TRANSCRIPT
I’m gonna tell a story about my first real experience with depression. I was 14 years old. I didn’t even know what depression was, and I got this really exciting opportunity to go live with a family in Spain for a month. I thought it was going to be great, and it turned out from the very beginning that it wasn’t great.
One of the basic problems was that I didn’t speak Spanish. While some people in the family I was staying with did speak English, a lot didn’t. Most of the people that I had any chance of interacting with didn’t speak English. So what happened to me is that I became extremely socially isolated, more socially isolated than I’d ever felt in my life. It was so painful, and I didn’t have any real knowledge of how to deal with it.
So one of the things I thought is I wanted to go back home. I wanted to fly back to America, but it was very expensive, the airline. And also, it’s like that was only part of it. The other part of it was I didn’t want to let my parents down and make them think I was really weak. Another part of it was I didn’t want to admit to the family that I was staying with that I hated it there because they seemed to have no awareness at all how unhappy I was. And also, I wanted to not let myself down. I wanted to be strong and be tough. So I toughed it out.
But man, it was during that month that I first learned in my own mind the concept of depression. This is depression. I felt so stuck. I felt so lonely. I felt so hopeless. I felt so unhappy. I was actually just miserable.
Now, how did I deal with it? This is kind of sad, but at that time, one of my activities that I loved to do, especially in the summer—and I was in Spain in the summer—was I loved butterfly collecting. There were lots of new butterflies in Spain, so I thought, you know, at the least I can make the best of this and I can improve my butterfly collection.
So what I did is I was able to make a net. I got a pole, and I got some netting, and I got a wire, and I made a net. I went out every day and I caught lots and lots of butterflies. I would pin them out into my collection. And then we also went to Portugal for a week on a trip. It wasn’t all that fun for me because, again, I was very socially isolated. But it was summer, and there were so many beautiful flowers out. As a result of that, there were tons of butterflies, kinds I had never seen before—all these strange swallowtails and these fertile areas that had, like, oh, I don’t know, silver markings on them. It was really amazing.
So I was catching butterflies left and right. I brought all the ones from Spain with me, and I had them in shoeboxes. I had all these shoeboxes full of butterflies that I’d pinned out, and I’d worked so hard. It was like this was making me feel like my trip had been worth it, my trip had been valuable. In spite of all the misery and the depression, the fact that I really was getting almost nothing out of it—I couldn’t even watch TV with the family because it was all dubbed. It was mostly American television, which was ironic, but it was all dubbed into Spanish. I couldn’t even understand it.
So I remember one day I’d been out in this—I think it was like a church area or a monastery even. They had a big garden, a big public art. I came back with all these new butterflies that I’d caught, and I was gonna pin them out, make them so they were ready to be presented. I came back, and I looked in one of the shoeboxes in my bedroom, and I discovered something absolutely horrible. It was covered in ants—thousands and thousands of ants somehow had found my collection of Spanish and Portuguese butterflies, and they were just eating their bodies. They were just covering them. It was just black ants covering everything.
I literally freaked out. I was like, “Oh my god!” I grabbed the boxes and I ran, and I took them to the family freezer, and I started putting them in the freezer. The mother, she’s like, she didn’t want me to do it. “Those are full of idiots! You can’t put those in the freezer!” And I was like, “I have to!” I was crying. I was sobbing. It was like there was weeks of my work—it was all just getting ruined. All the gorgeous butterflies I had—also butterflies that I had killed for the purpose of putting in a collection—were being destroyed for no purpose. It just, like, everything about it was wrong.
So what I remember is she eventually let me put them in the freezer so I could make fries off the ants and remove them because I couldn’t get them off the butterflies otherwise. But what happened is that I’d been out for hours, and the ants had been in there for hours, and it was too late. So by the time I was able to get rid of all of the ants, all I had was wings—tons and tons and tons of butterfly wings. I probably caught over a hundred butterflies, so each butterfly had four wings, so it was probably like 400 wings. They’d eaten away all the bodies, so the wings had nothing to attach to. I was looking at my entire collection, which was now just piles and piles of beautiful, perfect butterfly wings, and it was completely horrifying.
It was like, it was interesting to know, yeah, you can be depressed, and on top of it, you can feel even worse than depressed. Well, I had two ways to solve this problem. One of the ways was that I later made fake bodies, or even I caught, like, or found, like, dead butterflies on the side of the street, and I picked their wings off. I used these other butterflies’ bodies, and I actually glued a lot of these discarded, ruined wings to these fake bodies, and I sort of made new artificial butterflies. Some of them actually turned out kind of good, so that I actually was able to salvage some of the ruined butterflies, the eaten butterflies.
The other thing is I was like, “Oh my god! I think I had one week left, maybe three days in Portugal and like four days in Spain.” I was like, “Daniel, you gotta make up for it!” So it just totally gave me a focus, a distraction from my depression, and a purpose. And so what I did is I went out and I caught as many of the butterflies as I could. I put them in places where there were no ants. I think I put, like, salt also around the edges of their shoeboxes so the ants couldn’t get in. I caught as many as I could, but I couldn’t catch a hundred. But I caught, I don’t know, I probably got like twenty or thirty species, so at least I was able to bring some things back.
But man, when I finally got back home to America, you know, I learned a big lesson about depression—that a lot of it really is just situational. Because I felt better as soon as I got back. I was back into the middle of a social environment where I felt safer. I had friends, I could speak my language, I didn’t feel totally alienated. But in fairness, a lot of the depression I would experience as I got older would not be so easily shed by changing situations. And eventually, to heal that more embedded depression, I’d have to face the traumas that I’d experienced in my family of origin.