Last Saturday morning, as I lay in bed (my usual position for the last few months), Sara asked me if I wanted to go with her to the Tesla protest in Berkeley that was going to happen at noon. She’d been making her political patches — linocut on fabric — in huge numbers (they’d been hung to dry on every available surface in our apartment) and could really use my help handing them out, along with the free safety pins she offers people so they can affix them to their jackets and such. That’s a lot of (free) merchandise, requiring lots of hands.
Depression said no.
So I lay there in our bed, while Sara went down to Fourth Street with all her stuff. It’s a twilight way of being, this thing of lying in bed incessantly while depressed. You’re not asleep; you want to be asleep, so you won’t be conscious of being depressed. You’re not really awake, either — as in, Done sleeping — time to do stuff! You pretty much hate yourself. You try to relish small gestures, like rolling over onto your other side, adjusting the sheets and blankets. You listen to the same basketball podcasts over and over, knowing all the ads, knowing the phrases before the podcasters say them. Sometimes you realize that for a bit of time you drifted off. Feels like a victory, that portion of unconsciousness — as if it were the only available escape from the depression. You think back over times in your life when you did things you now regret, or when you didn’t do things that you now regret not doing. You time-travel. You flow. Depression says, “Yeah!”
Then, ten minutes before noon, my phone rang.
Ringing phone scares depression.
Perhaps it was spam, and I could just ignore it and roll over again?
No, it was Sara. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I forgot to bring the safety pins. … Could someone bring them down here?”
I realized I was standing — already a big step, depression-wise. (Sitting in a chair is also acceptable.) On an impulse, I said, “I’ll bring them.”
“You will?” She was surprised. I was, too.
“Yes!”
Forgoing what Sara calls my morning Kornblutions (you know, bathroom stuff), I put on shoes, jacket, and reflective vest, grabbed the two containers of safety pins, and — for the first time since this depression began — got on my bike.
Oh, it was glorious outside!
My therapist says that depression might be called “the starting disease” — as in, it’s hard to start anything (beginning with ceasing to be lying down). So the trick — or at least a trick — is to get going somehow. I guess I just couldn’t take the thought of Sara down there, juggling all her various patches, trying to give them to people, and not having the pins to actually attach them.
We are, I believe, facing actual fascism currently. People are being grabbed off of the streets, or from their homes, and being disappeared. Virtually every aspect of the progress our society has made is facing demolishment by evil brutes. It hurts so much — it feels as if fundamental parts of our individual selves are under vicious attack. Because they are. Because big parts of our individual selves are actually intertwined with our collective self. Without the public parts of our society, each of us is incomplete. When the public is hacked at, parts of us — each of us — begin to wither away.
Conversely — blessedly — as I relearned when I got down to the protest, when we join together politically, those ailing parts of us begin to revivify. And we feel it: I am not just a consumer. I am not an island. I’m a citizen.
I took the safety pins out of my bike’s saddle bag and told Sara, “I’m staying!”
People were chanting and holding up signs. Sara and I divided up the patches and I started making my way through the crowd, saying, “Free patches that my wife made! In our kitchen, all night, while cursing out Trump and Musk!” People smiled, looked at the patches. “Free!” I repeated. They started taking patches from me. Then many of them took pins to put them on. People were attaching patches to the backs of other people’s jackets, onto backpacks.
I looked one protester in the eyes as she thanked me for the patch. I could tell that she shared both my profound terror and my dearest hopes for our society. I heard myself say to her, “I think we’re going to win!”
She looked at me in a kind of wonder. “You do?”
I nodded, confidently: “Yes!”
This kind of thing happened over and over: feeling myself reflected in the faces of others who had decided to show up at noon in Berkeley at a Tesla dealership to protest against the assault on diversity, equity, inclusion, respect, love, joy, beauty, whimsy, tenderness, truth. I sensed that each of us felt so very close to helpless, so very close to hopeless — but not there yet, not when we can gather together.
To be depressed is to feel alone — even when, in my case, you are surrounded by more love than can be imagined. That’s a disorder of my brain chemistry.
To have our collective beauty, our public magnificence, be attacked, maligned, defaced — it creates a deep psychic wound. Protesting with others, sharing our anguish and our hopes — that heals the wound. My god — look how fucked up I’ve been, and yet the exchange of hopeful energies with mostly strangers made me believe myself when I kept saying, “We’ll win!” And it wasn’t a lie. Aspirational, okay — but not a lie.
The truth is that it is up to me. Not alone — of course not. But if I leave it up to not-me, we are doomed. And I am doomed. And right now, it’s hard for me to do things. But Sara forgot the safety pins. And there were people down there who were demanding better than we are getting. And those patches weren’t going to attach themselves.
We gave away virtually all the patches. I almost told Sara, “You’ll never have to go to a protest by yourself ever again!” I almost said it — but I didn’t quite believe it yet. I didn’t know if the next time I’d get myself out of bed. I don’t know when this depression will end.
I’ve had a very hard week. Tomorrow at noon there’s another protest. Sara has been making more patches — so many patches! Our apartment has been smelling (very pleasantly) of ink. I don’t know if I’ll make it to the Tesla dealership with Sara tomorrow to help hand out patches and pins. I dearly hope so.
But I want you to know: No matter what I do tomorrow morning, as soon as I can I will be among others who are hurting, others who love the things we share, others who are terrified nearly to paralysis sometimes — but we’re not there (at paralysis), and they can’t make us be there, can’t make us give up, can’t make us give in. They just can’t. Because we’re us — and what we are, together, is beautiful. And powerful.
I have a whole lot of safety pins. I'll get them to you somehow. The patches are beautiful 😍
Thank you, Josh. I loved your honesty in sharing the underlying feelings of your state of depression and needing to stay in bed and then how you were brought to the surface of your feelings, choosing to engage, when Sara needed your help.