The Engine of Waking Life

On Depression and Teaching

Wassily Kandinsky, Landscape with Red Spots, No. 2, 1913, Oil on canvas

I don’t want to write about teaching high school English. But I need to write about being depressed. And for me those experiences cannot be neatly cleft, like conjoined twins whose shared skin shelters so much blood.

I once worked as a kid actor and kept at it until I was 23. I felt burnt out, lost, and useless. I filled my days with reading, using my newfound time to try to brute-force my way through a classical education. Then I read a charming essay by Salvatore Scibona about St. John’s, a small liberal arts college in New Mexico focused on reading and discussing great books. My wife and I visited classes and I felt at home, so we left Los Angeles and I started studying. The money I saved from five years of regular work on television was quickly immolated by tuition. After graduating, I didn’t feel my niche resume qualified me to work any job — but, as liberal arts graduates know, there is always teaching. And the state of New Mexico desperately needed teachers. After a few months of classes, I got my license and a job teaching English language arts to high schoolers at a charter school focused on “expeditionary learning” (that is, going outside). I went in with big plans and ideals, high on theories of pedagogy, believing my classroom would be an oasis of respect in a desert of inhumanity. I knew on paper that I could burn out and knew that many teachers quickly did. But I took the job anyway because I needed the money, respected the work, and would be working with adults willing to pretend again that I knew what I was doing.

In most American schools, new teachers aren’t provided much help. I was given a rough description of what my predecessor did, an outline of state standards, three days of training, and a lanyard. The school had lost its lease on its prior campus and now rented out half a megachurch on the south side of town. The workday’s basic structure was this: Wake at 5:45 a.m., carpool with another teacher at 6:30 a.m., teach class for six and a half hours — punctuated by a short lunch break and hour-long prep period — then carpool home and grade assignments. I had made up some loose curricula and got them approved by my boss, though each class needed an accompanying lesson plan which connected the day’s work to state mandates. Sometimes there were standardized tests. Each student was loaned a cheap laptop. Most of the work assigned to students was to be completed, graded, and stored online.

As you might have inferred, everyone in the building spent a lot of time staring at computers or phones. Most of us were addicted to the internet. Almost universally, students hated school and didn’t want to be there, and teachers hated work and didn’t want to be there. Everyone was tired and hungry at least 80 percent of the time. No one gave a shit about state mandates, and one person (our principal, a nice guy with kind and profoundly exhausted eyes) cared about test scores. Everyone waited around for each day to conclude, starting shit or staring off until daylight began to fade. It was an American high school for poor and/or neglected kids, so most of the time it felt like a prison — nonsensical and destructive for everyone involved.

My hopes of being the exception to the rule started to fade within the first few weeks. I woke up each day somehow more tired than the day before. My eyes were dry and my allergies were awful. My students were mostly considerate, but they were also tending to debilitating internet addictions while riding the bad high of puberty, so they were also wrecks. Following the weather, my mind became arid. By the middle of September, I thought daily about killing myself. By the middle of November, I was faced with a choice: keep teaching and die in January or quit and have enough time to try hard not to die. Before Christmas break, I gave notice.

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Books on depression have always frustrated me. Even the most popular and praised titles seem to miss some crucial aspect of the depressed person’s experience. And since understanding and empathy are ameliorative, the depressed person, sick or well, craves an account that captures the whole truth. I have yet to read, watch, or hear such a thing. But my frustration has a sharper name. I am angry because others have not accurately conveyed the power and dread of depression’s numbness.

Everyone suffers from an illness a bit differently; we may overlap with diagnoses in many ways but are usually aberrant from the orderly presentations of textbooks. My experience with depression was principally anhedonic. Numbness, not pain, was my enemy and madness. I felt nothing. More precisely, sensations of any kind — the taste of food, the sound of music, the pressure of a kiss, the novelty of a thought — were impossibly shallow and short-lived, as though reality itself had lost all its force. I felt trapped in a shadow play of life. Even pain — including the hard physical pain of a cut or a bruise — left no real trace. Despite appearances and the behavior of everyone around me, life itself and my time within it had no sensorial consequence.

This sounds like hell, and it is. But my depression’s numbness was more insidious. Lack of feeling also meant lack of a future. Since I couldn’t feel anything, because no encounter seemed to persist, I harbored a constantly growing conviction that the future was as dead as the present. Hopelessness came in like a slow-rolling fog. And since I believed the future to be absolutely without quality or consequence, my sense of causality began to break down. I soon felt that any action could follow from any other action, yet I also felt that any disjunction, any surreal if-then, would not, could not, matter. I would never again live under conditions in which I could be surprised. The core problem returned: surprise, or the sudden perception of novelty, is primarily a feeling, as are joy, satisfaction, anger, love. I felt permanently barred from all feeling, cast out of the realm of the animal, banished from the most basic structures of the world. Even sadness seemed impossible. I could hurt, sure — but this hurt did not register as an event. Instead, hurt and loss were indefinite silent conditions of the cosmos. Such flat eternality prevented reflection because no other perspective felt possible. One cannot gain perspective without distance, which one cannot gain without motion, which one cannot enact without desire. And what, or how, could an insensate freak even want?

