Unravelling

Kurt: 00:00

The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Always consult with a qualified health care professional for any health concerns. Take care of yourself out there.

Mary: 00:23

Welcome to Unraveling. This is a podcast that sees the world through the lens of mental health. I'm Mary Wilson, a journalist.

Kurt: 00:31

And I'm Curt White, a social worker and psychotherapist.

Mary: 00:35

And we're so happy to be bringing you another really interesting conversation with an author, an author who we met as part of the Brattleboro Retreats collaboration with the Brattleboro Literary Festival. And we got to speak to Peter Mendelsohn.

Kurt: 00:50

Oh, yes. And I was so excited to do this, partly because this kind of episode where we get to talk to really interesting creative people who've spent countless hours producing work for others to digest. I think it always tells us something about the way that people are organized, the psyche, the soul, But also because he's just such an interesting person. He did a reading from his new novel, Weepers, at the Brooks Library just up the hill from the hospital here. Then we walked down the hill to my office and sat at this very table where you and I are now and had a wonderful conversation about this other book that he's recently produced, Exhibitionist.

Mary: 01:36

Yeah. And you have that book on your lap right now, and I've really never seen something like it where it's taking portions of his own personal journal from a time when he was really severely depressed. And there's also paintings throughout where he was using painting as a sort of coping mechanism for the struggle that he was dealing with.

Kurt: 01:56

Yes. On the front it says, One Journal, One Depression, 100 Paintings. You know, and it is kind of that. It's a very interesting creative use of different ways of telling a story about something to really paint a picture, for lack of a better word, of what this deep depressive experience was like for him, and his recovery out of it also, which happens very gradually over the course of the book.

Mary: 02:25

And his journal entries and these paintings weren't even going to see the light of day until I guess he realized that they were worth sharing.

Kurt: 02:33

Yeah. This was really, I think, a personal exercise for him in sort of survival day to day more than in producing a work that was expected to be digested. He really didn't expect people to see this. It's a very powerful sharing. I'm very grateful to him for sitting down with us.

Kurt: 02:52

And well, I'll just tell you a little about him and let's get into it. Peter Mendelson is the author of seven books, including Weepers, The Delivery, Same Same, and nonfiction books, What We See When We Read, Cover, and The Look of the Book, as well as the current exhibitionist. He's a renowned cover designer and the creative director of the Atlantic.

Mary: 03:14

Let's take a listen.

Kurt: 03:25

Welcome to Unraveling. Peter Mendelson.

Peter: 03:27

Thank you so much for having me.

Kurt: 03:29

Absolutely. I was hoping we could talk a bit about your book Exhibitionist and the process that you went through to write it, you know, and even I think you're reflecting on it now. Because I I find it such a remarkable book in a lot of ways, a little bit unlike anything I've ever read as a kind of depression memoir. What brought you to write this book?

Peter: 03:52

First of all, thank you very much. I always love to hear people say that it's unlike something else. The background for the people listening is that this series of rolling depressions that I suffered during this period, I took up painting as a novice and, managed to produce a lot of them, the end result of which was the potential to maybe put these together as a art monograph, which seemed really boring to me. And as it happened during these depressions, I had been keeping a journal for the first time in my life. So I had all of this material and it occurred to me while I was making the art at that time.

Peter: 04:29

I was writing the journals at this time. Maybe they paired in some interesting way. Strangely, the art is very bright and colorful. And the first thing I noticed when I tried to put the journals and the art side by side is that crazy contrast that somehow I was managing to paint these paintings that were not depressive while I was just seriously and dangerously depressed. And I think, you know, just wearing my hat as a writer and someone who's worked in publishing for many years, it did seem interesting to me in almost a literary way.

Peter: 05:02

Like, what what would this be like for people to encounter this, you know, this disjuncture between these two modes? And the title exhibitionist just refers both to the showing the work, the paintings, like in other words, it's an exhibit, but also like what was my deep shame and what is no longer my deep shame around discussing my own mental health and the damage that I felt that I had been causing both to myself and the people around me. And I write in the book and I think this was true for me that of the aspects of depression that felt the hardest for me, you know, other than the, obviously, the despair. The alienation that was caused by not being able to communicate what my condition was and what my state of of being was to to others. You feel very cut off and there's also this sense of, you know, I was already so guilty about the depression, the idea that I would spend more time talking about it.

