Post by HLTD50 student Peppermint_Lattes
Image of Norman Rockwell’s “Bully Before” (1921). The pendant image, “Bully After,” develops this narrative.
(Content warning: this post includes discussion of suicidal ideation as represented in poetry. Take care.)
Depression is strange: it can hit you like a haymaker. I’ve dealt with it myself in times where I had no control over anything else. That’s when depression starts to settle in for me and that’s when I begin to question the purpose of life and whether or not it’s worth living.
I’ve dealt with depression in other people, especially those who lack social support in their lives or have had family members who’ve died. I’ve learned about depression affecting people with low socioeconomic status whose history of colonialism have caused them to turn to substance abuse as an outlet. No matter who you are in this world, depression is something waiting on the other side of life: watching, ready to envelop you into a stream of consciousness that’ll turn your way of thinking upside down.
That’s exactly what A MAD Fold-in Poem by Daniel Scott Tysdal discusses—depression. (Prof’s note: For more background on what a MAD Fold-in is, click here.) This poem examines the ways in which depression affects a person physically, emotionally and mentally, by placing depression outside, as its own entity, as a third-person bully that is assaulting the victim. Tysdal starts the poem off with “you”: but soon it’s clear that he isn’t referring to me, the reader, but depression itself. By addressing depression this way, Tysdal creates a kind of embodiment for this illness that interprets depression as if it was someone, rather than something. This choice to refer to to depression as an entity that assaults the reader is really effective, because it places the audience in the shoes of someone who is depressed. Although the “you” refers to depression in the poem’s opening lines, this pronoun also allows everyone who reads the poem to partially embody the depressed person’s experience.
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There are a few things that Tysdal teaches us about depression throughout the poem. The first is that depression is a bully that verbally beats you up with negative thoughts:
At times,
your voice is constant—”kill yourself, kill yourself, kill
yourself”
When reading, the first thing I notice are the words “your voice,” which stood out to me as characteristics pertaining to human beings. It is people who have a voice, and through this humanization of depression, I can imagine depression as someone standing over me, telling me these thoughts–uncontrollable thoughts that come from outside that penetrate someone’s train of thought.
Secondly, A MAD Fold-in Poem describes depression as assaulting you physically. Tysdal describes the way depression treats its victim as clay:
—fists punching clay with the aim to make me
nothing more than punched clay.
The victim embodies the clay, physically moulded by depression through beating. Instead of an inanimate object being the punching bag, it is the victim who becomes the punching bag; the puncher, depression. That’s what depression does– it attacks with no remorse. Not only is punching in itself a physical act, but it is an apt image for the poem also symbolizes depression as physically harmful towards it victim as he or she may be driven to self-harm, leaving physical life long scars on their bodies.
Thirdly, A MAD Fold-in Poem describes how depression negatively impacts self image:
At parties, you shape a sinister play from others’ glances:
“hate him”, “idiot”, “fool”.
Depression’s ability to shape the victim like clay not only applies to the victim physically, but also mentally. Self image is similarly punched into submission because depression reinforces feelings of worthlessness: as if to confirm that someone is an idiot worthy of mockery and undeserving of respect and love. Since victims cannot simply “get over” severe depression no matter what kind of mask they choose to put on for the public eye, depression continues to stalk them (but with a twist, as the poem’s conclusion suggests):
Yet with each step the unrelenting chorus of you
circles round me, another chorus surfaces to surround you: the
line of sheltering trees artists grow,
[. . .] the magic of bringing nib to page and penning life
with urgency and patience, word by word, with abandon
and care.
No matter the outlook on life, depression will always be there waiting, and there is something about this permanence, whether that is permanence in a particular individual or a population, that Tysdal believes is beautiful because it allows for poems like this to be made. Through “penning life”, reading poems like this that describe a different mindset, allow those with or without depression to see through the eyes of someone who suffers from severe depression.