Intro for The Long Walk

These statistics are taken from a 2002 report by The National Institute of Mental Health :

Approximately 18.8 million American adults, or about 9.5 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older in a given year, have a depressive disorder.

Nearly twice as many women (12.0 percent) as men (6.6 percent) are affected by a depressive disorder each year. These figures translate to 12.4 million women and 6.4 million men in the U.S.

Depressive disorders may be appearing earlier in life in people born in recent decades compared to the past.

Most of the pieces in this show deal with our physical bodies; the stereotypes, threats, and trials that plague woman every day. However, my next piece is about a disease that affects our mental and spiritual health. Depression, while it exists among males, is more common in women. Depression is a concern for woman just as breast cancer, rape, and genital mutilation are. The unfortunate thing about this disease is that becaue it afflicts our minds, most people do not deal with it as the often life threatning illness that it is. Those who are diagnosed with it are often treated as if they are a spoiled child, trying to get attention by crying wolf. Usually, instead of assesing what type of help they need, people simply have pills thrown at them as a primary, cure-all step as if they will fix everything. In my experience, pills, while they may help a portion of the population that deal with this illness, do no help everyone. Despite what pharmisutical companies would have us believe, anti-depressants do not make you happier, they merely numb the pain; morphine for the soul, if you will. You become less depressed because you become unable to feel anything at all; your demons are subdued, but as a last slap they take all of your joy and your ambition along with them. We are giving birth to a nation of emotional zombies, instead of trying to find a better solution to the problem. Throwing pills at a problem will not make it go away. I, personally, have known more people who have made suicide attempts while on anti-depressants than those who refused to seek medical help for their depression.

The title of my piece, The Long Walk, is an allusion to a scene from Sylvia Plath's novel "The Bell Jar" which is about a young woman named Ester who is dealing with depression and suicide in the sixties. In one chapter, she writes her mother a note telling her that she has gone for "a long walk" before taking a bottle of pills and going to her basement to die. The moral of her story is that the pills did not help her; she only became better and beat her depression through therapy. I am not suggesting that there is one correct answer for every person who is struck with depression. All I am saying is that we, as a society, need to do more research on the subject to find alternate methods of coping.

I based this on my own personal experiences as well as those of my friends and partners. I want to dedicate this poem to everyone who has been there before, whether you made it back or not.

The Long Walk

Can you remember how your demons
Forced you to the floor?
Forced you to crawl on your
hands and knees?
Or perhaps you could only screech
by that point
Scream blindly into the piles
of sand and road salt
that had acculumlated over the winter
Incoherant babbling
Like speaking in tongues
Kneeling at the alter in your head
Praying to every god
(yet not believeing in any god at all)
That you'll make it to see daylight.

Ragged nails tear your arms to shreads
Angry, twisted wealts left
as a testamony to your trials
Teeth marks mar your palms,
Clumps of hair entwined in your
grasping hands.

Desperate to think of
how many lives will be destroyed
when they find you:
Bleeding, bloated, vomit-soaked
Ash, ash
Cold, glassy, grey.

And if you're one of the fortunate ones
They catch you.
Find you wailing,
Or catch sight of the scars

The come the little, Stepford Wife
Good Housekeeping, white picket fense
And two-point-four children pills.

You become a narcotic turkey
Stuffed with uppers,
downers
Shot through with anything
but what you really need:

Compassion
Expression
Empathy
Words

Chanined and beaten
into submission
And the mosters never truly leave
they merely wait in the corners
until you are fully weak
perhaps from the realization
That you only mimic joy
Stoned into a blissful state of
apathy.

And all I could ever give to the world
were the bits and pieces
of a woman I could never become.

This is the price you pay to live
in the society that we have created together.

I was always a mess...