Peter: 06:03

I just didn't wanna drag down the people that I loved and in the absence of anybody to talk to or even a language with which to talk about it, there was a loneliness that was absolutely complete.

Kurt: 06:18

That was a thing I really appreciated about it is how clearly you really show that side of the depression. That it is that that part that wants to hide it even in the depths of suffering. That you're desperate to communicate about it, but you can't possibly

Peter: 06:35

Yeah.

Kurt: 06:35

Burden other people with this.

Peter: 06:37

Yeah. It's the yeah. The burdening is a big deal, think, when you have for me, you know, my kids and my wife and, you know, everybody around me has known who I am for many years, and I think the trope for me has been because I'm bipolar. Right? So the trope has been, well, Peter is so productive, and he's so lively and garrulous, and he can be funny, and, you know, he does so many things.

Peter: 07:01

And then it's like, where's Peter? He's been gone for three months, and, you know, Peter is crying in bed. So my family knew me well enough to know that these are things that happened to me, but I don't think any of us really had the language to know why. And I think especially for children, it's very confusing. And as a kid, I think with a parent, if there isn't good communication, you of course make up you make up worst case scenarios and you're you're, you know, you build your own narratives.

Peter: 07:31

And when I was a child, my father was very very sick and also manic, undiagnosed, and also suicidal, and none of this was spoken about at all. In fact, it was hidden from the kids. He also had a brain tumor, which none of us knew about. Mean, my sister and I didn't know about, and, you know, my father's mother didn't know about. I mean, this was a secret, and I think that was both to quote unquote spare the people he loved.

Peter: 08:01

And also, I think there was shame there too. Right? Because there's shame around all kinds of illnesses in our you know, these are weaknesses, I think it's seen in our in our culture. So I firsthand know what it's like to be a kid where there's silence around a parent who is suffering from something, and I should have known better at the time and I should have articulated to my children exactly what I was going through. And I should have discussed it from the point of view of my own origin in my family.

Peter: 08:32

I should have discussed it from a chemistry point of view, I think would have been very useful for them to see this as, you know, the chemical determinism of it. You know, this is this is not my fault, in other words, and although it very much felt like it was. That was the fundamental tension for me.

Kurt: 08:52

One thing in the book that I I mean, when I say that I think it's different than things I've read before. One thing that I mean is that you you sort of drop the reader right into the middle of that despair with you without really framing it very much at all. And I I love that. There's something feels very maybe that's the therapist in me. That's that's

Peter: 09:14

kind

Kurt: 09:14

of because that's how it comes to us. You know? It's this very, you know, the non metabolized form. But you almost never read memoirs of it partly because it's I think it's so hard because you don't you can read it and you don't know that that person knows he's gonna get better.

Peter: 09:31

Yeah. You know, in that is kind of also the nature of a journal is that there is a day to day ness of it. So if you were to open it at random I mean, it wasn't at random. I thought, well, this is the worst of the depression. I will just start at my well, it actually turned out not to be the lowest point, but I will I will start at this moment where I have my family and I have left our life in New York City.

Peter: 09:53

We've moved to this remote place. It seemed like that's where I would start the novel. So that's the journal entry that I started with. But, yeah, I was very much in the middle of it. That particular depression, I'd had many up until then that had been increasing in frequency and depth since my twenties, but I really knew that this was the big one.

Peter: 10:16

I knew in in my water as they say that this was gonna be the one that was like make or break. It was that bad and, you know, that's where I started around the moment where I was just coming to terms with the fact that like, oh, here we are. This is it.

Kurt: 10:32

And I think it's, there's always that tension for me as a therapist between the, I don't know, the sort of meaninglessness of a depressive episode, the way that it's like Thomas Ogden says, an attack on meaning almost. It just sort of pulls you away from everything that you have, and then this sort of meaning making enterprise that we have where we we have to try to make sense of the muck that we're living in even when it's hard to shower. Right? I mean, this is and you do that in a way. Right?

Kurt: 11:02

You're making sense of intergenerational trauma from the holocaust, of your father's un metabolized suicide attempts, secrets in the family at the same time as you're trying to get out of bed and make it to the barn. Right? I find that really remarkable.

