Julie Barton was sitting on the couch one day with her head in her hands, utterly defeated by the severe depression that filled her with sadness and self-loathing, when she felt an unexpected warmth in her toes. Her fluffy red golden retriever puppy, Bunker, was sitting on her feet
On an average day, I leave my apartment at 8 a.m. and walk to my 9 a.m. class that is located roughly 10 minutes away from where I live, 15 if I’m walking slowly. More often than not, when I reach the halfway point to my destination, I start to worry if I forgot class materials or if I locked the door.
When I was at rock bottom, I’d joke that Dementors were trailing me. It was the only explanation for my waning ability to feel. I carried around bars of Dairy Milk like pocket-sized Patronuses. It was easier to joke about it than to name it.
NEARLY 20 years ago, I was a social worker in a county jail where I first began to understand just how frequently the police deal with people with mental illnesses. Run-ins with the police were a regular occurrence for many of my clients, with officers often knowing them by name. They were overwhelmingly poor, and poor people with mental illnesses are also likely to experience homelessness andsubstance abuse — issues that place them at increased risk of police contact and incarceration.
When Jack O’Connor was 19, he was so desperate to beat his addictions to alcohol and opioids that he took a really rash step. He joined the Marines.
Last year at this time, I laid to rest, a young man at the cusp of his young adult life. He had been driving along a secluded backwoods road and had decided to text his girlfriend that he was on his way home from work. In so doing, he veered over into the oncoming lane as he crested a hill. Unfortunately, a man of middle age was traveling on his way to work and crested that same hill at that same moment. They collided, both died.
“Pssst!” With that one syllable, Dave Hamrick can tell how his wife is feeling. It might be a confident “pssst” if she’s happy; a quiet, deflated one if she’s feeling sad. “An enthusiastic one would be like pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst,” he demonstrates, in a psst that lasts several seconds. “That means she’s interested in a little more than just cuddling,” Hamrick says with a smile.
Help is needed for a retired Golden Valley police officer who has fallen on hard times.
“Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in 1999, in the New Yorker piece that would lead to his magnum opus Kitchen Confidential. He proclaimed the professional kitchen “the last true refuge of the misfit,” and while many would argue that still holds true nearly two decades later, even now there pervades an unfortunate double standard in which the sort of so-called dysfunction that often drives people toward cooking as a profession is still too heavily stigmatized to talk about.
When I fall prey to the black dog, it’s easy to tell. My depression manifests in baking: jars filled with rapidly aging cookies, racks of untouched cupcakes, freezers glutted with brownies. Typically I find baking soothing, but there’s nothing soothing about this frenzy of activity. It’s a Hail Mary attempt to wrest a little accomplishment from life, the last of my energy reserves wasted on food whose presence, whether it’s a success or failure, becomes another reproach. Baking is about the triumph of precision over creativity, but in these moments my approach is slapdash and the results uneven. If cooking can be a means of nourishing and communing, this is the opposite, a sort of gingerbread fortress of solitude.