Can you write about depression and anxiety in the style of Jacob Geller - can you weave personal reflection, historical and artistic analysis, and philosophical inquiry into a narrative structure that is emotionally engaging and intellectually stimulating and give the piece an interesting and quirky title?
"A Room Made of Fog: Wandering the Mind’s Dark Hallways"
I once spent an afternoon staring at a clock that didn’t move. It wasn’t broken. Time, I suppose, was passing just fine, but I felt no connection to it. The second hand crawled, or maybe it stopped altogether; I couldn’t be sure. This is one of the things depression does. It turns even certainty—time, progress, life—into something distant and unreal. Moments collapse into a single, suffocating present, a room with no windows and no exit.
Imagine standing in a room that’s too dim to fully make out the details. You know the walls are there, but you can’t quite see them; there’s a kind of oppressive weight in the air that makes breathing harder, as though the atmosphere itself is dense with uncertainty. You don’t know how long you’ve been there, or how long you’ll stay. It’s the sensation of time stretching on without resolution—an unending present that pulls you in but offers no clear way forward. This room is where depression and anxiety meet. We live in a world that tends to divide emotions into neat categories—sadness, fear, worry, joy—but the mind rarely obeys such tidy rules. Depression and anxiety, often seen as distinct, are in many ways two sides of the same coin. They bleed into one another, creating a haze of distress that is difficult to untangle. For some, depression is the pervasive fog, while anxiety is the panic that pulses in the background; for others, it’s a cycle of back-and-forth—feeling utterly exhausted and overwhelmed by the weight of existence, only to be jolted awake by waves of fearful anticipation.
Depression, like anxiety, warps experience. It takes something so vast and elemental—time, fear, hope—and makes it feel unbearably small, pressing it into the mind until it’s heavy, jagged, and inescapable. Woolf, Styron, Munch—they’ve all stood in this room. Each of them has tried to sketch its outlines, to make sense of its walls. And I have often found myself wandering among their words and images, looking for a map.
The Fog of the Everyday: When the Familiar Becomes Strange
Depression is often described as a fog, but it’s not the kind that drifts gently through a forest. It’s the London smog of 1952, when soot and smoke grew so thick that people couldn’t see their own feet. In less than a week, thousands died of suffocation. Depression suffocates in a similar way—not by attacking outright, but by dulling, darkening, and filling the mind until the world is unrecognizable. You still exist in it, but it’s as though you’re seeing life through warped glass, each shape distorted, every light dimmed.
William Styron’s memoir Darkness Visible offers a harrowing portrayal of depression as a collapse of selfhood, where “the gray drizzle of horror” becomes inescapable. Depression isn’t just a feeling—it’s a state where light, meaning, and sensation drain from existence. The future is not bleak; it’s nonexistent. Styron recounts how the most ordinary things—sunlight, a beloved piece of music—became unbearable weights when he fell into a deep depression. It’s a common experience: the familiar becomes alien.
I remember standing in my kitchen once, staring at the steam rising from a cup of tea, feeling as though I’d never seen anything so strange, or so empty. It wasn’t sadness. It was vacancy. The familiar becoming alien in this way is less common.
Art, paradoxically, can illuminate such a vacancy. Edvard Munch’s The Scream isn’t about terror in the face of some external horror; it’s about the terror that lives within—a figure trapped in the abyss of their own mind. The swirling sky above is a chaos that mirrors anxiety’s endless possibilities, while the bridge and figure below are fixed, unable to escape the soundless howl.
Anxiety as Architecture: The Mind in Overdrive
If depression is fog, anxiety is architecture. It constructs elaborate cathedrals of fear, every pillar a “what if,” every arch a possible disaster. It’s a house of cards built entirely from worst-case scenarios, and even as you try to shore up its walls with logic, you feel it trembling. It’s exhausting. You’re always rebuilding, always running calculations about things that will probably never happen, but might.
In The Lonely City, Olivia Laing writes of how isolation feeds this architecture of anxiety. Living alone in New York, she found herself consumed by her own thoughts, each one reinforcing the next, until even the smallest interactions—buying groceries, making eye contact with a stranger—felt monumental, she describes anxiety as a constant hum of dread that transforms even mundane interactions into trials of survival. Anxiety is a thief of ease. It steals the simple pleasures of the everyday, replacing them with constant vigilance.
Loneliness, she writes, “grows from the outside in,” wrapping itself around your thoughts until it becomes impossible to separate fear from reality.