Peter: 11:19

Yeah. It's a funny thing. Meaninglessness is a very good way to frame it. There there's no you can't get any traction on anything in the world. This is what I mean by alienation, like, there are no hooks to meet the Velcro, you know.

Peter: 11:32

It's just you're sliding off everything and just everything is slippery and it's like you're you're in this body of water and you're surrounded by these slippery rocks and you can't pull yourself up. But I do find that the bravery that one encounters with people who suffer from these kinds of things is in fact remarkable. It has been some of those things like taking a shower or there were many times where, you know, I have a job. I had a job. I had to show up and do things and to be able to get dressed and get out the door felt impossible.

Peter: 12:13

And it does and I think other people will recognize if they suffer in this way that these are the moments that just, you know, they're battlefields. I still to this day, the narrative has been, you know, if you go on NPR or something, the introduction will be, you know, essentially something like how painting saved Peter Mendelson's life. And that really was not the case. It was You mentioned meaning was gone and desire was gone and connection was gone, and I didn't feel more of it when I was painting. And I think I maybe say this in a journal, but it did keep my hands busy.

Peter: 12:51

And there were moments where my brain could just focus on, well, does this line make sense with this circle or this color makes sense with this color? And that was a little bit of a reprieve, but, you know, it didn't in fact save me. What saved me was therapy and medication and friendship and family. I I find it's really important for me to say that and and I don't wanna you know, I believe very strongly that art therapy is is powerful and can do a lot of work. It just didn't do it for me.

Peter: 13:24

The medication changed my life and the therapy changed my life. And being able through those two vehicles to be able to finally express myself to my loved ones changed my life. And the fact that at the end of it all, I have these 100 somewhat paintings feels weird. It feels in a way like if I had saved every single one of my tears. Do you know what I mean?

Peter: 13:51

Like, this is this residue. It's like something that was excreted during this time.

Kurt: 13:56

Do you think that, you discovered something new about depression for yourself in going through this episode?

Peter: 14:03

Yes. Most definitely. I think a lot of the important things that I discovered about depression were about my own relationship to depression, which I do mean, like, I did stop blaming myself for it. There was a radical acceptance of it that was absolutely necessary to get beyond it and an understanding that this is not who I am. This is something I am suffering from.

Peter: 14:30

That distinction was very important to me. And when I first started medicating, I remember being hopelessly philosophical about everything, thinking a lot about, well, who will I be if my brain chemistry is different? And really sort of going round and round, perseverating in my head about this. And, you know, at the end of the day, the truth is I am me, but really me. It's funny, like, there's an amnesia that sets in and I remember this with the bipolarity that, you know, it was very hard when I was depressed to remember the times where I was manic and very hard for me to remember when I was manic what it felt like to be depressed.

Peter: 15:07

For me now, I recognize that, you know, the relief of not being depressed anymore had abetted in my not being able to come to terms with it, in my not being able to treat it properly. And I think being able to articulate in the journal what it felt like, you know, the phenomenology of it, the the day to day feeling. You know, we speak a lot about these things in the abstract as if there are things outside of us. They're objects. There's the depression.

Peter: 15:37

The depression and then there's me and the depression. I have the depression, like I have a loaf of bread or I have, you know, a broken nose or But to be able to describe what it is to be inside of it was very useful to me in that I could kind of uncover for myself what it was that I was suffering from. And in the end, it is the things that I've described to you at the beginning of this conversation. It was the loneliness and the alienation and the despair that that would never end. And I think for me, is that to be able to connect with other human beings is I think like food and water and air, it's just absolutely necessary to survive.

Peter: 16:20

And in a way, you don't have that, if you're unable to have or maintain that ability to make that connection, it's hard to be alive. Paul

Kurt: 16:33

Russell was a psychiatrist in Cambridge, Mass for a long time, and he he would write these papers on his typewriter and just give them to students and wouldn't bother publishing them. Someone published a bunch of them after he died, but and he was well known enough. He'd been doing that. But but if you trained in the Cambridge area at a certain time, you you had these photocopied versions of Paul Russell's papers. And one that was my very favorite was a little two or three page thing called The Radical Cure.

Kurt: 17:01

And he sort of talks a little bit about the history of treatments and things like that. But ends with the wonderful sentence, the the radical cure is time and love.

