"The Anatomy of Melancholy" by Jackie Hedeman
There is a song. I first heard it on The Good Wife. Other Lives’ “Dust Bowl III.” The lyrics are, “Is there any way, to get this weight off my skin and find another one?” One of my most vivid recollections of 2012 is a sensation I can remember but can no longer access: feeling those lyrics like a heartbeat at the back of my skull.
There is a wall. Charcoal. Museum-grade shadows. On it, the words, “Is it possible that you succeeded in climbing out of that awful abyss?” I snapped a picture of the wall in 2015, standing in the Museum of London, in the first room of a Sherlock Holmes exhibition. I was also standing at the edge of an abyss. The character of my abyss was complex in ways I am still unpacking. Hopefully it is enough to say that I doubted myself—my value, my identity—in ways both big and small. When I was out with friends I buzzed with anxiety, craved the muffled quiet of my one-bedroom apartment. In the apartment, I turned immediately to endless YouTube videos to drown out the silence. I felt offstage in someone else’s life, forgotten until called upon, always available, never my own woman.
The origin of the quote, Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Empty House,” is a reprieve from grief. The reprieve is not uncomplicated. To feel relief, Dr. Watson must first acknowledge how deeply he felt Sherlock Holmes’ absence when he was presumed dead.
I gripped him by the arms. “Holmes!” I cried. “Is it really you? Can it indeed be that you are alive? Is it possible that you succeeded in climbing out of that awful abyss?”
There is a movie soundtrack. Capote, composed by Mychael Danna, is nowhere to be found on Spotify, and is therefore the sole reason I hang on to my ancient iTunes collection with its albums lifted from public library CDs. Almost a year after my visit to the Museum of London, I took Amtrak from Chicago to Lawrence, Kansas, my face pressed to the window. It was winter, so everything was grey and brown, then just black with far-off farmhouse lights. I listened to the Capote on loop, its melancholy beauty reflected in the passing fields.
Maybe it was the rhythm of how the train moved like a drum line, or people marching in step, or being rocked to sleep. Maybe it was how the train slid through towns I would never see from the highway. Whatever the reason, sitting on the train I felt really, really Midwestern. Sad and happy and alone and proud of the whole place, even the parts of it I can’t exactly claim.
From my apartment, the whistle of the train is the perfect volume, even in summer with the windows open. Even in winter with the windows closed and the heat on. When the air is still, you can hear the thud of the wheels.
I have vivid memories of lying in bed in my childhood home in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois and hearing the train. I always envisioned it running along the train tracks on North Prospect, by the bar called the Ice House and on out of town, when of course the sounds came from the much closer tracks separating my part of town from the university, from the power plant, from the other half of our twin micro-cities. I passed under those tracks every day on my way to high school. At night, I tried to sleep, stomach pressed to the mattress, eyes squeezed shut and Capote playing on my brand new iPod, the train whistle cutting through it all.
Or maybe it was summer, and the windows were open, the box fan humming. I would have tiptoed in from a night with friends home for the summer or cooling their heels before leaving for college. There were eighteen years worth of summer nights but I remember those last ones best: the stillness of the air, the paint chipping on my windowsill, the train, the suspicion that no one would ever know me as well as these people knew me.
There is a feeling like the liquid at the top of an overfilled glass, taut and quivering. I think of that feeling as my feeling, my go-to. In 2016, at the dawn of a new age, my therapist first said the word “anxiety” and gave me permission to feel this feeling, despite the fact that deep down I suspected I had no right to it. That permission freed me, with time, to begin the difficult process of explaining myself. (I will always be trying to explain myself.)
Out to breakfast in Yokohama with my friend Tanya, under-slept and vibrating with panic, I didn’t try to push through it; I told her that I had to leave. She gave me her key, gave me space, stayed to pay the bill, and later met me back in her bedroom where I was staring fixedly at a computer screen, trying to steer myself back to shore. She sat on her bed and read until I was ready to pick the day back up. It was a simple thing, but she is still one of the only people to have ever seen me like that, unvarnished.
Allie Brosch put it best in Hyperbole and a Half: “How do you make the face for ‘yay’? Am I doing it? I hope I’m doing it.”
There is a book that has been sitting next to my bed for nearly ten years. I bought it in 2012 and I have yet to crack the spine in any meaningful way and in this I am not alone. First published in 1621 and ultimately running over 900 pages, The Anatomy of Melancholy proposed to be the definitive textbook for what we now sometimes call depression. Burton, an Oxford scholar, combed science, religion, literature, philosophy, and popular wisdom to build his behemoth. “I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy,” Burton writes in his introduction. Later, he writes:
Generally thus much we may conclude of melancholy; that it is most pleasant at first, I say, mentis gratissimus error, a most delightsome humor, to be alone, dwell alone, walk alone, meditate, lie in bed whole days, dreaming awake as it were, and frame a thousand fantastical imaginations unto themselves.
I know Burton wrote these things because I read them on the internet, verified them on the internet, despite the book sitting at my elbow, propping up my alarm clock. I bought The Anatomy of Melancholy because “Dust Bowl III” called and something in me answered. The presence of the book comforted me. It was a promise of some future project, because what would I be doing with a book like that if not embarking on some elaborate erasure poem or my-year-in-melancholy essay? Burton’s book was a portal to the future. That or it was unexploded ordnance.
Earlier this year I logged into Zoom therapy and started crying almost immediately. “I don’t know why I’m crying,” I wept, watching my face in its tiny square go red and crinkle up. “I’m just so annoyed with everyone all the time and I hate being that way.”
“Irritability can be a symptom of depression,” said my therapist.
And I knew they went hand in hand, my feeling and this feeling, and I knew that sometimes, every once in a while, the life drained out of me like I was already at the bottom of an abyss, but I still thought, like I’d never heard the word before, oh. Like I hadn’t been sleeping with The Anatomy of Melancholy next to my bed, unopened, for a decade.
When I met up with Tanya again, after years of being unable to see each other in person, I tried to tell her this story, but I stumbled over the words. How to explain the sheer duh of the anvil hitting my head? How to explain that I still don’t know if this is an experience I can claim. If it has mostly happened in empty rooms, in train cars, with my face pressed to the glass, has it happened? Am I making the face for depression?
“Oh, Jackie,” said Tanya, and it was like she had given me the key to her quiet apartment again.
There are people waiting for us where it’s safe.
Elsewhere in the Sherlock Holmes canon, Holmes forbids Watson from wading into danger alongside him. “You are not coming,” Holmes says. Watson does not miss a beat. “Then you are not going.”
I am thinking about this, watching from my window as people who have spent the past year moving away from each other out of care finally move closer. They throw their arms around each other and hold on.
Jackie Hedeman (she/her) received her MFA from The Ohio State University and her BA from Princeton University. Her writing has appeared in Autostraddle, The Best American Travel Writing 2017, Electric Literature, Fugue, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat Fellow and a Charlotte Street Foundation 2019-2021 Studio Resident. With Molly Olguín, she is the co-creator of The Pasithea Powder, a scripted audio drama.
