Author’s Trigger Warning: Though the author is in no way a certified expert on the subject, this story contains references to the mental health condition called depression.
It is a commonly held belief that depression primarily presents with symptoms of lethargy, such as the individual wants to sleep all the time, or lacks motivation, or is sad, or even suicidal. While these symptoms certainly are part of the canon, they are not the only way that depression manifests itself in a person’s actions and reactions.
I learned a couple decades ago when a close friend of mine and I came very close to forever ending our friendship, that depression can also present as anger and aggression. Several weeks ago, I had to remind myself of the decades-old incident with my friend in order to try to find a way to process the anger leveled at me by a total stranger who unleashed an unprovoked verbal attack.
I walk each morning through several nearby neighborhoods where a number of people pass by on bicycles or on foot with a wave and a friendly hello and good morning. This has become the usual way of things in a pandemic. Some people wear masks, one man adds gloves to his attire, and everyone observes the cautionary six-foot distance.
Observing the six-foot distance might be initiated by a runner or walker as much as a block in advance. I’ve seen people cross to the other side of the road, and I’ve seen people with dogs move off the sidewalk into the grass where they simply wait until an oncoming walker has passed. I started to notice that walkers routinely yield to runners, and if there are two runners, we both move to our grassy sides of the sidewalk to create the proper distance. An unspoken and unwritten social contract has evolved among those of us who are active. It was really nice. Until one person wasn’t nice at all.
It was the first week of May, 2020, and a small percentage of people, fed up with social distancing and sheltering in place, had begun to voice their anger. Social contracts be damned, they ranted, their freedom and constitutional rights were under attack and they were having none of it.
During this same early week in May, as I walked my usual pathway, I saw a woman heading towards me. She was walking very fast. I had just transitioned into an older part of the neighborhood where the sidewalks are considerably more narrow. They are too narrow to be able to observe the six-foot recommendation. As she got closer I could clearly see she had no intention of moving off the sidewalk herself, so I took the initiative and stepped off into the grass as I continued moving forward. She gave me a bit of a glare and scowl as she approached and then at the moment we were parallel she muttered, “Fuckin weirdo.”
I’ve never been very good at comebacks. When people say shocking, insulting, stupid, or nonsensical things to me, I live in a world of the stunned. I can live there for several days trying to figure it all out and I toy with phrases that would have been the perfect thing to say.
In this case I’ve decided that the only thing that may have had an impact is, “Well, bless your heart.” But then I remember that her anger is undoubtedly the result of a lifelong struggle with depression. And for that, she’ll need some serious meds and a psychiatrist.
Copyright DJ Anderson, 2020
