At the end of August, after a month spent upstate working exclusively on my next novel, I hopped in a car (to DRIVE IT) when a bout of depression came flying through the windshield, drenching me in its claggy funk.

By the time I could shake it off, it was too late—it had already wept through my skin and was walking on its hands in the deep end of my brain.

I spent the next few days crying, and when it was time to return home, I felt better—more stable. So, imagine my irritation when it found me again, a few days later, this time in Brooklyn. Ever clever, its form had changed, and now it wrapped itself around me like a weighted blanket, holding me hostage to an obnoxious anthem of outdated club-kid beats.

Good morning, my loser! Congratulations on having no family! You wanted kids, but you didn't have them. Probably for the best, because look at you—can't even get out of bed. No one remembers about you, and guess who hates you? Here’s a hint: Everyone!!

Every morning, I woke up into the same world, a groundhog’s day of rumination and awfulizing. The invisible filaments of energy that vibrate the universe into being scraped against my skin on the way to the kitchen, the dog park, and back to bed.

The world that was replaced itself by the world that wasn’t. My present life circumstances were amplified only by what wasn’t present. Instead, I lived inside the absence of the life I wanted but didn’t get. And I woke up every day as that person, in that life, with those same thoughts that don’t fade, but self-replicate.

Depression delivers each day as the same day over and over again. And every you as the same you whose same thoughts are driving you the same mad. Every sound, every sight, every thought and idea is the same, only louder, closer, like you’re a re-run in syndication, only poor, without residuals.

I needed out of my mind. I needed a new mind. Short of surgical intervention, the closest I could come was to pump in a new voice. I listened to one podcast after another on Buddhism, on Philosophy, and Meditation. Then on one of these podcasts someone said, “You need to break the habit of being yourself.”

Yes, I thought. That is what I need.

Turns out, they were referencing a self-help book written by Joe Dispenza. Desperate times call for desperate measures, but also—as my sister rightly mentioned in her wonderful newsletter this past weekend, one should never feel embarrassed for trying to help themselves—I downloaded the book and began listening.

I’d never heard of Dispenza, and listened not with an open mind, but a desperate one. Although it wasn’t new information, some of what he said helped me; it was what I needed to hear. While other things he said raised a NASCAR wave of red flags alerting me to his wildly limited understanding of the intractability of serious mental illness.

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