"I wanted so badly not to be me"

The Guardian has an interview with Neko Case, in which she discusses her depression, in particular the depression in which she wrote her latest release "The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You." Her description of depression will be familiar to those who know it, though she can perhaps express it better than most of us can:

But it was the mundanity that struck her more than anything. "Depression, there's no grand excellence to it," she says. "In my experience it was just almost the gulaggy boringness of it that'll kill you. You're just in this murk. And you're with other humans, but you lose all your human skills and it's just like you're in this plastic bag and you can't quite connect with people. You lose your ability to transmit electricity or something, and to receive it. It's just like this 'bzzzuh'." She makes a feeble, disconnected sound. "It isn't sparking."

"It isn't sparking"
That is quite perfect. Depression dulls those inter-human connections that we need to maintain our affective equilibrium. It leaves us surrounded, especially in the most social of situations, by people who seem to move around us as through water, slowly and seemingly distantly and with no possibility of communication.  We can watch and observe, but we never feel fully present and we can never connect. We cannot spark.


A chill ran through me
And I grabbed on tight
That was when I left my body for good
And I shook off all the strength I'd earned

I wanted so badly not to be me
I wanted so badly not to be me
I saw my shadow looking lost
Checking its pockets for some lost receipt

Where did I leave that fire?





Bonus: Neko Case performing in the studio on NPR's World Cafe