Peter: 17:10

That's right. That's very beautiful. That feeling of human connection and knowing that there are people who not only want you to be your best self and and you're hurting them by not bringing them in, that that that is not an act of love, that the act of love I thought I was providing by keeping it from everybody was in fact not an act of love. It was an act of denial. And as soon as I was able to share, people just jumped at the opportunity to be helpful, which is surprising how lovely people are.

Peter: 17:50

You know? Why should it be so surprising?

Kurt: 17:52

I love that. I I do think that that's a big part of what I feel your work is offering, actually, is that is a a kind of post post modern sincerity. Right.

Peter: 18:07

Right.

Kurt: 18:07

And know, where you've really signaled to the reader that this is darker than you can imagine. This is more perplexing and confusing than you can imagine. I often had the sense that things were moving backwards and forwards in time in the book. The leitmotif of negative space, which you use so brilliantly to frame the book literally and as a way of I think saying, there's more to this than I've written down. I'm not guiding you through this.

Kurt: 18:34

I'm just offering this.

Peter: 18:36

Yes. That's such a perceptive read. I mean, the interesting thing about a journal, it's very hard to see entry to entry like it is day to day in life, sort of what the thematic material is. And it was kind of cool at the end of the day compiling the book and I was looking at it and I was like, oh, there are themes here. And you're right, negative space was one of them and just the absolute freedom of making like two marks on a blank canvas.

Peter: 19:06

And that does allow people to fill in those spaces, much like in a book. And in a way, the book ends with this painting of my father's that is just full of negative space. And you know, the negative spaces for him as a boy that existed in his apartment that was filled by his family and other families who had just gotten out of Poland, the lucky few, everybody else having disappeared. Was that was I saw a letter of his recently after my mom's dying where she described it as apartment that was full of the valorous dead. In other words, this whole cohort of people who were all sort of canonized by virtue of their deaths to grow up with these ghosts that he was trying to fill in these backstories.

Peter: 19:55

For him, he grew up with all of these these question marks. My grandparents, his parents, who I was very close with, never talked about the war, and that silence and then the silence in my household. And, like, these are the negative forms of negative space. And so to be able to write about that as I was kind of enacting it on a canvas was I think I was trying to get to something there without knowing it.

Kurt: 20:24

Yeah. I do love your paintings. I wanna say that I was really, you really do have a talent for it, and I hope you continue to to work on it even if you don't think of yourself as a as a painter in that way, like you said earlier.

Peter: 20:38

But thank you very much. I mean, I have a very confusing relationship to the paintings because, you know, there was another form of self annihilation that was happening during the painting process, which is that, you know, I came at it with no expertise. And I think what I was trying to do was make something that had as little to do with me as humanly possible, which was a reflection, I think, of the depression. And what I mean by that is sometimes both I would create techniques where I would paint left handed or I spin myself around before I painted or I was trying to I was trying to get myself out of the picture. And then, you know, also, I was taking opioids and I was drinking.

Peter: 21:25

And it's funny because there's a whole artistic tradition, literary artistic whatever musical tradition of the annihilation of the artists. I think it was Verlaine who described the the derangement of the senses and this idea that if you really go to this place where you've rid yourself of yourself, that that's where great art happens. But I think for me, it was really just if I was going to do this thing, which I was doing, you know, I talked about trying to get through the days and putting one foot in front of the other. It was also, you know, putting one paint stroke after another, putting you know, stretching one canvas after another, that a lot of that was like, okay, I'm gonna do this, but it's not gonna have anything to do with me. That at the end, whatever is produced, like I said, is like tears or sweat or and it would be garbage and I wouldn't care about it and I would just pile it up on some midden like I would and like a bunch of old mattresses and, because I didn't really have I didn't have an ego anymore, so I had no desire to share them.

Peter: 22:32

I couldn't imagine people knowing about it happening. You know, and I punished the paintings physically. Like, I really punished them. I poured things on them. I dragged them around.

Peter: 22:43

I left them out in the rain. I I'd beat them. You know, the the funny end result is that there's this wonderful texture to them now. And I like

Kurt: 22:52

so There is a and you you say, you know, this this piece made with dirt and, mud and coffee and whiskey and, you know, and acrylic.

Peter: 23:02

Right. Well, it's funny. It's a little like, you know, if you were to go to a show and you were to look at the little plaques next to the painting and they were to say something like, you know, charcoal pencil pain. Mhmm. Exactly.

