Self-Assessment

Around this time last year, the USB hookup in my car stopped working. I started to listen to the radio more and began to buy CDs again, something I hadn’t done much since I was a teenager. Greg Mendez played a concert in Nashville, and before he went on, I bought two from his merch table: his self-titled album from 2023, and Live at Purgatory, from 2022. I put them in my car. I try not to skip songs on either one. But I am happy when I hear him introduce the sixth track on Live at Purgatory, “Bike.”

It’s a short song. Mendez sings the lyrics only once. This is what I hear, which is different from what I see on Genius but is the same as in a handwritten lyric card I can partially see in a picture on Bandcamp:

I wanna ride your brother’s bike
I wanna stab his friends sometimes
I wanna tell a million lies
I wanna steal your partner’s heart
I wanna turn your pain to art
I wanna cry in your mother’s arms
I wanna wear your daddy’s jeans
I wanna drink the way he did
I wanna smoke menthol cigarettes
and I wanna fight
I wanna fuck on ecstasy
I wanna love, but what’s that mean?
I wanna go back on EBT

Those words take a little more than fifty-five seconds. It’s instrumental for a minute more. I only recently realized how short it is. It was a strange realization, because I love this song and talk about it to my friends, and would have thought I would have already noticed that it was so brief, or that it doesn’t have a chorus, or a bridge, or even more than one verse. But by the end of the lyrics, I am often so struck by his voice and by the way his voice says these things—which in his mouth are so beautiful, even if they are not necessarily beautiful things to say—that my mind has gone into outer space, and I guess the rest of the song, or its absence, has been lost on me.

Most of the lines follow the same pattern, aurally speaking, with an exaggerated, even artificial lift to Mendez’s last word. “I wanna ride your brother’s ^bike.” “I wanna tell a million ^lies.” “I wanna cry in your mother’s ^arms.” Some depart from the pattern or seem to move instead towards an elongated downturn in his voice, almost distended: “I wanna stab his friends some_tiiiimes.” “I wanna turn your pain to _aaaart.” The tonal structure almost follows an ABAB scheme, though not quite.

The exception is the second-to-last line. When Mendez says, “I wanna love, but what’s that mean?” his voice changes in quality: it is softer, less definitive. It is obviously asking a question, but I have also heard a sweetness, almost a wistfulness, a different wistfulness from the rest of the song. Maybe I have heard hope, particularly as it pairs with the guitar’s brief chord change. When set against the other lyrics, which seem to speak of pain, past pain, destruction, self-destruction, lost childhood, even self-hatred, the line has felt like a turn, or an allowance. And though the next, last line feels like a turning back—maybe not quite to the old pattern, but to an almost brash quality in his voice, and back to declaration—Mendez’s question remains alone: a quiet rest, or grace.

This December, “Bike” came on while I was stopped at an intersection. The second-to-last line sounded different. It suddenly occurred to me that Mendez’s voice, rather than earnest, might be bitter, maybe even cynical. Not “What is love? What does love mean? When will I know I have it?” but “What does it mean for me to say, ‘I want to love?’ What does it mean when I say anything? Do I even believe myself? Would anyone else?” His question seemed to point not outward, at existential wonder, but back at himself: to this person who might tell a million lies, who might exploit other people or take their things, whom he doesn’t know if he could trust to handle loving. I had never heard these lines that way before, even though his voice sounded the same as always.

I don’t know that I would have made much of my new interpretation if it had not been, at that time, only a week or two since I had taken my last available Lexapro, an antidepressant I’d been using at a low dose for five years, excluding the few months I swapped it for Wellbutrin. I had been curious if Wellbutrin wouldn’t make me so sleepy. I don’t remember if it made me less sleepy, but it did make me volatile; I switched back to Lexapro, and again I felt calm. Much of the stability, happiness, and connection I had built I attributed to the addition of Lexapro to my life, or at least to the person it allowed me to be. I didn’t think I would stop taking it.

But I was splitting my pills between my partner’s place and mine, imperfectly dividing three-month refills from a provider at the counseling center of the university where I had recently completed a graduate degree. I ran out more quickly than I thought I would, having miscounted the amount I had stored at my partner’s place. By the time I was able to get my new primary care provider to write me a prescription, enough time had passed that I understood the drug was no longer present in my body. I felt no different, and though I knew it was possible that this coasting wouldn’t last—that I would feel the loss of the medication in a few weeks, or maybe months—I was curious what would happen. It seemed possible that enough had changed in my life that I could live without Lexapro’s support, even if only for a little while. This felt like potentially new information, and information I would like to have. I made an appointment with a new psychiatrist. I thought the weeks until we were scheduled to meet would be a good length of time to conduct my experiment.

Because I was suddenly less medicated, I was alert, maybe over-alert, to any shift toward melancholy. In my car, listening to “Bike,” I wondered if the way I heard Mendez’s voice indicated a direction I did not want my perception to go. While it wasn’t necessarily unpleasant to hear something new, the difference pointed downward. I had heard his tender wonder. Suddenly I heard his self-disgust.

