I Am Bad at Museums and Depression

A few weeks ago I went with my in-laws to the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit. We sat in a room as 600,000 cubic feet of projections and Van Gogh’s artwork flooded around us. “There’s two ways to watch this,” the ticket handler at the door told us, “You can watch it like a movie or you can experience it.”

I’m not very good at experiencing art. I feel bad about this, but so it is. Usually I walk around a museum for about twenty minutes, and then I think, That was cool. Is there a cafe or a gift shop? I don’t really know enough about art for it to touch me most of the time—but every once in a while, every once in a while it barrels past my ignorance and tags me anyway.

In the exhibit they sometimes animated the paintings, and one in particular caught my eye. It was on every wall, this gnarled and bent over man, rocking back and forth and I thought, I recognize that. I know that feeling.

At Eternity’s Gate, Vincent Van Gogh, 1890.

It’s hard for me to explain depression. I’ve really tried. I say, for me, depression is not being able to feel the things I know. I know God loves me. I know the people around me love me. I know I am not (just) a burden on them. I know that things will probably be OK. But when I’m depressed, even though I still know those things, I can’t feel them. Being depressed is swimming up stream all the time, even when I’m just sitting there, even when I’m just existing. So to do anything else, to add anything to just the pressure of being feels, like I’m not going to make it, I’m going to drown. Depression feels like hanging off a cliff face with my finger nails, it feels like hope slipping through my fingers like water, it feels like every touch bruises.

I try to name depression, to put words to it, but I can’t make words be what it is. The words sound dramatic, and depression doesn’t feel dramatic, it just feels bottomless.

I don’t think I would have had to describe this to Vincent Van Gogh. Although there’s a lot written on it, it’s unclear what Van Gogh’s mental illness would be diagnosed as today. Guesses range from bipolar disorder to schizophrenia, two diseases I only really know about from movies, which is to say, I don’t know anything about them. But he knew what it was to be betrayed by his body and crushed by his chemistry. So it makes sense that he was the one who painted this man who, rocking back and forth, embodied for me what it felt like to live in a depressed body.

I didn’t know how depressed I was last year. I mean, I knew I was depressed, but it’s only now, after months of therapy and medication and yoga and meditation and a ridiculous amount of physical affection and affirmation from the people around me that I have it in me to sit back and look at this painting and really let myself realize. I was so sick.

I don’t really know what to do with this fact. When I saw the painting at the exhibit, it hurt so bad I almost couldn’t move. I remembered so vividly what it felt like to not be able to stop crying, to not have it in me to make food even when I was so hungry.

Oddly but inevitably, when I looked up this painting, I found that it didn’t mean to Van Gogh what it meant to me. Before it was a painting, this image was a sketch and lithograph. This bent over man was haunting Van Gogh’s artwork for eight years before it was finalized in blues and oranges. Though painting is sometimes also called The Sorrowing Old Man, indicating some purposefulness to mourning that I found in it, the other title is At Eternities Gate. Van Gogh wrote that it was meant to capture “the existence of 'something on high' . . . namely in the existence of a God and an eternity . . . something precious, something noble, that can't be meant for the worms.”

I looked at that man and remembered what it was like to be afraid to go outside. Van Gogh looked at him and said, “There must be a God.” The old man was so glorious, Van Gogh thought, that his existence couldn’t possibly be without meaning.

There’s incongruity between what I see and what Van Gogh painted. I see hurt, he saw eternity. I think we’re probably both right.

Since I’ve been at divinity school, I’ve had a lot of people ask me about the meaning of suffering. They’ll call after a traumatic experience, after talking to someone who can’t believe in God because of the hurt and evil in the world, and they’ll say, “Why? Why does this happen? Why does it exist at all?”

I did study this at divinity school. I read books and poetry, I went to lectures about the question. As I sit here thinking about it, quotes from Simone Veil and Monica Coleman are coming to mind, wisdom from scholarly foremothers that I respect and love—and, still, my answer remains, I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

I don’t know what it means that we suffer, but I do believe that our suffering cannot steal our meaningfulness from us. Even in our suffering we are still “something precious, something noble, that can’t be meant for the worms.” Even in our woundedness and pain, our humanity is still evidence of the divinity that created us. It’s a marathon of cognitive dissonance, but the pain does not cancel out the good. In fact, sometimes, but not always, pain makes us more alive to the good.

I don’t necessarily subscribe to experiencing the bitter being what lets us taste the sweet—but I can tell you that not being depressed after being depressed feels like being able to hear the soundtrack to my life. It feels like being able to see more colors—like I can see the stars the way they appear in the pictures, with greens and purples and oranges, instead of small twinkles on the edge of vision. It feels like getting pounded by a wave in my hometown, like waking up slow—it feels like everything, but more.

I don’t think I would have had to explain that to Van Gogh either.

Starry Night, by Vincent Van Gogh