The depressed person’s imagination is sometimes maniacal in its activity and precision, particularly when it comes to imagining suicide. But more often than not the depressed mind is no more sophisticated than a ticker tape running alongside all experience, reminding its victim that they are in fact trapped. Sad in the classroom, I first noticed my imagination beginning to atrophy; I felt my ability to imagine alternative schooling, even happier students, wither. Within a month, I felt incapable of imagining anything at all. Plainly, when I was depressed, I was extremely dumb. My thinking and speech slowed to a crawl. I had to muster all my energy just to walk at a normal pace or to sit up in a chair. I often walked into the bathroom near my classroom so I could cry in private, and each time I nearly collapsed onto the floor — not from the depth of my tearful mood, but from feeling like I had no energy whatsoever. One day I called out from work and accompanied my wife to her woodshop. While she ran planks through saws, I sat in a rocking chair with a blanket over my lap and stared at nothing for three hours. And even this felt like maintaining a brutal performance. I could smile and laugh when I knew that would put others at ease, but each time I faked feeling okay, I sensed myself slipping further away.

Depression corrodes memory, so it’s hard to pin down when exactly I was sick. But I taught while depressed for no more than a few months. Regardless of my short tenure in the classroom, I came to believe with perfect solidity that all students with whom I spent time were doomed. Their lives were and would be dictated by scant resources, addiction, and materialism. Depression has a way of internalizing the cultural conditions that cruel systems reproduce. Working in a punitive school felt like trying to survive as a consciousness in a limited, failing body. A binary, combative political environment was a summary of the living part inside me desperately trying to die. For the depressed person, all negative interpretations of the exterior are easily corroborated by one’s deranged interior. Any positive interpretation was an affront to the absolute reality of nothingness (depression and pride are more related than you might think). Depression is paradoxical: pain premised on numbness, carelessness premised on conviction. But depression is the least romantic paradox. Depression’s only boon is that it grants its sufferer an ability to quickly identify the myriad ways in which the world as it stands is wrong, cursed, or impossible — and thus can lead to the creation of incredibly focused art and criticism. Yet I should affirm again that the fundamental error of the depressed mind is its automatic totalizing: a person in pain confirms the agonized substrate of the cosmos; a private disappointment indicates a collapse of public possibility; the particular becomes the general’s executioner. A depressed person makes a terrible teacher because teaching requires believing that change is possible. Depression is the lived experience of a blind faith in stasis.

Suicidality has been given its literature. After writing a novel centered on a suicide cult, this is a subject to which I needn’t further contribute. But I must say here that self-destruction is a reasonable escape from the claustrophobic madness of depression. It is not a good response — in fact, it is likely the most corrosive social act — but it makes sense. If you couldn’t feel anything and knew with complete certainty that the future would bring neither relief nor change, would you choose to keep facing the day? Just as a broken clock is right twice per day, a crazy animal can make a logical decision. Depression’s tragedy is not that its qualities are alien to reason and sociality, but that its madness can be hidden, or lost, so well — particularly in a culture obsessed with the pursuit of stimuli. Unlike a man bleeding on the street, the depressed person must articulate what they are experiencing in order for others to help them — yet the illness makes the afflicted feel like speech is both impossible and a waste of breath. Other illnesses loudly signal their underlying dysfunctions, but depression can so easily be read as a simple fatigue or trenchant cynicism, as run-of-the-mill burnout or accurate political analysis. The fact that depression is often indistinguishable from a reasonable reaction to the world should indict our culture in the strongest possible terms.

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Telling my family that I was thinking about suicide saved my life. My mother, sister, and wife helped me talk with doctors and to take medicine, eat, sleep, exercise, and not hurt myself. And weirdly, too, while teaching I also got interested in a card game from my childhood. A buried childish part of me, the part enamored with toys and collecting and fantasy, came alive for some reason. Thinking about that card game meant not dreaming about dying. Maybe any silly hobby from my past would’ve stood bright as a life-preserver, but those pieces of artful cardboard helped me stay afloat. I’ll be grateful for that game for the rest of my life, though I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the serious labor of the people who loved me and those in whose professional care I was entrusted. Good people are our greatest medicine.

Now far removed from classroom teaching and long past the pit of severe depression, I’ve come to believe a few things about education. (My thoughts are also informed by seven years working a good job at my alma mater, a position in which I help students one-on-one.) Attending a good school must be 100 percent voluntary. Students must lead their own learning — and teachers must help, not dictate or direct. All subjects of study must be valued and treated as worthwhile, including narrow topics and practical trades. The environment must be designed and tended to cultivate joy, freedom, and the desire to expand one’s ability to know. A good school should help people articulate their wants, needs, and beliefs with the enthusiastic support of other people. It should enhance and expand what we can feel. In such a school, questions would be celebrated as the engines of waking life — since every question is the bright face of a hidden possibility. A good school would be the arch antidepressant.

Ken Baumann is a writer who lives in New Mexico. Find him at kenbaumann.com.