Here is the thing that bothers me most about the assertions that John Lennon lied about his final 5 years being his happiest.
You might thing it’s all of the horrible implications and outright accusations regarding Yoko that always accompany the assertion that, really, John Lennon lived out his final years in misery. Or you may think that it’s the unquestioningly capitalistic nature of the argument that his lack of production equates to a lack of satisfaction and happiness. It’s not. Though both of these things bother me greatly.
The most “credible” assertions that John spent his so-called Dakota Days miserably, not being a happy father and homemaker but a frustrated depressive, stem from actual evidence found in his journals – stolen, and never intended for public consumption, I would like to add yet again – where he writes and/or speaks of being depressed and/or even suicidal.
The thing is, I do not doubt for a second that John Lennon experienced a period, likely periods, plural, of depression during the last 5 years of his life.
I also don’t think that he was lying when he said that they were his happiest times.
“Why?” one might ask, assuming this to be a contradiction.
Because I’m a person who has struggled for more than half her life, to one degree or another, with depression.
John Lennon was also a person who spent most of his life battling depression. It’s a strangely under-acknowledged aspect of his life and personality, considering how exceedingly open he was about it. Such a major figure regularly discussing his bouts with mental illness, you’d think, would get some attention. But it usually doesn’t, unless it serves someone’s ulterior motives.
By John’s own account, he was depressed during the days of Help! He was depressed around Sgt. Pepper and especially following Brian’s death, at the time he met Yoko. He was depressed in 1970, when he got off heroin for the first time and entered primal scream therapy. And, as he has said countless time, he was depressed during the 1972-1973 period where he and Yoko were not getting along and eventually split.
Looking at the patterns of his own publicly acknowledged major depressive episodes, I would indeed be far more surprised if John Lennon did not experience at least one and more likely two bouts of intense depression during the time he spent away from the public eye. As someone who has chronic depression, I mean this with absolutely no glibness and only a sense of familiarity and sympathy when I say that he was due.
And what angers me about the assertions that John was not happy like he said he was, because there were periods where he was depressed, is just now little agency it gives people with depression to live, construct, and frame their own lives and experiences. It provides us with no room to interpret and decide our own feelings for ourselves. It gives us, frankly, no room to be happy. And it uses a diagnosis, whether official or armchair, to filter every single one of our experiences, without our consent.
Depressed people can find ways to be happy. Sometimes. When depression is just a reality of your life that pills or therapy just don’t take away entirely, you have to. It’s the only way to live, to keep on living. It doesn’t make sense to most people who haven’t been there. But it’s true.
When I look back on what I would describe as some of the greatest periods of my life so far, a close examination would reveal that, in fact, I was going through depressive swings throughout them. And really, that makes sense. When else was I supposed to have these best, most fulfilling times? Before age 10?
The fact that John Lennon was depressed at some points throughout the last 5 years of his life, and maybe even sometimes wished that he were dead, doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a devoted father who received extreme joy through parenting, or that he didn’t really bake his bread, or that he didn’t love Yoko, or that he didn’t feel freer and more at peace with himself once not tied to the media and the music industry. It does not mean that he was not happier than he was at other points in his life.
All it means that he was depressed. Like he very commonly was.
He didn’t talk about depression during those years publicly, so it’s none of our fucking business, to be quite honest. But the point is that these two things are not mutually exclusive. And there is a lot of ableism and hurtful, insulting assumptions in the idea that there is only one way to be happy, that some of us just aren’t entitled to use the word unless it meets the standards of someone with a completely different experience of life and what happiness means, that we aren’t qualified to define our own happiness just like anybody else.
People with depression are a diverse bunch. But we can be happy, we deserve to be happy, we are allowed to be happy. And it does not make us liars. It does not make us liars.
