The hardest part of depression is recovery. Being depressed is actually incredibly easy—and I know you’re not supposed to say that, but it is. By the time recovery is necessary, being depressed has become second nature: wash, rinse, spin, repeat. It’s all down to how long one has lived with a simple deception: this is fine. The subsequent isolation of self is a consequence of this deception. Others on the outside might be less inclined to believe the lie, so they become subject to distraction and schism, just as the self endures. In the end, one has slowly become their own abuser, a link in a chain of trauma forged by the same fraud: this is fine.
Like a bully, trauma must eventually be faced. Trying to work with trauma anonymously perpetuates what’s already known to be untrue, though this knowledge doesn’t halt initial attempts at dialog—that’s how you’ll think of it at least. But it’s all part a budding relationship subservient to trauma. In the absence of confrontation, trauma consumes those around it. Trauma defines the lives and dictates the relationships of all who enforce and invite its presence by allowing it to grow through inaction. Denial begets subjugation as trauma is forced upon others. Life transforms into the lie: this is fine.
“The distinction between protecting the addiction from the truth or the life from the lie is meaningless because it all starts to look the same. The entirety of your existence becomes isolating everything that’s not the addiction from everything that is—including you. Once you can lie to yourself, once you can believe it, the rest is easy: you go away. The addiction is all that’s left.”
I wrote the above about four and a half years ago, in April of 2016. Now I’m struck by how effortless it is to substitute the word addiction with the word depression and have the text still capture the same disparate circumstance. The concept of addiction and depression describing the same thing seems ludicrous, but these concepts—traditionally viewed as distinct—so often exist together the exercise of determining a cause and effect relationship between the two starts to seem just as ludicrous. The resulting behaviour is the same act.
Recovery starts when the lie can no longer be sold. This is fine is revealed to be what it has been all along—incongruous. Life changes. It isn’t fine anymore. It never was. But there is no feeling of liberation from the lie because there’s no feeling left other than numbness. It’s one of the most difficult feelings to bare because of its implications as an emotional fail‐safe. Numbness has taken the place of awareness because awareness has become overwhelmed by the presence of absence.
The worst part of recovery is when your dreams return—because you’ll realize at one point you stopped having them and didn’t notice. And it’s not just the sleeping dreams either. Wonder, hope, anticipation—the waking dreams of inspiration and imagination—they all were disappeared by depression. The part of you that never stopped dreaming returns from oppression in a state of strange elation, a mix of joy, of rage, and of potent sorrow.
You left me there alone.
The next worst part of recovery is when your memories return—because, much like your dreams, at one point you stopped having them and didn’t notice They’re all still there, but depression has placed so much distance between you and them that they feel like the memories of an approaching stranger. There is a certain horror to the experience: the approaching stranger is you.
You left us there alone.
This is the most dangerous part of recovery. The intensity of emotional experience brought on by the building pressure of intense dreams and forgotten memories is becoming unpredictable. Stability is at risk. The need to return to a more familiar numbness is strong and fuelled by shear terror. A growing shockwave is consuming your narrowing path. The only way out is through.
But I don’t know if I’ll survive.
Welcome to the paradox of recovery: you’re not going to survive, not as you are at least—and I know you’re not supposed to say that either.
This was going to be a story about using an airplane to reach the speed of sound, but another story appeared when I started working on it, a fear‐induced cockpit confessional, as it were. It’s the second time this other narrative took hold of something else I’ve been writing. There’s a draft post about my trip into the mountains while I was in Iceland—it detoured in the same way. I was recalling the memories of one the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, yet eventually all my words could muster was darkness. I couldn’t proceed. It felt like I was polluting a serene place with outside noise.
I started this post instead, a purposefully more technical exercise, but the words from the mountains appeared to follow me, materialized in front of me, seemingly out of thin air. This time I let them take shape and watched them take flight. The words hadn’t worked on the ground. They needed to be in the sky, up in the clouds. That’s where they were from. That’s where they lived. It’s no wonder they found me in the mountains.
