Column: From my Bath Mat
Written by Holly Ruskin
About 10 years ago I came down with a highly contagious infection that what we in the UK call 'Mumps'. I had been vaccinated against it as a child so my case was rare; I was asked to send a saliva sample in the post so the NHS could track the number of diagnoses. Suffice to say, waking up in the middle of the night to a feeling much akin to having been punched in the side of the head and - upon looking in the mirror - seeing that your face is three times its normal size does not spark joy. I looked like an oversized chipmunk. When speaking with my GP over the phone (because I wasn't allowed into the surgery, or my place of work or really anywhere there were other people), she explained that it's really an infection of the salivary glands that results in swelling and a lack of saliva production meaning eating was excruciatingly painful...lack of lubrication also meant everything tasted like sand. I lived off (pre-Vegan) Ben & Jerry's for a week, while miserably checking the mirror every 30 minutes to see if I looked any more normal.
Where am I going with this delightfully visual story? Well, trying to write poetry while suffering from the sort of depression where you can't get off the bathroom floor to shower, is much like trying to eat with mumps. No brain lubrication. Words are worse than sand. They're not there really at all. There's pain, in the physical and emotional sense, when I sit down to write a poem and it comes out as three lines of nothing. Like something from the inside of a cheap greetings card, or a painfully trite Instagram post.
I was first diagnosed with depression after my daughter was born almost three years ago now, having 'only' suffered with generalised anxiety from the time I was a teenager and throughout my whole adult life thus far. Postnatal/postpartum depression is particularly acute because it comes at a time when you need all your vital organs - heart and brain mostly - to be in perfect working order. But for a while, I couldn't feel love for my daughter and still now I struggle to look at pictures of her when she was a baby, remembering how deeply sad I was and so very engulfed by the black cloud of mental illness.
While that particular postnatal cloud passed, I have found myself in recent times back in less than clement mental weather. We are living through uniquely challenging times that, up until now, have given me much to write about. Poetry has been the way I've processed out of my body all the things I've thought, worried about, chewed on, mulled over, loved and hated in equal measure. It has been particularly shocking to me, this struggle to write, because I came to poetry when my daughter was 8 weeks old...in the thick of my postnatal depression, I wrote more than I ever have before and in a form that was totally new to me. Poetry was my anchor, holding me fast to myself. Now, well, it's all mumps.
Running a small press though, has meant I've had somewhere else to send my creative juices (what little there are inside me at the moment) and editing other women's words has allowed me to bathe in writing while I wait for my own to unstick from the roof of my mouth. I miss the steady flow of poetry, tip of the tongue to my Notes app. The well oiled machine of my mind sending out slippery sentences, slick with passion and meaning and honesty.
I tried to write from my bath mat the other day and still, like sand. Claggy. Clogged. Dry. But if women are writing - and I know they are, I've read and published and admired their work - then I'm sure I will too. Inspiration waits to whet my appetite and poetry sits, wings folded for now, close my heart.
For all those who write and suffer from depression, this one's for you.
HOLLY RUSKIN has been a writer all her life, but started exploring the poetic form after the birth of her daughter in 2019. She co-founded ‘blood moon poetry’, an inclusive place for female poets to submit their work for publication. Holly lives in Bristol, UK.