Adventures in Depression Reflection

 One might be surprised to know that of the readings for this class so far, the one that has connected with me on the deepest level was a webcomic - simple drawings broken up by chunks of text totaling less than a thousand words. Adventures in Depression used its medium, style, and semi-comedic tone to convey aspects of depression that are rarely represented: its mundanity and its absurdity. Without going too deep into personal detail, I will say that during quarantine last year I experienced a bout of depression that lasted the entirety of fall semester 2020, eventually leading me to take spring 2021 off of school as a leave of absence in order to recoup. As someone who has experienced and continues to struggle with depression, I think that the view of depression that Adventures in Depression portrays is one that does not get shown nearly often enough. 

Countless stories in every medium have detailed the depths of despair and ennui into which one might sink, emotional lows richly rendered in high definition purple prose and elaborate poetic metaphor. That’s all well and good - there’s a catharsis in writing and in reading about these emotions, an importance to discussing the more violent effects of the disease, and it makes for beautiful art. But it’s not the full story, and when these depictions are the vast majority of visible representations of depression, it can lead to misconception or glamorization. You can’t deny there’s an instinctive appeal to these works and their authors; the tortured artist bleeding pain and truth into his work, drinking to numb his overwrought sensibilities, throwing himself into turbulent relationships or deathwish adventures just to FEEL something again. All of this with an air of movie melodrama, perhaps in black and white with a smoky filter across the screen, perhaps inexplicably performed in french.

Very rarely does stage screen or well-known text show the other side of depression, because to be frank, it’s not interesting. It’s not glamorous or romantic or in any way reminiscent of new wave cinema. It’s laying in bed, numb to the world, knowing you have to get up and go about the duties of your life but too tired to muster the energy to leave your sheets. It’s feeling the itch of your scalp protesting at two weeks without washing, but still not having the will to take a half hour to shower. It’s not leaving your bedroom all day, staring at the wall or blankly scrolling through an endless, meaningless stream of digital content, while inside your own head you’re screaming at yourself to get up, do your work, do anything except continue to sit there and waste oxygen. And that is the part that Adventures in Depression hits dead on the head.

In my opinion, the simplistic and off-kilter style of the character and world convey the experience far better than a painstakingly rendered artistic masterwork. In my experience, depression can make you feel like the comic’s character looks: a strange, malformed, pathetic creature, hardly human, lurching around in a body not really suited to continued existence. The composition of the panels helps to convey what it feels like to be trapped in your own head, as they sometimes show both the character as she exists in the world, often crumpled into a corner or melting into a chair, as well as the voice in her own head, attempting to yell, threaten, and shame herself into action. At times the panel of her inner voice seems to push over into the space the character occupies, crowding herself up against the wall and only serving to reinforce her inaction and despair. 

The comedic tone with which the author approaches the subject may to some seem reductive or crass, aiming to make it relatable to those whose closest brush to depression was a night of tissues and ben and jerry’s after a breakup, but in my opinion it isn’t that at all. Depression is a horrible disease, and to go through it or see someone you care about go through it is deeply sad. But it’s also patently absurd.

I have many friends who either have had experiences with depression or who continue to struggle with it, and they are often the funniest people I know. There’s a reason why so many successful comedians are depressed; to have your mind and emotions so fundamentally divorced from the reality of your circumstances forces you to look at yourself and the world at large from the outside in, and often what you find when you look is absurdity. Especially when one has been living with depression for a considerable amount of time, has researched it, has had time to learn their own destructive patterns, and therefore knows that they are feeling things that have no solid basis in reality. Humor is often derived from incongruity, and there are few forms of incongruity deeper than incongruity with yourself.

So when Adventures in Depression has a quote like “that made me even more sad, and so on and so forth until the only way to adequately express my sadness was to crawl very slowly across the floor”, followed by a set of panels showing her character’s spindly extremities splayed around her stubby rectangle of a torso while her inner monologue looks on with disgust and calls her “sad legs”, it’s funny to me not only because of the visual humor of the scene, but because I see myself reflected back to myself in its full illogical nature. I’ve been in that space where you’re so numb and sad and weird-feeling that it might make sense to just drag yourself across the floor. When you don’t have any feelings left except the constant thrum of self-loathing and barely-suppressed anxiety, you do weird stuff just because why not? It makes as much sense as the rest of the world, which is to say, none at all.

At the beginning of the comic, the author states: 

“It's disappointing to feel sad for no reason. Sadness can be almost pleasantly indulgent when you have a way to justify it - you can listen to sad music and imagine yourself as the protagonist in a dramatic movie. You can gaze out the window while you're crying and think "This is so sad. I can't even believe how sad this whole situation is. I bet even a reenactment of my sadness could bring an entire theater audience to tears."

But my sadness didn't have a purpose.  Listening to sad music and imagining that my life was a movie just made me feel kind of weird because I couldn't really get behind the idea of a movie where the character is sad for no reason

I think that this carries through a point about why it’s important to show that absurdity. It’s tempting, when in the midst of depression, to lean into the sadness, to try to squeeze every drop of sickly-sweet self-pity or stoic Byronic isolation, to let yourself buy into the narrative presented in media that misery is noble, beautiful, meaningful. The thing is, when you let yourself lean into those feelings and romanticize your depression, you may gain temporary comfort, but you also further solidify yourself in that state, until you forget that it isn’t the truth. You forget about the absurdity and the fact that it is a disease, not an enlightened and charmingly jaded self-awareness. When you buy into the myth, you don’t want help, and unless you want help, you won’t get better. When you lean into the absurd, though, remembering the discrepancy between your perception and the world as it exists, it becomes easier to keep your head on straight and remember that a better state of mind is possible, and is worth working toward. 

#relatable amiright