content warnings
depression, mention of self harm
[2378 words]
After only a few months into my master’s program, each day had become just another attempt at acting human.
In September of 2023, I moved to Halifax, Canada, to begin an MA in English. I’d honestly thought I’d been enjoying it. I liked reading and I liked talking about books, so I assumed I’d enjoy being in a program where I could combine those two things. But using big words in fluorescently lit classrooms soon lost its appeal—to me and the rest of my cohort, all of whom were only studying English because they thought it was easy enough and didn’t know what else to do. I was the only one who actually wanted to be there, and I didn’t even want to be there.
I’d never thought to stop and consider how I was feeling. I was just going through the motions. I took melatonin every night so that I could reduce the amount of time spent in anxiety spirals, and then I’d sleep ten, eleven, twelve hours just to wake up exhausted the next morning. I’d then drink three cups of coffee to lighten the weight of my tiredness and get my anxiety off to a healthy start.
I soon began to harden over: my skin like a wooden carapace; my joints stiff and inflexible; my face a poorly painted smile.
I was becoming a wind-up doll, set to go through the motions of everyday life. Each day the key wound a quarter-turn tighter, and soon my poor little clockwork motor began to whine. That whine expressed itself in my, rather aggressively, redeveloping the stutter that I’d had in my undergrad.
It was so difficult to speak—to push words out of my windpipe—that even when I did manage to squeak out a little noise, there was absolutely no way to get my vocal cords to resonate in a way that sounded anything like intonation or inflection. I just focused on mechanically ejecting the words that were required of me without any regard for the robotic tenor of my voice, or the invariable stutter that accompanied it. I often chose not to speak for fear of what might come out. It was as much a problem of resignation as it was of resonation.
Each day consisted of getting up, reading, walking to school, going home, reading, cooking, watching tv shows and movies in my bedroom, just like I had in high school when I’d had no friends. I was always tired. I’d also just broken up with the girl I’d been seeing in the summer because I’d had to move to Halifax. I had no one. People said I could phone them, and I knew that I could in theory, but in reality, I couldn’t physically bring myself to pick up a phone, nor did I even really contemplate it as an option.
I thought the problem must be physical. An iron deficiency? Magnesium? I ate a lot of sugar so maybe that was it?
I went to the school doctor and asked if I could get bloodwork done. I needed to know what the problem was. I had to determine how to treat it.
“What times of the day do you feel tired?”
“I start to feel tired around noon most days and that lasts for like the whole day.” In reality I was always tired. I woke up tired and went to bed tired. No amount of sleep helped. Every day I felt a little weaker. It was clear to me that I was dying.
But when I’d returned to the doctor and all the bloodwork came back fine, much better than average actually, she’d asked, “Are you feeling ok? You don’t think you’re depressed, do you?” she said this a little bashfully, which made my face flush, but I answered honestly.
“I don’t think so. I feel pretty level, pretty ok.”
I hadn’t realized that depression did not always mean feeling bad. It often meant that you didn’t know how you were feeling because reality had become a buzz of anxiety tightening your chest, stiffening your forehead, and droning out everything else.
In grad school I quickly learnt that my life should exist on pretense. There were things I should say in order to get good grades, and affectations I should adopt if I wanted to sound smart, or right, or important. My master’s degree in English was training me to sound like I had a big vocabulary and progressive ideas. I did not understand nor care about “the imbrication of affects in Lauren Berlant’s” work, and nobody cared to make me care. All that mattered was that I sounded progressive and used big words while doing it.
Imbrication. I used that word in class once, and at that very same moment I felt that key twist one full turn tighter.
Imbrication means overlapping, but it was good to say imbricate instead of overlap because that way people would be so focused on what imbricate meant that they wouldn’t question the other dumb shit you said.
I would never use the word imbricate in real life, so why in a classroom? Weren’t we learning how to communicate effectively? Or just pretentiously?
Texting my friends back home, I sent them pictures of candy hearts with the word “jizz” written on them. This was funny because these candy hearts usually said something like “be mine.” I followed that message up with another candy heart labeled “like cumshot,” to clarify the meaning and significance of the prior image. It was a reference to a skit comedy show we revered and quoted relentlessly. I missed having friends with whom I could laugh, but now I just have classmates with whom I can say “whom.”
These texts to my friends were the few glimmers of personality I showed throughout my day. Otherwise, my mask was back on, and I was pretending to be a straightlaced little boy, when in reality I was quite a silly person. I do realize a silly person would not say “I’m quite a silly person,” but academia has crushed me and I’m doing my best.
It wasn’t until I was back at my parents’ house in Winnipeg for Christmas break, and my best friend and I had taken a spoonful of shrooms, that I finally felt unguarded enough to say,
“It feels like my face is a m-mask, like it’s made of wood and it’s s-so hard to just move it.”
“You’re preaching to the choir brother,” he responded without hesitation.
When he said that it had moved something momentous in me. I’d expected him to be concerned or confused or unable to fathom what I was feeling. But he was feeling exactly what I was. I was not alone. I was not the only person struggling so hard to move their face.
He told me about his life. He was going through the same laborious lifestyle as me, but under a different career path: working for Canada food health and safety, pretending to be a figure of authority, pretending to know things he didn’t, pretending he cared whether he lived or died. A life prescribed by pretense.
“When I say things,” I said. “I feel like it’s so hard to get people to hear me. I feel like it’s almost impossible.”
