Swamped: On Depression and Vision

ABSTRACT “Swamped” cracks open my experience of depression by exploring how a specific place—a swamp—acted on me to bring social and emotional injuries, but also modes of seeing that ultimately moved me out of the depression, to the fore. In writing from this specific place, I build on moments in which something—a desire for beauty, the luminosity of blue, the dullness of gray, the vibrancy of lichen, and the slippage between seeing and …