You Wouldn't Be So Depressed If You Really Believed in God

“You Wouldn’t Be So Depressed If You Really Believed in God” is a photographic response to my lifelong battle with depression. Through abstracted self-portraiture, I explore how this invisible illness affects my children, my creative practice, and my relationship with daily life. Through photography I look at how my faith (or lack there of), cultural assumptions, and role as mother shape how I understand and relate to depression. I do not attempt to create self-portraits in the traditional sense, but instead I show the fragmented and sometimes distorted ways in which I experience relationships and the mundane rituals of every day life. How inanimate objects can often represent more than just an uneaten apple and how depression can make your world, regardless of how beautiful and safe it might be, feel heavy, dark and frightening. Whenever I was having a particularly hard time, my mother would say to me: “You wouldn’t be so depressed if you really believed in God.”. As a child, this advice made me feel like I was not only failing God and my family, but that I was completely powerless. Years later I came across Jane Kenyon’s poem “Having it out with Melancholy”, and discovered that the same phrase my mother often said to me, “You wouldn’t be so depressed if you really believed in God.”. It filled me with great emotion to read that the “advice” which had haunted me since childhood had factored into Kenyon’s also. “When I was born, you waited behind a pile of linen in the nursery, and when we were alone, you lay down on top of me, pressing the bile of desolation into every pore. And from that day on everything under the sun and moon made me sad even the yellow wooden beads that slid and spun along a spindle on my crib. ...... 3. Suggestion From a Friend You wouldn’t be so depressed If you really believed in God.” - Jane Kenyon