For the past month and a half, I’ve suffered from what I call “unmanageable depression and anxiety.” Trust me, there’s a big difference between manageable and unmanageable. Manageable is what I’ve lived with for years. Unmanageable is a different animal altogether.
For instance, it’s hard to explain why the thought of vacuuming the living room makes me cry or why I can’t find the mental constitution to shower or put on makeup every day. It’s hard to explain why I don’t want to eat or why leaving the house is akin to climbing Everest. Yet, in times like these, the synchronicity of literature can sometimes be astounding. Or maybe it’s just God putting a certain book in my hands at a certain, specific time.
The book to which I refer is The Rules of the Tunnel: My Brief Period of Madness by Ned Zeman. Zeman was a successful editor for Vanity Fair when his descent began. He became fascinated with offbeat men who suffered strange deaths, most notably Grizzly Man Tim Treadwell. Soon, this fascination turned into anxiety and depression, therapist after therapist, medication after medication.
An excerpt: “Everything, at this point, was an anvil on top of a piano. Utility bills sat on the kitchen table for weeks, unpaid. Not because of money concerns. Because who had the strength to find postage stamps? Meals went uneaten; suits, baggy; calls, unreturned. … By month six, your hands were trembling round the clock. The subway was a potential powder keg—The Taking of Brooklyn One Two Three. You kept up appearances as best you could—you were gifted that way. … You wanted out. Needed it.” This, in so many words, is depression.
Zeman’s journey is long and arduous, but his writing is not. He is possibly the first writer I’ve come across to successfully write an entire book in second person: you this and you that. The perspective made it all the more personal, as if you, the reader, were along for Zeman’s horrific ride through the dark, lonely tunnel of mood disorder, followed by electroconvulsive treatment (yes, shock treatment) and the ensuing amnesia—often a side effect of ECT.
Zeman is at times tragic, at times hilarious, and at times completely inappropriate. The book is not a downer; it is a first-hand, honest, self-deprecating account of a topic most of us would rather not discuss.
Author Ned Zeman.
As someone whose own depression/anxiety is, every four or five years, completely unmanageable, it was comforting to read the descriptions of Zeman’s own torment. It made me feel less alone, and although he may not be technically “healed” by the end (are we ever?), he at least knows how to be better. Perhaps what further aligned me to his plight was the writer thing. As he points out, “Chipper, well-adjusted people don’t write ‘The Raven,’
To the Lighthouse or
Heart of Darkness. … Writers,
creatives, were different from everyone else.” I’m aware of this (as are thankfully my friends, family, and husband), and I embrace the difference. Would I be an artist without my depression? Am I an artist because of my depression? Does my depression stem from my art? Too many questions, all of them unanswerable and frankly inconsequential.
I related heavily to Zeman and the characters in his book, including an overdose victim named Michael who used to disappea
I have, as many of you know, been on a hunt for extraordinary memoirs. The equally inventive and true kind of memoir. The it's-not-really-just-all-about-me. This weekend alone I went through several would-be memoir contestants. I emerged holding just one high above my head.
(Victory.)
It's called
The Rules of the Tunnel: My Brief Period of Madness. It's by Ned Zeman, whose work you might have seen in
Vanity Fair or
GQ or
Outside. He's a reporter—witty and smart—but he's also dogged by the demons of depression. Anxiety gnarls at him, too, worries that escalate over time. And as therapy of the medicinal as well as the talking kind fail to relieve him of a paralyzingly dark stupor, Zeman turns, with hope, to electroconvulsive therapy.
The madness doesn't quell; it escalates. Mania ensues. Zeman will barely remember a bit of it, for amnesia has swept in, too.
Told in a fantastic, sometimes bawdy, reliably funny (yes, funny), deeply intelligent second person,
The Rules of the Tunnel is not just a reconstructed life. It's a book that looks out for others along the way—defining, cautioning, placating—all while offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the doings of
Vanity Fair, the collective care of friends, and the investigative tools that must be brought to bear on the telling of a life that is not, in large swaths, remembered. I am head-over-heels for the final lines in this book, but it wouldn't be fair to quote them. So I will give you the equally fantastic first bit of a book that is just this good in its entirety:
Not so long ago, in the heyday of your idiocy, you made yourself a promise. That you can no longer remember making the promise, nor anything about it—aside from a yellow sticky-note reading "Remember Promise!"�fills you with the warm glow of achievement. You lived, if only briefly, among The Great Amnesiacs. And you did live well. Reportedly.
The Rules of the Tunnel is, I will add here, a Gotham publication, acquired by Lauren Marino. I always sensed that I, with
Handling the Truth, was in good hands. Now I know for sure.
The book to which I refer is The Rules of the Tunnel: My Brief Period of Madness by Ned Zeman. Zeman was a successful editor for Vanity Fair when his descent began. He became fascinated with offbeat men who suffered strange deaths, most notably Grizzly Man Tim Treadwell. Soon, this fascination turned into anxiety and depression, therapist after therapist, medication after medication.
Thinking of u my friend!!!
Hugs
Miss you, girl!