HANDLING MYSELF
My Buby Florene is seventy-eight years old. She is one of the only people in my family, and one of the oldest people I know, who has experienced depression. I came over to her house and she cooked French toast for me, just like she used to when I was a kid and I would sleep over. We had a frank conversation about mental health, a word she doesn't like because it puts her in a certain box, a category she doesn't want to be in.
Despite this she was very open with me about her struggles with depression in the 1970s. When she started dating my Zaidy around age eighteen, Florene was very shy and reserved, a stark contrast to his family. "I really didn’t know how to handle myself. So I think as situations arose I started to really withdraw. I would start getting very unhappy, unhappy with myself, and I would let these things fester inside me and I would blame everybody else for my own inadequacies."
Despite this she was very open with me about her struggles with depression in the 1970s. When she started dating my Zaidy around age eighteen, Florene was very shy and reserved, a stark contrast to his family. "I really didn’t know how to handle myself. So I think as situations arose I started to really withdraw. I would start getting very unhappy, unhappy with myself, and I would let these things fester inside me and I would blame everybody else for my own inadequacies."
"We got married and everything was fine, but I was a very needy person. I would cry a lot at night, things would just overwhelm me. It wasn't because I got married [so young], I mean I just don’t think I was emotionally ready for anything, never mind marriage and having kids. I really wasn’t emotionally ready, but in those years you never thought of that because that’s what you did. I certainly wasn’t ready to deal with life, but I did."
I asked her about the culture that surrounds mental health today and what it was like growing up in a time when that wasn't the case. She told me that because her father had died when she was fifteen, and her mother was an immigrant dealing with the loss of her husband, that she grew up in a household where feelings were never discussed. A house of four women who got along in their own way but without any real connection, "or maybe that was just me. I don’t want to say I wasn’t a part of my family, but we were sort of disconnected, all of us. My mother didn’t talk about feelings, you just did what you had to and that was it."
"I think it’s fabulous! It’s out in the open, that we understand it more, and that we’re more forgiving," she said, talking more about today's positive attitudes towards mental health. When I asked if she thought growing up now would have changed her experiences, it was hard for her to say. As a product of how, and specifically when, she grew up, she admitted that depression and anxiety look a lot different today than they did back then. "Would it have been easier? Maybe...I really don't know."