give way to madness

indulging the drama of melancholy, nightgown optional

I planned to write this winter.

Is there a more romantic way to spend these blustery months than curling up with a cup of coffee, your back to a snow-covered window pane, pulling words from the stored-up places in your soul and crafting them into something like art? I’m under contract to write another book, after all. If my sun-craving skin is forced indoors anyway, might as well churn out work. Might as well be productive.

But winter, bless her soul, had other plans for me. Winter couldn’t care less about productivity. Winter wants your heart on a platter.

This is how I found myself unable to write a single word since Christmas and wading through an inconvenient depressive spell. But dammit if I haven’t learned a book of things about myself. Dammit if it isn’t for the best.

I’ve spent my entire adult life resisting these dips into depression. They have always been faithful to pay me visits, but I take my Zoloft and I see my therapist and for the most part I’m able to stave off any degree of intensity. I’m a mother, after all, and a spouse to someone prone to depression himself. I can’t give way to madness. Who has the time?

But here’s where I went wrong this go around: I started listening to Lana Del Rey. And the first time I heard “I’ve been tearing around in my fucking nightgown / 24-7 Sylvia Plath / writing in blood on the walls / ‘cause the ink don’t work in my notepad” it was a done deal. This was my entire personality now.

First thing I did was buy a nightgown, one of those dramatic vintage fake silk and lace ones you pay a lot for on Etsy but I found in our local thrift store for a few bucks. It’s several sizes too big and I can’t get the weird smell out, but that just adds to the despondency of it all.

I’m obsessed with it.

Next thing I did was buy a copy of The Bell Jar. I’d never read it. I mostly loved it. More on that another time. Point is, I’m into Sylvia Plath now.

I’m not yet writing in blood on the walls.

But I’m taking daily walks in the woods, usually in waking hours but sometimes at night. The trees are snowless these days, which is odd for February, and the stark bare branches feel appropriate. I’m playing records and drinking whiskey (not much, don’t worry) and lighting candles just to sit and watch them burn. I’m smearing ashes on my children for the start of Lent. I’m crying at the longing of love.

When I started writing a book on mystics, I made a list of the six women I wanted to amplify. Most of them I knew a good bit about already, but two — Margery Kempe and Catherine of Siena — I knew almost nothing of. Turns out, they are the “crazy” ones. Turns out, they are my favorites. They were unafraid and unashamed of the most opaque parts of themselves. They lived with passion, embracing not just the joyful and the beautiful, but the grotesque, the morbid, the bleak. They opened themselves to everything. They were fully alive, even — and this is important I think — even if they weren’t always happy. They wanted it all.

I want it all too.

So this winter, I think I’ll continue to indulge the drama of my melancholy. I’ll ask questions about what it’s pointing to; I’ll let it show me what I’m longing for. I won’t avoid it out of fear of what I might meet in the dark, for I suspect I will very likely meet myself.