Laing’s reflections are echoed in Munch’s lesser-known painting Anxiety, where a crowd of distorted, hollow-eyed figures huddles together. They stand on the same bridge as The Scream's solitary figure, but their presence doesn’t ease the fear. Anxiety, like depression, is profoundly isolating even in a crowd. It convinces you that connection is dangerous, that reaching out will bring judgment or rejection.
Time Warped: Depression and the Philosophy of the Absurd
Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus famously explores the absurdity of human existence—the tension between our desire for meaning and a universe that offers none. Depression amplifies this absurdity until it becomes unbearable. Sisyphus, condemned to roll his boulder up a hill for eternity, at least has a clear task. Depression steals even that. The boulder becomes a weight you cannot lift, and the hill disappears altogether, leaving you stuck at the bottom with no reason to move.
Yet Camus insists that Sisyphus can be imagined as happy. In his rebellion against the absurd, in his continued pushing despite its futility, there is a kind of defiant freedom. This is where anxiety complicates things. It fills the empty spaces that depression creates, convincing you that you’re not doing enough, that if you just think harder or plan better, you can avoid catastrophe. But there’s no winning against the absurd. It exists beyond strategy.
Finding Light in the Dark: Glimmers of Escape
Mary Oliver, in her poem Wild Geese, writes:
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”
Her words are a quiet defiance against the self-punishment anxiety demands. They offer permission to exist as you are, flawed and frightened, but alive nonetheless.
The Power of Art and Storytelling
When I read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, I recognized my own thoughts mirrored in its pages. Woolf’s characters move through London’s bustling streets, but their minds are consumed by memories, fears, and half-formed ideas. Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran haunted by trauma, feels as though life is slipping away from him even as it surrounds him. His anguish is raw, his mind a battlefield where silence and terror collide. Woolf, who herself battled lifelong mental illness, once described her own experience of depression as “a darkness…lying in a spoon.” It was heavy, impossible to escape, yet horrifyingly mundane. The waves of her prose reflect how depression blurs time into a single, continuous moment, while anxiety fractures it into infinite, catastrophic possibilities. David Foster Wallace, in his famous Kenyon College commencement speech, described the mind as “an excellent servant but a terrible master.” In Infinite Jest, his depiction of depression as “the Great White Shark of pain” is as visceral as it is inescapable. The novel is filled with characters who loop endlessly through their thoughts, caught in a feedback system where every attempt to think their way out only deepens the trap. This is the cruel trick of both depression and anxiety: they masquerade as rational processes, convincing you that if you just analyze enough, you can find a way through. But the labyrinth has no exit. Depression tells you there’s no point in trying. Anxiety insists you haven’t tried hard enough.
In a culture that values productivity, progress, and self-sufficiency, depression and anxiety thrive in the cracks. There’s the silence of depression, which isolates you in a world where everything feels out of reach, and the silence of anxiety, which keeps you from connection and compassion, afraid that revealing your inner turmoil will make it worse. Both create a sense of disconnection, as though you are not quite part of the world around you. Depression makes you feel invisible, while anxiety makes you afraid of being seen at all.
This is compounded by the way our culture tends to romanticize the idea of mental illness. “The tortured artist,” the “deep thinker” who struggles with existential darkness—these images make it easier to internalize suffering, to believe that there is something noble or even productive in your pain. But it also distorts the reality of depression and anxiety, suggesting that the pain is something to be endured in silence or even celebrated. This dichotomy between social narratives and lived experience creates a subtle tension, where the person suffering is expected to function as they once did, even when the very tools of functionality—motivation, clarity of thought, focus—seem beyond their grasp.
And yet, although art doesn’t offer easy solutions to depression and anxiety—it can’t fix the mind’s labyrinth or clear the fog—it does offer a kind of companionship, a reminder that the room you’re trapped in isn’t entirely yours. Others have been there. Others have mapped its contours. And sometimes, in their words, their paintings, their music, you find a crack in the wall, a sliver of light that reminds you the fog isn’t forever.
It’s strange, isn’t it? How we can be so utterly alone and yet so profoundly connected by our loneliness. In this way, art becomes a lifeline, not by pulling us out of the dark, but by teaching us how to sit with it—how to feel its weight without being crushed. It offers an acknowledgment that there is meaning in the struggle itself, that there is a glimmer of connection, of understanding. The clock still ticks, whether we see it or not. And sometimes, even in the stillest moments, that ticking carries us forward.
ChatGPT said:
Yes, I must clarify: the attribution of the metaphor "a darkness…lying in a spoon" to Virginia Woolf is not a genuine quotation from her works. If I used such a phrase without verification, it would be inaccurate and should not be presented as a real quote.
No comments:
Post a Comment