I used to be smart

Some years ago, when I taught test prep classes for the Princeton Review, I tutored a high school junior who was struggling with the materials tested on the SAT. He was a sweet kid, generally a hard worker, but he was often so frustrated that his will to keep trying would start to collapse into a heap of anger. When he was in ninth grade a severe bout of encephalitis had left him with permanent learning disabilities, and so nothing came easy for him. That in itself—the fact that his struggles and frustrations were the result of having been improbably and permanently damaged by a mere virus—was sufficient reason to extend to him all the empathy one might imagine the world containing. But what really broke my heart was that much of his frustration was not the result solely of the struggles he had to endure in order to understand and retain new lessons. The worst of it was this: the virus had not been merciful enough to take his memory when it took a sizable chunk of his cognitive skills. The virus left him able to remember all too clearly the time before the encephalitis, when learning was easy and he did better at school than most of the other kids. And so every torturous step of his journey was made all the more cruel by the memory of his capabilities before his brain was damaged.


I was reminded of him yesterday. As part of what I hope will be the final steps necessary to get my iMac fully up to speed, I had to look for a license key for NoteTaker (a nice notebook program for Macs from Aqua Minds). It was not in any of the folders on my current machine, so I pulled out my old, old iBook and opened Eudora to search through my ancient emails.  The email  with the key was there. But what I really came to talk about today was my encounter with the old Eudora inbox, which opened up when I opened the program.

Looking at the senders' names and subject lines in that inbox felt very much like archaeology: the window contained a collection of fragments, neatly arranged in chronological strata. They are the few surviving artifacts from a world that has disappeared: a world in which I was doing interesting research, receiving fellowships, corresponding with cool, smart people who also were doing cool smart things. A world in which it looked as though a life that had been ruined again and again by dysthymia might finally realize some satisfaction, some joy, some achievement. It was a world of possibility.

But like so many other worlds from the past, that world was wiped out. Not by volcano or earthquake or war or ecological collapse;  it was destroyed by the slow but certain grinding away of depression, or "major depressive episode" as they like to call it. Or, in  the case of dysthymics, double depression. The destruction extends deeper than just one's social existence. One's very mind is reduced, as the cognitive fog of depression descends and closes down one's capacities, with the more subtle skills disappearing first. The destruction of towns by desert is as good a metaphor as any: the interior of one's mind turns heavy and useless, as if filling with blowing sand.

Photo of house, Kolmanskop, Namibia by Louise Blair. More here

Depression's cognitive impairment is well known, though not well understood. I'll talk more about that some time. Suffice it to say, for now, that impairments in focus, thinking, and memory are common during depression.

In the course of my inbox archaeology I was intrigued by the subject line from a correspondence with a former colleague: "National Myths." I clicked and began reading the sort of thing I was capable of writing in that previous world. It was a comparison of the way the US and Mexico had worked their respective indigenous populations into national myths and narratives. It was like the abstract for a paper to be written later, with suggested books for my colleague to read should he be interested in pursuing the concepts. It was clear and clever and adroit, and it seemed to me that someone else must have written it. And in a way, I guess someone else did, and I muttered to myself, "Jesus, I used to be smart."


It is true. I used to be smart. Depression knocks a person down a few pegs in that regard. The question before me now: will that ever come back? Or will I ever have only the cruel memory of it?