“Same here. In my zoom calls for work, I’m always surprised when people respond to me. I don’t see how they can understand what I’m saying. Everything I say is fake. I’m trying so hard just to push the words out in a way that sounds human. The second I leave the meeting I say to myself, I want to kill myself, fuck fuck fuck. I can’t help it. I just say it.”
“Even when I c-can s-s-say—” S’s are the hardest. I had a lisp as a child, and I think it’s because my mother always pointed out when I’d lisped that I’m now afraid to use the letter S entirely. “—things, I stutter so fucking badly that it makes me not even want to speak a-at all because it’s so difficult just to get the fucking words out of my mouth. And when I start stuttering, fighting with my whole body just to get the words out, people are so busy feeling sorry for me that they don’t listen to what I’m saying.”
I started to tear up. “It’s so h-h-hard—not being able to express yourself because you can’t s-s-speak.”
“I’ve never thought of you as someone who stuttered.”
“You haven’t?”
“No.”
I thought about it for a moment. “I guess it really started to get bad around the time I started my master’s.”
There was silence for a moment. I way laying on my back next to the fireplace. The melodic folk music I’d put on gently rolled in the background. I finally felt at ease. Did it take doing mushrooms to finally find a moment of peace in this world?
“It will get better,” he said. “We just have to trust that it will, right?”
A week later, the day I was returning to Halifax, my friend dropped by to say goodbye. And just as I made to leave, he said, as if were difficult for him, but he’d finally worked up the courage to do it, “I just want you to know, it makes me really sad that you’re not doing well, because I love you so much.”
“Stop, you’re making me cry. I really love you too.”
I hugged him as tears streamed down my face. My body began to shake as I tried to stop myself from sobbing because I didn’t want him to see me cry. Why is it so difficult to show emotion?
“Please phone me,” he said. “I’m too embarrassed to pick up the phone myself, so could you please phone me, and we can talk?”
“I can do that.”
And I did. And we did talk most weekends after that.
And after Christmas, I began to feel a little better. It was so much easier to exist knowing my feelings were not unique, and that I too was human. I still struggled with all the things I had before, but I could take consolation in the fact that—as cliché as it sounds—I was not alone.
However, after a few weeks back at school, away from my friends and family, my mask began to harden once more. Luckily, around that time, something unexpectedly cut through the noise and loosened it from my face. And that was Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, a stop motion film made with puppets.
Every character in the film, male and female alike, is voiced by the same nasally man, and represented by a different iteration of the same puppet, each wearing a different wig, except for the protagonist, Michael, who remains the only unique puppet, in voice and appearance. In Michael’s life, everyone’s voice has the same tenor. To him, they all speak the same, all look the same, and all confined to the same movements of their identical puppet bodies. And because everyone in his world is the same, puppeteered by the same master, Michael finds interactions with others meaningless. It was the best metaphor for depression I’d ever seen.
And when Michael finally meets Lisa, a woman who looks different than everyone else, and, unlike everyone else, has a pleasant, timid voice, he is enraptured. He has to be with her. He immediately confesses his love for her and proposes marriage. And she accepts, but soon she too loses her originality. Her voice, and even her face, lose their distinctiveness and begin to meld with all the others, with the monotony. So, in the middle of the night, Michael leaves her, feeling more alone than ever.
But while by the end of this film Michael once again feels alone, it made me feel the opposite. I understood how he felt, and I empathized with him. He was struggling with feelings. He didn’t yet understand what he was feeling, but I knew it intimately well. He was just trying to feel human, but he couldn’t escape the fact that he was a fucking puppet. I felt that.
Watching that movie reminded me that this is why I’m doing all this. This is why I’m studying art and literature and all that bullshit. Because sometimes some weird fucking puppet shit cuts through the noise and you don’t feel so alone. And only in studying English can you write about whatever—even the strange puppet movie you watched last night—interests you at any given time.
I feel that much of academia has done a disservice to me. It’s ironic to spend so much time studying theories that my own life becomes theoretical. No substance. Big words and no feelings. Big assignments devoid of meaning. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
As I write this now, it is from my own apartment in Calgary, where I am beginning my PhD in English. I know that might sound counter-intuitive given that in the past academia has made me violently depressed, but there is something different in the air over here. At this university, students are excited, rather than embarrassed, to speak about their academic and creative projects. At this school you can write a novel as your PhD dissertation! Weeeooo! My lifelong goal of becoming a published novelist may finally come true!
I’ve also gotten back together with the girl I’d broken up with last summer, and she’s moving out to Calgary to live with me next week. Life is good. My friend was right. It does get better. And it did him too. As I write this, he’s taken on a completely different career path and is for once passionate about the thing he gets out of bed to do. And so am I.
I realize now that my depression was fundamentally a lack of purpose; it stemmed from allowing myself to go through the motions and not pay attention to what I was doing in the present. I do realize that I will likely feel depressed again, and that like Michael, my jaw will once again be confined to a single hinge upon which it will be puppeted, but it’s nice to know that it does get better.
Jackson Mattocks is a writer and academic from Winnipeg, Canada, pursuing a PhD in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary. From 2022-23 Jackson taught conversational English in public schools across small towns in the Czech Republic. Jackson completed his MA in English at Dalhousie University (2024), where he served as Book Review Editor for The Dalhousie Review from 2023 to 2024. He has an upcoming article appearing in the Cairo Studies in English Journal, and a forthcoming book chapter in the edited collection Straddling Haiku and Zen: Japanese Writers in the Western World.
