DEAR SEAN:
My life is coming apart, I’m depressed and I’ve been this way since this dumb pandemic started. I want to be happy, for my son who is 4 and needs me, but I can’t pull myself out of it, I just don’t know. I just had to tell someone and you seem like a nice person.
Sincerely,
NURSING-STUDENT-IN-SAN-DIEGO
DEAR SAN DIEGO:
Right now, the sun is blazing, the air is crisp. I’m listening to the Carter family sing “Keep On the Sunny Side,” circa 1926, on a Zenith turntable. My aunt sent me these old records.
I don’t know if you like old songs on scratchy vinyl, but this is a good tune.
“Keep on the sunny side,
“Always on the sunny side,
“Keep on the sunny side of life…”
It just so happens that there is a lot of science to back up this sunshine business.
Earlier this summer my Aunt Eulah mailed me several Carter family records and a book when she heard I’d been mildly depressed. I was in the
dumps because of something going on in my life which I will, for the purposes of privacy, refer to as an Unprecedented Global Pandemic Involving Every Single Human Being Alive.
My aunt’s old Carter family records were great. The book, not so much.
The book is a glorified science textbook. And I am not a science guy. Actually—and I mean no disrespect to Aunt Eulah—this book was about as fun to read as getting electrocuted by a kitchen appliance.
The book was all about the human brain. One of its main points was that being depressed is not caused by one specific event in life, nor by one specific system in the brain. Depression is caused by a traffic jam of things happening at once.
I don’t want to bore you, but imagine your brain is a map showing each U.S. airport.…