A Holy Wanting

A reflection and poem on depression and wanting

Content warning: This post speaks openly about depression. Please skip it if such content is detrimental to your mental health. Take care of yourself and much love to you all.

Last week I couldn’t bring myself to hardly anything. I called it overwhelm then exhaustion then sadness. It took me a while to see the fog for what it was. 

When depression visits me, it coaxes me under with a soft hand. I forget its deception until I’m already two feet underwater, suspended in a muffled nothingness. It’s not a feeling of panicked drowning but rather one of blue, blue grief, of being submerged yet untethered, numbed past all recognition of the self. During these episodes, all my senses dull to shadows of themselves. I lose appetite and vigor and lust and everything and anything that hints toward life and aliveness. Sleep becomes a constant siren song, my muscles groaning from the simple work of holding my body awake. It’s a lull so complete that I sometimes wonder, in the precise pinpoint moment of depression’s highest crest, whether I’ll ever move again, blink awake, twitch a finger, say a word. 

The most telltale sign of depression coming upon me is the disappearance of my desire. On my truest days, my want bleeds and bleeds until it soaks through every corner. Each taste of the sour and gaze into the forest and word written true, every brush of my lover and crackle of the fire and rise of dough are only swallows that awaken new thirst, greater thirst.

I weep often to know that, even with the longest, luckiest life possible, I will never have enough time to read every word, touch every tree, sink into every food, listen to every howl, admire every face throughout our world, this one fraught planet among thousands in our one galaxy among billions. 

It is never enough and yet—

When I am in the belly of depression for long enough, I want nothing. Desire departs so completely that not even a salted lemon on the tongue can jolt it awake. It is a terror to feel the want seeping away from me, to trail my hands through its disappearing streams without any strength to call it back. Sometimes I can’t even want the posture of wanting back.

For a long while, I was ashamed of my wanting. Under the theology of crucifying the flesh and its desires, I punished myself for it. I berated my body and became militant in my discipline to strip it clean and transcend it. I knew my desire to be bad but even worse was the object of it—the fallen world with all its fallen, already passing, already doomed inhabitants and creations. I wanted so desperately to be like every other believer and yearn only for the after but it was the one tenant of Christian faith I could never quite crush myself into, not even when I was at my most devoted. No matter how much I prayed and fasted or punished and repented, my want for eternity never came close to my want for the here and now. 

Today, out from under that theology, I can see my desire for the rescue it has always been. It is the saving grace that pulls me back up again and again after depression has lulled me under. Wanting keeps me alive, and I want so much to be alive. For that, I call the wanting holy. 

***

Salt Lick
I learned it on the front steps, 
in the sun, my brother and I 
eating our way through jars of sour 
pickles swiped from the basement. 
We were nothing but small hands 
digging for more, our numb white lips 
later telling on our greed. 

I still know nothing of restraint. 

I sizzle my tongue on the too 
hot, the too sour, the too sweet,
watch it peel in the mirror, 
every day trying to taste and see 
what good is still left here. 

I know I will be the old creature begging for more 
salt at every table, tastebuds burned past tasting. 
But I have eaten salt from the palm since I was young. 
That small death coming for me 
even now will not take hold so easily. 

Until I am nothing, I will sink 
my teeth into the bitter of this life,
rip from it the rind 
to taste the fallen and see that it is good.