Through air, the speed of sound is about 1,235 km/h or 767 mph—it fluctuates depending on air temperature. The piston engines used in propeller planes of the late 1930s couldn’t produce the necessary thrust to get anywhere near the speed of sound during level flight. Pilots would perform power dives to compensate: they’d climb as high as they could, rev the engines as high as they could, point the nose of the plane down at an extreme angle, and hope they’d be able to pull out of the dive as the ground inevitably came rushing up. Violent turbulence resulted as the plane approached the speed of sound. The flight control surfaces of the aircraft wouldn’t function as expected. Inputs would suddenly have the opposite effect before swapping back just as suddenly. Corrections were not intuitive and would often make things worse. Sometimes the controls wouldn’t function at all. There were many crashes, injuries, and deaths. It would take nearly another decade of research, development, and experience before the implications of supersonic flight were properly translated into aircraft design.
In the meantime, the idea of a sound barrier had formed in the minds of engineers and pilots alike, and understandably so: what they were undertaking, in retrospect, was an impossible task.
The best they could do with what they had at the time was get dangerously close to the speed of sound. Without getting into too much detail, sound and flight are related: they both result from changes in air pressure. The way air pressure changed around an object moving through it near or at the speed of sound was drastically different than at slower speeds. Without a reliable way to safely maintain the faster speeds needed to understand how drastically different, it was all rather like learning how a parachute worked while falling to Earth without one. More powerful piston engines wouldn’t necessarily help because once the rotating tips of the propeller blades approached the speed of sound, the propeller wouldn’t produce as much thrust as when it was rotating at slower speeds. The historical use of the term sound barrier brought to mind something physically in front of the plane preventing it from reaching the speed of sound, and looking back now there actually was: the propeller itself.
It wasn’t until the development of the jet engine that planes could easily approach—and critically, exceed—the speed of sound. Power dives were no longer necessary. Meaningful data collection could occur during sustained and level flight. Aircraft design rapidly evolved in turn. The shapes of the wing and body were altered. New control systems were developed. Flights of prototype designs revealed the increasingly unstable nature of the aircraft as it approached the speed of sound would dissipate once the speed of sound was exceeded. The key was not to linger near or at the speed of sound itself, but to advanced past it. Subsequent designs further rendered the transition from subsonic to supersonic flight a nonevent, barely noticeable to pilot and eventually passenger.
I didn’t know this when I was up in the mountains back in Iceland, but I wasn’t far from a place called Krýsuvíkurskóli—or Krýsuvík School in English. Proposed in 1967, and in connection with the Church of Iceland, the building was originally to be used as a boarding school for teenage children who did not “fit in” with their peers. Isolation was the contemporary approach to treatment; however, upon completion of the project, as the website notes, it became clear that people’s ideas about upbringing and schooling had changed. Investigation, adaptation, and integration were now the preferred approach, so a building out in the middle of nowhere capable of housing about 60 people was no longer necessary. It sat vacant for years.
Falling into ill‐repair through disuse, the building was later sold to a group who refurbished the structure. Now it’s used to support young adults recovering from the trauma of drug and alcohol addiction. The building’s location surrounded by the natural world is combined with progressive therapy and compassion. The facility has one of the highest success rates in Iceland.
And I also didn’t know this, but I ended up getting a picture of the building as part of a mountain view when I was leaving the area.
At the time I assumed it was one of the support buildings for the many power plants found throughout Iceland’s landscapes. And thinking about it now, I suppose it still is.
What happened? Where am I?
You’re okay. You’re on the other side of the shockwave.
And you are something new. Something improved. Something better. But also—still you. The turbulence is fading and things are settling. It’s quieter now—peaceful by comparison. Everything is familiar, but everything is a little different at the same time, as if there’s space where there wasn’t before. The sky is filled with good air, and there’s nothing in front of you. You can trust your craft again. The noise and disruption that’s past can no longer keep up, can no longer catch you. Keep pushing the throttle forward.
Almost there…