Kurt: 23:18

I love that you said at one point, by the way, you were using more whiskey on the painting, so at least you had less to drink. You know? So, you know

Peter: 23:28

Whatever it takes. I

Kurt: 23:32

dropped into therapist mode with that. But and I love that. And I just wanna say I also love the technique of writing a word and then hiding the word. And no one will ever see this word. But everyone will see, you know, I'll see people.

Kurt: 23:47

You see this or don't see it, this kind of, like, expressing, hiding kind of dichotomy. It's so beautiful.

Peter: 23:54

Oh, thank you. It's, you know, it's it's funny, beauty. Right? I mean, I and again, completely unintentional. I think so much happens during a depression that you're just not you know, I would like to say I was not myself.

Peter: 24:07

I, again, don't know anything about depression. I don't really like I said, I haven't read the literature. I certainly don't know the clinical literature. I don't know how to talk about it in a way that's anything other than the way I talk about it because I'm me, and so I I I worry about saying the wrong things or any trip wires there, but, I really was not myself during the depression. I was I was in a different place in time.

Peter: 24:35

You know, I did say somewhere in the journal and I think in a way it's the most apt metaphor for how I felt was that I feel like I'm on a cage on Mars. Like it's that far removed is how I felt. But anyway, speaking of language, you know, without meaning to, I did this thing where I would write these words, often words about the very dangerous thoughts that I was thinking, and then I would paint over them and realize now, of course, how of like, duh. It's exactly what I was going through that there were these secret truths and then on top of it, you could just see the Peter, the public figures doing his thing and telling his jokes and writing his books and, you know, that the the viewer as it were would encounter the colors and the shapes, but then underneath them would be this this kind of horror show. But, you know, by the time that the depression started to alleviate, I was still painting at that point.

Peter: 25:36

It wasn't entirely gone, but it was getting better, and I started to become interested in the technique, which is a very different mode. Right? And then kept doing it.

Kurt: 25:47

You know, you say I I'm struck you say you don't know much about depression, but in a way, I don't know about that. I think, I don't know. Part of the whole point of this podcast endeavor is I think people ask too much of therapists, and they ask too little of their poets.

Peter: 26:03

Oh, that's a beautiful way to put that too. I guess what I mean really is that I wanna be conscious in talking about my depression about a, not talking about everyone's depression because I'm sure or I guess at least that depressions differ quite a bit, but also that there are experts and you are one, and there are people that know a lot about this stuff. And I know that there's new ways of thinking about depression, new ways of talking about depression that are I assume, like, hopefully, a lot of medical treatments and knowledge have evolved and there's more information and so I worry about being like retrograde. You know, guess this came up because I was saying something about I was not myself and for a second, sort of was interrogating that like the depressive is still human. Right?

Peter: 27:01

And so I just worried that somehow I was saying something that that somehow I was stepping on a tripwire of some kind because of course, in my depressions, it would have been unthinkable for somebody to think about that as me not being myself. But of course, it was a different self. It was a a self that was suffering from a disease.

Kurt: 27:24

Oh, yeah. Well, I I would really say I think you you got to the heart of something very important that probably isn't said enough, which is that it's it really is a very different state of mind. I I would think of it as a very distorted state compared to your to one's usual state. Yeah. And I mean, how else could we explain something like suicide, for example, where the person is really just completely convinced that that is the best possible option in that moment or the only option to escape that pain.

Kurt: 27:55

The reasons for it can be different individually, but I think that the fact that it's a you know, like another planet, you know, is really there's a truth to that.

Peter: 28:06

Yeah. That part's hard for me to talk about. Honestly, I wanna talk about it actually. And for me, it was like not best option, but only option when I was thinking about it and planning for it. I was told recently that, actually live on a podcast when I said, well, you know, I didn't obviously try.

Peter: 28:26

There was no real I was never hospitalized, you know, I was just planning and the person said just planning, like, you know, planning is a big like is a big warning light. But in the moments where I was truly close, it didn't feel like best of all possible options. Just felt like, you know, this is this is inevitable and everything was leading towards this. And, the worst part was the people will be better off, which is the part that's very hard for me to say out loud. But but of course, that's so wrong, you know?

