My solution to being depressed as a teenager was to leave. I LOVED leaving. After high school I left for England for a year. But the therapeutic value of leaving didn’t last, maybe because London was so foggy and grey. I applied my leaving strategy to leaving England for sunny Spain.
Leaving is fine, but where you arrive has an influence on how successful leaving will be. Spain wasn’t the Promised Land for me. I didn’t identify with the Mediterranean mentality. As grey and foggy London was, it was a WASP country. And whether I liked it or not, the WASP culture had seeped into my pores.
Which made me recoil when the caballeros in Spain did everything they could to breach my ‘personal space’. Northern Europeans consider personal space as sacred. On the London subway, an unspoken rule is to sit as far way from other passengers as open seats will allow. In Spain, there was always a muchacho rubbing against you, even if half the compartment was empty.
I spent a lot of time with a rolled up newspaper in my hand, whacking Spaniards trying to invade my personal space.
I was tired of whacking, so I went back to Holland. It is as rainy and grey as England, but at least it has a WASP culture. Going back home felt like I had entered a cul-de-sac. ‘Now what’ I asked my depressed self.
It was time to face my demons, so I went to see a psychiatrist. No whacking necessary here. The therapist was unobtrusive, to the point of being shy. He was a small person, making himself even smaller by crossing his legs and hunching over during our sessions. I had a desire to take care of him, not the other way around.
So, I started babbling. What I said made him chuckle. I wasn’t sure why he chuckled, so I asked him. ‘You are funny’ he said point blank.
That was the first time anyone described me as funny. That was my twin sister’s department. Everyone in our family knew that my twin was funny and I was depressed. Now, I had discovered that one could be depressed and funny at the same time.
But the sessions didn’t last. Even though I really tried hard to confront my depression, my addiction to the leaving strategy took over and I left yet again.
This time, I made sure to create some distance between my demons and me. I crossed the vast Atlantic Ocean and left for America.
As soon as I stepped onto the tarred New York pavement that felt like marshmallows because of the heat, I knew I had made the right choice. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. I had taken a bite of the mushroom that made me be just the right size.
Here, almost everyone else left somewhere to come here. All these professional leavers are my true tribe. Besides, America is a jungle of a society, where the survival of the fittest still reigns supreme. There just was no room for my depression. leave comment here
