I went to see "A Star is Born" in the hopes of having a good cry.
I went to a counsellor the same day.
Not a drop.
I did that thing of playing chicken with the counsellor when she went silent for ages. I thought I was going to get the giggles, so I ended up filling the space. But I should have held my nerve.
It is very hard to go to counselling without thinking of Tony Soprano.*
I was never much of a crier when I was little. I remember watching TV with a relative once (non-Irish) who started sobbing away at a made-for-TV movie, and I was gobsmacked at the shamelessness of it. Even more incredibly, as the credits came up, she just blew her nose, wiped her face and switched over to Wheel of Fortune. I couldn't understand how such heartfelt emotion could be switched on and off. If I had reached the point of tears, that usually meant I was facing down deep disconsolate pain and my inner angst had burst out of my nail-digging fist. It would evolve into a wailing and a shuddering and a sickupping mess. It wasn't just something that could come upon me like a sneeze or a giggle, out it pops and you move on, without analysing deeply the whats and whys.
Everyone knows that this all changes when you become pregnant or have children. The floodgates open, the heart creaks at any tiny hint of something small being hurt or harmed, and the tears leak like my kitchen ceiling. It's enjoyable and liberating and I absolutely loved going to see Mamma Mia in the Mums 'n' Babies cinema club and soaking the Baby Bjorn with my tears as well as the baby's drool.
There is something very therapeutic about a good cry. But Bradley and Gaga didn't do it for me. And I find I am boring myself, these days, so pouring my heart out to the kindly therapist totally failed on the lacrimation front. I could think about my children being motherless, that is always a shoo-in for producing a good salty flow, but I'm not a total masochist.
I was reading Sara Baume's "A Line Made By Walking", in which a young woman who is suffering an emotional wobble returns home to live in her dead grandmother's house. She describes lying with her face on the carpet for hours. That's how I feel on my down days. This insight I am getting (only intermittently, thankfully) into the world of depression is revelatory. It's the absence of feeling, the vacuum of emotion, that is most disturbing. Sadness, heartbreak, desolation - they would all be an improvement on the black-hole-ness. Despite many years of speaking to people with low mood, I always assumed there were strong feelings involved - raw emotion, deep hurt. Now I realise that those would be a relief, a sign that you were still able to feel and experience life, rather than just existing in this detached nothingness. The ability to have a good cry is the very thing that depression takes away from you.
I am grateful for the fact that my visits to the dark places are brief. I think my impatience is serving me well here; boring as I am when I'm content, it's a far sight better than the Father Stone I become when I'm feeling low. So my subconscious self decides to snap out of it, to change the channel.
We went to see The Grinch the following week.
The tears flowed.
*{To be fair to the counsellor, in addition to the usual dying/not-dying dilemma that I bring, this time I had the extra baggage of Doing Work on the House. She just threw her hands in the air at that stage. Someone who is mid-renovations cannot be helped by conventional psychotherapy. And if you're living in the house at the same time? Well then you pretty much deserve all the misery. There is no way to keep positive and chirpy when every day starts with the rat-tat-tat of three burly builders dragging a load of rubble into your kitchen, before you've had your first sip of tea. Lovely fellas they are, but Christ I will be happy to see the back of them}
