Ballet of Blues | Text by Michelle Shail | Summer 2010
How Come Every Time I Get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints are on the Knife? is an entertaining and thought-provoking book probing how, exactly, we contribute to our demise. Dr. Jerry Harvey examines the term “Anaclitic Depression” from the Greek Anaclisis which means ‘to lean upon.’ Anaclitic Depression generally begins with infants who do not receive the necessary emotional nurturing for proper growth and development. Infancy is the time when we learn, however subconsciously, to form attachments to others. The absence of being held, stroked, and nurtured causes infants to become lethargic, tense, fearful and unresponsive to others. Anaclitic Depression, if unattended, can result in a “wasting away.” Harvey and other researchers furthered the hypothesis to all those separated from necessary emotional bonds. In Harvey’s eloquently irreverent writing he refers to Anaclitic Depression as a “melancholia that we often experience when the individuals, organizations or belief systems that we lean on or are dependent on for emotional support are withdrawn from us.” In contemplating that definition of Anaclitic Depression I wondered if ‘Being Blue,’ or ‘Down in the Dumps,’ or just in a proverbial ‘Mood’ might be some sort of sophisticated alarm system? A survival mechanism, if you will, leading us to or away from the end result.
“When you’re dreaming with a broken heart, the waking up is the hardest part. You role out of bed and down on your knees and for a moment you can hardly breathe.” John Mayer, of course, is singing of lost love. We have all lost something foundational to our souls, to our identity, and to our sense of how or why we belong to this world. Love, friends, marriage and jobs are loaded with stimulus that can cause us to stray from our personal core. But the relationship between pleasure and pain can cause us to feel ‘turned around.’ Charles Darwin wrote, “It leads an animal to pursue that course of action which is most beneficial,” in trying to explain why we vacillate from one mood to another. But somewhere in our culture it became taboo to be Blue, and daring to feel sad or melancholy became a vice we women, in particular, have learned rather well to conceal. We lie, bluntly put, as society has trained us to, and are now styled as irrational, overly emotional, and spinning out of control creatures whose emotions and erratic behaviors have become an intrinsic part of our brand.
When my husband took a job in Charlotte North Carolina some seven years back, the thought “Well, I could use a project” sheepishly reared its head from a murky corner of my conscious thought. But exploration of the thought was traded for organizing and executing the project at hand. After an exhaustive search through a maze of suburbs I stumbled on our home almost by chance. One attribute appealed to me emotionally - the enormous wall of windows in the master bedroom. I was enthralled by the morning glow of the delicate pastel skies beckoning us to join the day. The expansive twelve feet of windows lining the eighteen-foot wall creates a shadow box displaying an idyllic cul-de-sac of manicured lawns by day, illuminated homes twinkling by moonlight and exuberant children forming childhood memories. Perhaps postpartum depression, the abrupt stop to the hormones of the maternal ticking clock, or maybe just a seething silent desperation, but shortly after our third child was born I found myself battening down the shutters that I’d once so willing left open to the morning sun. I begged the night to continue so that I could refuse the day at hand. But the sun refused to relent and the endless needs of three children under the age of five forced me from the refuge of sleep. For some time I avoided the hollow reflection staring back at me, explained away the short temper to the demands of being a busy mother, as my distorted worldview vacillated between hopelessness and anger. While silent desperation was an acquired and perfected skill, the mother in me could not deny the pain of my young charges. My son, carefree and engaged in the company of his friends, was somehow discontent inside the walls of our home. And our daughter and middle child preferred to occupy herself with tears rather than her many talents. And while their attitudes may have been a reflection of my own I, with terms, began to concede and accept that the continual rotation of their moods and the continuum of their attitude was, in fact, a highly sophisticated navigation system.