Peter: 29:06

And in fact, it's sort of the least compassionate thing anybody could do, you realize. So that is a massive distortion, you know. I I think about the people in my family and just, you know, how indelibly damaged they would have been by that. It would have created a lifelong and perpetuated something. You talked about familial traumas and historical traumas.

Peter: 29:38

You know, I feel like even writing the book, I mean, my kids have been amazing about it. And I had talked to them before the book came out and obviously they got to read it before it came out and the reactions were remarkably unemotional in a good way. I mean, you know, 21, 22, and '25, like, they were like, oh god, dad, we know. You know? So it's just like kind of not I mean, obviously interested and they love me very much and, but having said the things and everybody knows what's on the table, what the playing pieces are, and what the calculus is, they could just go on being the age that they are.

Peter: 30:18

I think it was really buoying to see that they just didn't really give as much as shit as I was like, you know. I was like dreading it. And then it was like and I know it was hard for them in that period, obviously. I'm not trying to downplay that. My eldest said to me recently, she said like, dad, you seem like you're really doing good.

Peter: 30:40

And I was like, yeah. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. I really am. It was just so to be able to hear it and to be able to respond in that way is massively joy inducing.

Peter: 30:53

There was a moment during the depression. Towards the end, I was starting to get better, but I was still in it, where I visited a friend up here and he had just got a new puppy, a Labrador. And we were walking in the woods with the Labrador and we encountered a small lake and the dog had never seen a big body of water before. And in response, she just started tearing in circles around it, like so fast that she was like Tokyo drifting around the corners like she couldn't her hind quarters couldn't keep up with her, and her she was smiling, her eyes were bright, and it was just like pure unadulterated joy. And I remember thinking at that moment, I cannot remember the last time I feel this way.

Peter: 31:34

And then I thought, I don't think I'll ever feel this way again. And then this autumn, I went up to this big sculpture park in Upstate New York called Storm King, and it was this beautiful it was exactly a year ago. It was this beautiful fall day just like this one. And the sun was shining, and I was walking around, and all of a sudden, I just lay down in the grass. And the sun was hitting me, and I just closed my eyes.

Peter: 32:02

It was kind of spread eagled. And I was like, here it is. That was it. It was like, I'm back. I'm back, baby.

Kurt: 32:10

So some people might read a book like this and relate to it in a sense that they might be also going through a difficult time. But there's a bit of a risk, isn't there, that a person might start to feel like, you know, they should be also painting, you know, writing a book or doing something that will eventually be a sort of a large public endeavor. It's kind of interesting because as a therapist, there is that idea. Right? You don't wanna, like, make people feel like they have to do more than they have to do, right, which is so critically important at certain moments.

Kurt: 32:46

Right? Just get out of bed, walk across the room, do a little more than you did yesterday, and that really is fantastic. Right? But there is also this kind of phenomenon that that kind of opening up that a horrible period does to people. You do hear about this, and you see it, that it it does sort of transform you, and people do end up more sometimes more open to things inside of themselves that they can get a kind of better version of a thing that was in there all along.

Kurt: 33:18

Maybe that's a better relationship, a closeness with family. Maybe it is a I've known people to write like a whole book sometimes in an an amazingly complicated mental state with lots of mental illness going on. And you never know what's gonna come from people, and I don't wanna close it down either.

Peter: 33:38

Yeah. I can't remember if somebody gave me this advice or I was saying it to myself, but the what you just articulated, just do the simplest thing you can, see if you can do a little more than you did yesterday. Like that was critical for me to be able to think that way. You know, I talk a lot about the bed in this book about how it's of the unsafe places to be, the safest place I felt, but the most embarrassing place to remain. And, you know, I remember there's some part in the journal where it's like, I'm trying to get out of bed, And every single movement that I'm making is the hardest thing I've ever done.

Kurt: 34:15

It's a beautiful passage. I know how to remember it. This is the hardest that this and it's Yeah. It really captures it.

Mary: 34:28

Getting out of bed. I roll over onto one side. This is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. I prop myself up on my elbows. This is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

Mary: 34:41

I push myself back on my haunches. This is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. Push up to a crouch. This is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. Somehow, somehow, stand.

Mary: 34:55

Will I go to the barn? I thought about it all day. The trip is a short walk, but too far for me.

