I have been sitting on this post for a few weeks now, as I have been battling a depressive episode. It caused me to forget my #1 rule about this blog: that I would post first-draft material that I wouldn’t nitpick over. The post doesn’t capture everything I’d like to say about its topic, but that’s not supposed to be the point here. So I’m posting it now, with a bit of a shove.
For the past few years I have been on a downward trajectory of cultural interest–and now it feels like I’ve pretty much bottomed out. It was probably inevitable. Eight years ago, in the middle of my PhD program, I was at the top of the curve. While I was reading every book, I was also watching all the TV shows, listening to all the “best albums of the year,” systematically watching the “best” movies, watching all the sports, and talking talking talking about all of it. It was a heady period of escapism in the midst of a brewing personal crisis. I didn’t know where my career/life was going, but I knew everything about your favorite ____ and could talk to you about it at length.
But as I finished grad school, depression set in. Health issues. Relationship issues. Trump. The pandemic. Climate disasters proliferated, inspiring a sense of imminent doom. I became glued to my phone after years of resisting. Escapism became challenging and then impossible. My attention span evaporated. I grew bored and frustrated with everything.
Now, I probably won’t watch the hot new TV show. I only listen to music sporadically, and it’s always my old familiars. I have sworn off sports completely (for many, many reasons). I’m still watching movies to fill the evenings, but only out of habit. I rarely enjoy them. And finally, heartbreakingly, I can’t seem to read. Nothing holds my interest. Everything irritates me or bores me or disappoints me.
Night after night, I sit down to relax for the evening and scroll through the streaming apps. I ask myself, “What am I in the mood for?” The answer always seems to be: “Something lush and powerful, that will sweep me away and take me over completely! Something profound and thrilling and beautiful.” “Yeah sure. But what will I settle for?” is the inevitable follow up. Maybe an epic or an Austen adaptation instead.
I’m listless. I’m uninspired. My senses are deprived. I want a transcendent experience. But my time and attention span are short. I need a jolt, that will also last and last. That will get me through the days. Through the time that just unspools ahead of me. The currently available “content” is not up to the task. I need the equivalent of a pilgrimage, a psychedelic trip, a divine epiphany. Instead I’m watching the films everyone says to watch. And they do nothing for me.
This is not a plea for recommendations. I swear to you it won’t work. I’ve tried everything. It’s more than “a funk.” I’m contemplating joining a Buddhist nunnery, or building a shack by a pond. In high school my senior year English class voted me “Most likely to join an Amish community.” I laughed along but never understood the joke, because I never really saw myself clearly. But I guess they saw something like this coming.
In the title I used a big word you may not know. You may’ve thought, “She’s using this big word to show off how smart she is.” And yes, this is admittedly true. But I only learned this word last week. Anhedonia: the inability to experience pleasure. It is one of the primary signs of a depressive episode, or a depressive disorder generally. I have struggled with depression most of my life, and I have experienced lengths of time when it was difficult to enjoy experiences I usually enjoyed. And social anxiety, inhibition, and lack of good “joy role models” have generally made it challenging for me to experience pleasure or excitement. I was taught to be reserved, demonstrate self-control, suppress glee, enthusiasm, and even interest in things. To be interested in things: ugh, the epitome of the uncool. But while my depressive episodes come and go, the experience of anhedonia itself seems to have settled in deeper. I always feel it now.
For most of my life I thought the one thing that brings me the most pleasure in my life is reading. You could strand me on a deserted island, but if I had my favorite books (reliable sources of fresh water and protein), I would be perfectly content. I believed that I didn’t really need anything else: not family or friends, not sex, not meaningful work… Reading, I believed, was all I truly needed.
My current drought is making me question this long-held assumption. A truth I have never faced before is thus: I have actually used reading to avoid my life. When I was young I used reading to hide from my family. Lots of discontented kids do this. But I also used reading to hide from other forms of exploration and experimentation. I used reading to build walls to keep people out, and to keep the “real” world away from me. That was its primary use for me—not pleasure. Sure, there were many books I read and enjoyed, even loved. But that wasn’t what I needed reading for. I needed it to hide.
So it does make sense to me now that—in a new phase of life where I am both trying to resist escapism and feeling like escapism no longer works or appeals to me—reading seems to have lost its place in my life. And the same goes for my backup modes of escape: TV and movies. If it was never really about pleasure, but mostly about avoidance, then what am I doing? I don’t want to do that anymore.
But then I am left with a rather steep challenge. If what I want is to recenter my life around joy and pleasure, how do I do that when 1) depression makes it difficult for me to feel pleasure, 2) I am woefully unfamiliar with what brings me pleasure and how to recognize it, and 3) the lifelong habit of gravitating toward cultural consumption out of a mistaken urge toward pleasure is proving to be rather challenging to overcome. It being a pandemic and currently winter doesn’t help either. My avenues for experimentation feel very limited.
Because that’s what I need and crave: a phase of radical experimentation. Thus far, self-exploration has allowed me to shed aspects of myself that were primarily coping strategies or socially imposed. And that has been liberating. But I’m not sure yet what is left of me, and how to nurture it. I’d like to feel more whole, rather than threadbare. I’d like to fill my time with creativity and joy, but I don’t yet know how to do that.
I’m not starting totally from zero, though. There are a few sources of joy that I can rely on, that are not complicated by misuse. Kayaking. Gardening. Swimming. Those are three things that bring me uncomplicated pleasure. Everything else I’m familiar with is thorny. Food? Exercise? Sex? Cultural consumption? Social interaction? Ugh. All so very complicated. And of course, what I feel called to do: writing, making art—very emotionally complicated, and nearly socialized out of me. But I am resisting hard in this area, scratching and clawing my way back to creative experience.
There are also other possibilities for pleasure that remain unexplored. And, on top of this, I know that finding pleasure in doing things, experiencing things, is also about bringing a certain approach, attitude, perspective to them, and not just about finding the exact right things to do or experience. So I do know ways forward: to explore the unfamiliar, and to do the work to make familiar, complicated joys less complicated. It is possible that I will return to reading for enjoyment—if I want to, and if I can shift my approach from one of avoidance to one of curiosity and wonder.
I’ll close with an anecdote: Early in my PhD program, I eagerly met my future dissertation advisor in his office for a chat. He had one of those professor offices that was completely filled with books, but in his case the collection was “organized” in very overwhelming and structurally unsound way. (A fire marshal had clearly never seen this room.) He sat in a broken armchair in the midst of this book madness, wearily scrolling on his laptop. I sat down across from him and his eyes went to my messenger bag, where I had a few pins secured to the front. One of those pins said, “Reading is Sexy.” His eyes lifted to meet mine. “Reading is NOT sexy,” he said in a voice that contained the weariness of decades of scholarly study. It was not dismissive or patronizing. It communicated his despair. This was probably the first in a series of moments that led me NOT to choose the career path he had. I didn’t want to feel that way about reading. But a decade and one PhD later, I kinda do. I still find the sight of an attractive person reading a book, and not just scrolling on their phone, very sexy. But if the act of reading ever felt exciting, alluring, radical, or sexy to me (and I can think of times when it did), that relationship to reading now feels very remote. It’s really no wonder when I consider the mechanical, unnatural reading practices I had to adopt during the PhD—when you’re basically expected to have read and formed a sophisticated and unique theoretical model on every book ever. It’s certainly no wonder if I seem to need a break of a decade or so from reading practice, as I completely reorient myself toward the act. In the meantime, I am hoping that cultural creation, rather than consumption, will help to renew me.
STUDIO 