I have noticed that, when I am closer to experiences of depression—when I am in the middle of what I would call a depressive episode, or when I have just recently emerged—the centrifugal force of my own experience tends to draw in objects and other people, until I believe them all to be referencing a personal darkness not dissimilar from my own. This has happened enough that I know it to be temporary, if not false. I trust that when I inevitably feel better again, I will see things differently.

An example: Etel Adnan’s Shifting the Silence, which I bought and read in a happy part of my life. Her poems made me feel like I was looking at one of her paintings: held in their atmosphere, even if few of her words made much sense to me. From my first reading, I most remember a line about unrequited crushes—that they were like fallen angels, I think.

But when I read it again a year or two later, during my Wellbutrin months, I found myself focusing on a passage that suddenly seemed to say “depression.” I copied it down:

It’s gray outside, stormy. I am looking at the ocean, it’s some ten yards away, I wonder why its tide stops at a certain point, why it doesn’t enter my apartment, but I have to live my limitations, so I think that the ocean too has its own destiny.

 There’s a pale yellowish band above the horizon. Why does a horizon exist? To lift my spirit?

Right now this passage feels not quite neutral, but maybe ambivalent. Maybe it’s about depression; it feels a bit morbid, or at least as if it’s about the ends of things. But maybe there is an upward lilt, as though the speaker might intend to make someone laugh. It is kind of funny to compare your limits to those of the ocean. Limitations can mean many things—can be cozy, even, or imbued with a humble sense of what’s possible on a human scale. I can imagine the last two questions as wry, posed to a lover beside the speaker on a balcony. The lover is looking at the horizon, or at the speaker, who is pointing and saying, See that? That’s there to cheer me up. The partner might laugh. There might be something calm about the melancholy, if not peaceful—at least something through which it is possible to live.

But that was not what I saw when my depression felt closer. Depression seemed to be the subject. Maybe it is; I don’t really know. Even now, of course, I am connecting the text to my experience, even if my experience does not feel quite as narrow as it has in other moments of my life. I have placed a partner in the text, where maybe there is none. I guess I am thinking about my partner; I guess that has made him what I see.

In September, my partner began to refer to some of my connection-making tendencies as “the coffee phenomenon.” This “phenomenon” describes a pattern he observes in which I ascribe all changes in my experience of the world to the effects of physical substances I am taking or not taking, most often coffee, though sometimes other things. If I am happy, it is because I drank coffee; if I am sad, it is because I drank too much coffee or not enough; if I have a lot of energy, it is because I drank coffee or because I haven’t been drinking coffee; if I am tired, it’s because I drank very strong coffee or because I need more coffee. When I am not as focused on coffee, I might focus on something else: whether I have gone running, maybe, or whether I’ve had any alcohol in the last few days.

The joke of the “coffee phenomenon” is not quite that it is wrong: I am sure coffee does affect me; I am sure exercise affects me, and alcohol too. But even if I account only for those three variables, my focus on coffee would eliminate the effects of the other two, which might fluctuate even though they are excluded from the calculus. If I am happy on a Saturday morning, for example, I could attribute that to having had coffee, but that would mean it is not actually so relevant that I have not gone running, which a week earlier I might have said most related to my happiness. And of course there are many more variables than these three. Psychotropic medication would certainly be another.

But when I brought up this concept to my partner—that I was curious about my new read of the Greg Mendez song, and whether it might be connected to my recent change in medication, or whether that was a misattribution—he was not so interested. At the time, I had gone only a couple of weeks without Lexapro, and I suppose it seemed possible that I would suddenly deteriorate, maybe more quickly than I could coherently intellectualize. He used the words playing with fire rather than experimenting. He said, “This isn’t an exercise.” He said, “You talk about depression like it’s giving birth—like you don’t remember how awful it was.” I saw his point. I asked him to tell me if I seemed different; that I would be careful, too.

It is easier, of course, to wonder how the absence or addition of Lexapro might affect how I respond to a present stressor—for example, the Department of State’s indefinite withholding of my partner’s passport, along with those of others who tried to update their gender markers while it was still possible—than to worry about the intentions behind that withholding, or the implications of that loss for our capacity to leave this country together, should the government continue to graduate its violence towards trans people. I still didn’t fully anticipate what it would feel like to see my partner explicitly targeted by the executive branch of the federal government, even though we live in Tennessee, even if it isn’t new to see trans people targeted. In bed I kept finding myself trying to press as much of my body onto his as possible, as though I could transmit protection through the warmth of my skin. I didn’t know if it was an accurate read of the circumstance or depression leading my mind too far when I kissed him and felt I should pay attention, thinking I could one day lose him, whether to some kind of detainment or to the psychological consequences of his experience. It was too much. I went back on Lexapro.

Live at Purgatory was still in my car. On the way to work, I again heard Mendez differently, or heard something new. The way he said “art”—“I wanna turn your pain to art”—sounded less like a drop and more like the gentle waver of his question–”what’s that mean?” I wondered if this was an aural clue, the answer hidden in the test: one meaning of love, at least for Mendez. It seemed possible, or at least relevant to me. I wanted to make art, too; I wanted to make something out of this thing we were experiencing. But I also felt that love was starting to mean other things, had already come to mean new things, and would mean newer things still. I wanted to know what it would mean in a week. I want to know what it will mean the week after this. And I want my partner to get his passport back.

Devon Brody is a writer living in Nashville.

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