily practices. The forms of “self- help” embedded in habits are ordinary, not the stuff of heroic or instantaneous transformation, and they can’t simply be named in the abstract but instead must be inte- grated through the ongoing activity that forms a life story. But they are also what constitutes hope and the antidote to despair and political de- pression.

As an account of depression as political, then, “The Depression Jour- nals” doesn’t suggest collectivity and political action as an alternative “cure” in any simple way. (It also doesn’t say much about love and ro- mance because I wanted to focus on collective attachments rather than the happy ending of the couple form. But love and attachment, espe- cially in their queer forms, are fundamental to my story and should be understood as necessary for transformation even if they can’t always ensure it.) It certainly chronicles the powerful influence of an explo- sive moment in queer activism, one galvanized by the urgency of death and mourning. But it also shows the interplay between militancy and mourning that I later tracked in my work with Aids activists. The mem- oir tries to be honest about the ways that activism can sometimes stall out in the routines of daily life, rather than offering revolution as a prescription for change. It depicts transformation as a slow and pains- taking process, open- ended and marked by struggle, not by magic bullet solutions or happy endings, even the happy ending of social justice that many political critiques of therapeutic culture recommend. It suggests that when asking big questions about what gives meaning to our lives, or how art or politics can promote social justice or save the planet, ordi- nary routines can be a resource. The revolution and utopia are made there, not in giant transformations or rescues.

The memoir also functions as a research method because it reveals the places where feeling and lived experience collide with academic training and critique. I have a feeling that this conflict is one of the

causes of political depression among academics and activists, and writ- ing personal narrative encourages the hunches, intuitions, and feelings that intellectual analysis can restrict with a taboo- like force. For ex- ample, the role of ritual and the sacred, so frequently disparaged in academia, in my transformation ultimately led to my exploration of the “sacred everyday” of home and habit in the critical essay. Its some- what inchoate or incipient appearance in “The Depression Journals” provided the basis for new forms of thinking and new concepts. “The Depression Journals” also rubs up against critiques of “nostal- gia for lost origins” within the fields of migration and diaspora studies. Schooled to question concepts of home and nation, I was surprised to discover the force within the narrative of the images of rivers and oceans and the trips to British Columbia. The psychogeography of going “home”—not just to the places named Campbell River, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and Canada but to the distinctive landscape of that region—entails touching on or feeling (or, equally significantly,

not feeling) longer histories of genocide and displacement. Although

the presence of indigenous and migration histories in “The Depression Journals” is oblique, the critical essay that follows, including an ex- tended chapter on depression, racism, and indigenous spiritualities, af- fords an opportunity to bring those histories more explicitly into view as a way of addressing the disjunctions between my white middle- class background and those histories. The obscurity of the connections be- tween our own despair and the collective despair that is present in the places where we live adds to our confusion and (political) depression. My narrative seemed to be telling me that a connection to where you are from, especially if it’s been denied to you, is crucial; if anything, naturalization covers over the hard process of making home somewhere on the planet. One value of memoir, although it is not exclusive to it, is to track the life of the sensate being in the world, including its material attachments to environment and geography and to see how capitalism

feels or how diaspora feels without screening out nostalgia or sentiment

or melancholy. Rather than worry that I shouldn’t feel attached to my grandparents’ land or the Vancouver Island psychogeographies that shaped me, I wanted to explore the nature of that attachment, which includes histories of separation and loss, both my own and those of colonization. While, from the perspective of diaspora theory, the desire to find home might be as naïve or problematic as recommending drugs

to cure depression, the persistence of that impulse on a daily basis is important for the politics of feeling, as is the question of how to claim an emotional attachment to home and land without inciting violent nationalisms or separatisms. It is in the spirit of Public Feelings not to tell people what to feel or to judge how they feel, but instead to find better ways to describe the complexity of what they are feeling. Personal narrative can be a forum for the places where ordinary feel- ings and abstract thinking don’t line up. The impasses of depression and writer’s block can live in those interstices, and alternative forms of writing can spring them loose as foundations for innovative thought. The value of bodily and creative practice and of politics, ritual, and home is sometimes merely an incipient insight in “The Depression Jour- nals” because the knowledge they represent was embedded within ex- periences of anxiety, inertia, and despair. Unbeknownst to me, I was sometimes healing myself by just waiting and doing nothing, or through what seemed like ordinary or insignificant activities—going swimming, doing yoga, getting a cat, visiting a sick friend. Writing about them be- came a first step toward trying to unpack that fledgling knowledge, often through descriptions of bodily states and sensations rather than reflections on their meanings. The essay that follows picks up on these insights, providing the more sustained analysis that builds on them, but I wanted to include the memoir as a record of the process by which I got there.

part ii