Psychotherapy as a Study of Missing Pieces

That is the nature of endings, it seems. They never end. When all the missing pieces of your life are found, put together with glue of memory and reason, there are more pieces to be found.

When my therapist asks what the thing I casually refer to as “depression” actually feels like, words escape me. Instead of recounting what it is, I settle for what it isn't, describing undone to-do lists and piles of laundry — trying to sketch a convincingly depressive self-portrait as only the photographic negative to some ideally productive self. In truth, I avoid answering in positive terms because the true answer — like many truths — sounds ludicrous. Growing up in a big city and learning to swim in the shallow end of a pool, “drowning” was a storybook concept to me, Victorian and surreal. How could I claim to feel like I was “drowning” if I never learned what it felt like to drown? Even spoken only in my mind's voice, such a confession sounded dramatic and wholly inadmissible.

When I fail to answer a question — or the answer makes me uncomfortable — instead I dissect language, playing like I can reassemble the parts of a sentence into some Frankenstein whole of an answer. Let us first define “depression.” And, “feels like.” I draw a hard line between depression and the feeling of depression. Why did my therapist ask me to describe my “feeling of depression,” not the object or condition, “depression”? I wasn't sure what the relation was between the two. Is depression just a collection of feelings of depression? Do feelings of depression pass some threshold at which they become depression itself? Can one have depression without any associated feelings at all — and, if so, what substance could that disorder consist of? And what is one supposed to call it when things go wrong in a life in ways consistent with depression, without the person — as far as anyone can tell — actually having depression? Although such a condition had recur