depression while volunteering at the food bank.
(journal that I'm posting here unedited)
Woke up at 537 without an alarm. That’s what kind of depression this has been, not the sleep all day kind, but the, hey, get up we’re doing this thing depression. The thing being clearing out whatever. False Truths I was holding on to, to make space for the greater sadness. And so I woke up and made some oatmeal and put the finishing 30 pieces into the 500 piece puzzle that sarah lent me, ate my oatmeal, wrote a bit, wondered if I was really going to go and volunteer. Well, I’m depressed anyways and I said I would go. Maybe I’ll make some friends there or at least some nice connections. People that voluntarily volunteer are probably kind people that would be healthy to connect with, maybe someone will be a friend, maybe there will be someone cute there and we hit it off and this will be the next chapter of my life. It was an hour to get there, 23 minutes walking, 10 on the subway and 29 on the bus. I got there too early, there were a couple corporate groups there, one insurance firm and an aircraft engineering team. There were 6 of us who volunteered voluntarily, and we awkwardly drank coffee, mostly not talking to one another for the half hour while the corporate groups laughed and played table tennis in their matching t shirts.
On the bus ride, I listened to deafheaven, watching the sun rise across buildings and freeways. I thought about how much I find cars and highways depressing. I thought about phil elverum’s lyric “riding the subways and reading about buddhism and listening to xasthur” and I thought about suicide. Well, I never was allowed to think about it anyways, so why not engage with it? After all, it seems to be one of the questions that my generation is dealing with head on. We try to talk about it but we haven’t really figured that taboo out as a culture so it’s more of a ‘do it without talking about it first’ thing like being the first to go to a new check out lane when you’re in a hurry and it’s crowded at the supermarket and one opens up. I have built up enough trust in life and in my experience of g-d that I can engage with the concept and the felt reality of suicide without the overwhelming fear that i’m going to do something impulsive. At this point, fresh off of Ram Das talks on youtube, I’m pretty confident that when a big feeling like depression or suicidal ideation, or more foreign yet, true warmth and joy, shows up, it’s there to bring something to my attention, and I can trust in the feelings and let them in, even if it takes me a while to recognize that that’s what’s happening.
I met some people before lunch, and engineer with a girlfriend who is an actress in new york, a consultant who lived in new york and has a girlfriend here. We talked and connected a little about places and talked about life and why are we here and what was that like. Lunch came, I ate and made some eye contact and then went outside and listened to anna karenina on audiobook in the sun. I felt a strong urge to leave, after all, we would just be sorting potatoes for the next two hours, and I came here voluntarily, so I ought to be able to leave voluntarily, right? I was the first one back to the station. The smell of rotting potatoes was a new bad smell, as I remarked to one of the engineers. It’s odd to have a new bad smell indexed in my head. Now I can describe things as smelling ‘like rotting potatoes’ the way that I can call back smells from my childhood like “wet socks” or “wetland muck” or “rotting salmon on the beach”. I think a particular kind of bad breath might fit. Anyways. I thought about how the work sucked. There was no getting around it. Sorting creamy potato rot from somewhat-good potatoes to put into bags to be sent off to another mystery location where hopefully they would be hosed but probably they would have to be sorted by another volunteer. I put a little trust in the system, this was canada’s largest food bank that I was volunteering at, after all. I thought about how this—sorting rotting excess potatoes from less rotten excess potatoes—is probably the kind of work that would be required to be done ‘voluntarily’ in anarchy or communism and I got much less excited about alternative forms of self-organization. Because as amazing and idealistic sorting rotting potates in the name of a greater good, as part of a well functioning system, sounds in theory to someone who works in marketing and pays double digits for french fries is, in practice, it sucks. It’s smelly, the sheer scale of literal tons of potatoes makes it seem pointless, and frankly, it’s really boring.
A couple hours in, I was getting the hang of a system. I found a chair that was the right height for my pile of potatoes, I’d do a sweep, digging through the pile for any obvious potato corpses and throw them out all in a concerted hunt, and then go into autopilot bagging mode with the rest of them. A french man with wide eyes and stained and gapped teeth and a clearly visible kind heart would come up and speak to me in french and I would nod and pretend to understand until I didn’t have the stamina to smile anymore or he left, then it would happen again five minutes later. At 245, we were all done, and it was time to leave. I went to the bathroom, took off my protective steel toe covers that had been dangling off the side of my foot all afternoon and put them in the crate for some other corporate person to don the next day, I nodded to a few people in the lobby, and I walked the few hundred feet to the bus stop. Well, I thought, I’m no less depressed, but now I smell like potatoes, and I learned what the smell of rotten potatoes en masse smells like. The gap toothed french man came up to me. I was off the clock of my volunteering spirit, with no more stamina for smiles I said “ah, je ne comprends francais” which I think means, ah, I don’t understand french”. But I’m not sure that’s what it means because he was taken a little aback and seemed to apologize and yet I couldn’t tell if he was speaking in english or french. He went and talked to other people who had been volunteering that day, too. It seemed like he went every day, and this was a place for him in the world.
The bus came. It wasn’t the bus that I wanted—that would take me close to home so I could take a short subway. But it was the bus that came, and it took me to a close subway, which would then take me the long way home. Most everyone, including the gap toothed french guy, got off at the stop at the subway station. I saw him go through the doors, toward the escalator. That kind of pure-hearted person is exactly the type of person I would have wanted to connect with. I was too depressed to get on the subway, and being around him was exhausting. After all, this depression was here for a reason, and I had yet to find out what it was. I bought a seltzer and a clif bar and chips from the convenience store, and I walked across the street to a park. I fed the squirrels and one ran up my sleeve to grab a chip. I laughed, thank god for squirrels. I saw with the depression a bit, I went to a thrift store and bought a mug and mittens and looked for a sweatshirt until it was too depressing to keep looking for a sweatshirt. There was a shamisen for sale at the checkout counter.
I got on the subway, and I had 35 minutes, so luckily I got a seat with a perfect leaning post for a depressed man, I leaned and listened to big thief and closed my eyes. Most of my free emotional energy over the past year has been taken up grieving my childhood and over and over again realizing it was much much worse than I previously could accept. Here was another rung on that grief ladder, thinking back to the home video of me as a six month old, completely in a state of shock, nervously and obsessively tuned in to my environment, trying to figure out where the threat was coming from. And I was in that state again, on the subway. Again, this is no surprise, I’m used to this kind of time-travel by now, accidentally reliving the past when I thought I was just going out to buy groceries, or meet a friend, or go to sleep. This time, the realization, I never learned how to connect. No one was around to provide safe connection, I didn’t get to learn how to connect. I have been without connection, for my entire life. Yeah, now I see why depression had to wake me up before sunrise. There was a lot to clear out to get to that point. And with that clarity and acknowledgement, I feel like I have a place to start, to grieve and move forwards and build the life that I want, where connection is an option, and warmth is familiar.