Peter: 35:07

It is important to recognize that I think that is a really important thing to remember for anybody that's suffering is that there is a kind of path and that path is to stay with what is simple and what's doable. And if you're gonna push yourself to do it in the gentlest ways and in the smallest ways and over time, it's like, you know, one drop after another, you get that ocean and that was very useful to me. And I wanted to say also that, you know, the fact that these paintings came out of the depression were very much because I just make things automatically and so I could have been falling out of an airplane without a parachute and I probably would have made like origami. I have no idea if I had paper on my hands. This is a very unlikely scenario.

Peter: 35:59

Yeah. But so, you know, there's no expectation I would think, for anybody who's suffering in this way to do anything outside of suffer. And if something does come, then it'll be in the manner in which that reflects who they are. And I've talked to other people enough to know that the depression can you know, I talk about it probably in negative terms that I shouldn't use, but I felt like so much was burnt out of me. And much of that was just self loathing, guilt, bad habits, a certain amount of grief, huge amount of shame, that the depression was so excoriating that I felt like when I came through it, that all of those things had been annihilated in me, and it did create this tremendous amount of openness and empathy.

Peter: 36:53

You know, it's like the Zen parable of the teacher filling the student's cup with tea and then just pouring and pouring and it keeps running over and the student's saying, you know, why are you doing this sensei? And he's like, trying to show you that the cup needs to be empty to be able to receive. But there was this sense of being hollowed out, of being really emptied out, at which point you get to fill up again. And there is this huge openness that has come to me, and there's much greater compassion in me now. And I can sit across from people and I can try to make connections with human beings in a way that doesn't feel taxing that I so enjoy I mean, I was caring for my mother for years as she was dying, which felt so good.

Peter: 37:41

I mean, the ability to help and connect as as I've been saying is so healing and salutary. Like, it's this thing that brings you outside of yourself and to just, you know, to do my mother's dishes, to do the more disgusting things in her illness. Any whatever it was, like, having gone through this to appreciate what help means and then to be able to provide it was one of the better medicines. So all of this is to say, I suppose, that painting was this kind of residue, this thing that came out of it. But there are many more important things that came out of it, and no one should be expected to come up with some huge project.

Peter: 38:21

The project is really to to get well.

Kurt: 38:25

Peter Mendelson, thank you so much for talking with us.

Peter: 38:28

Oh, it's totally my pleasure. It's very nice of you to have me.

Kurt: 38:45

Thank you again to Peter Mendelson for that wonderful conversation. Joining me again is Mary. Hi, Mary.

Mary: 38:51

Hi. That was so wonderful. I was really moved, and I've been thinking about that conversation a lot and the work that he does with the paint, how it started with the bright colors, such a contrast to the dark journal entries and the dark place he was in. And then when he was actually feeling better, he went to black and white paints. Right?

Kurt: 39:14

Isn't that interesting? Yeah. He's such an interesting creative person. I think you just see in the whole way that this book is constructed, multiple layers of thought and experience and message that he's working with here. I think the way that the writing weaves in and out of the visual media, as well as the representations of blank pages at the beginning and his description of how he created the works and trips to Michael's.

Kurt: 39:50

There's so much in it that I think is just about, it's a sort of complete picture of life itself in its way. Know, and its darkest moments. You know, as well as I think a complicated picture of all of the ways that our experiences are sometimes almost impossibly hard to share, because they're sort of locked away in the privacy of the soul. It's a very profound book, and I hope people will really check it out. It's something pretty special.

Mary: 40:29

And again, the book is called Exhibitionist, and you can get it wherever you get your books. And we'll also put a link to it in the show notes.

Kurt: 40:37

Thank you again to the Brattleboro Literary Festival, as well as especially to Peter Mendelson for all of their time and effort in this collaboration and in sitting down with us for this interview. I hope that people will check out Peter's other works. Will put some links to those and to his own website in our show notes as well.

Mary: 41:03

Thank you and we'll see you next time.

Kurt: 41:20

Unraveling is brought to you by Brattleboro Retreat. Our producers at Charts and Leisure are Andrew Adkin, Adkin, Hans Beuteau, and Jason Oberholzer.

Mary: 41:29

And you can find us on social media by searching Brattleboro Retreat. Brattleboro Retreat is committed to exploring diverse perspectives on mental health. While we invite hosts and guests to share their insights, the views expressed are their own and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of the hospital or its staff.