Against depression.

A great story. Affirming and somehow touching for me.

Against Depression by Dervala
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I knew more about depression than most. I’d sat up through the night listening to despairing people on a suicide hotline. I’d seen people close to me live with it—and I do mean live, black jokes and all. I’d read Andrew Solomon’s fat book, The Noonday Demon. Somehow all that unfelt knowledge left me with the belief that if you could get out of bed (even if you’d slept in your clothes), you weren’t depressed. That paralyzing quality, described so often, was one I took literally.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t sick at all last winter. I was just failing and flailing. In fact, I would have liked to have been sick—confined to bed with some mysterious, painless illness that would have let me sleep for a long time and see no one. I thought about that a lot. And I thought about crawling under my desk at work, or into my wardrobe at home. The dark, the hidden, and the confined were the only inviting spaces left. Under my desk, I wouldn’t have to worry about leaking tears, or looking people in the eye, or inspiring my clients to greatness.

A few months before, I’d found things funny. Skipped and sang on Bernal Hill. Turned annoyances into dramatic stories. Said yes to invitations. Now, before meetings, I wrote “BREATHE” on the inside of my left wrist, because I kept tamping down stale air in my lungs instead of letting it out. Then it escaped in windy sighs that I couldn’t hold in any more than sneezes. I walked slowly, hoarding energy. I planned my day to avoid people. At night I would fall into bed in my clothes, as early as I could, only to wake wide-eyed at four in the morning, chased by mean, looping thoughts like a rabbit on a dogtrack.

Have you ever almost really hurt yourself? A badly-judged left turn that makes a truck honk, or a vault off your bike that could have smashed your skull? The knee-shaking shot of adrenaline that wires your whole body after a near-miss is permanent in depression. At that dosage, adrenaline is poison. Every scrap of energy gets diverted to survival. Every fiber twitches: danger—fight or flight? It looks like sloth, but it feels like war.

I felt like I would break, but only kind words cracked me. Luckily, when you’re depressed, you can throw human kindness off the scent: that frowning, sighing slump dries up the cheerful greetings and sends friends away. It must be like being very old, or very ugly. Without the respite of an illness or a convent, I crawled through day after day in which I was an unfit employee, girlfriend, daughter, sister, and friend. My mind plunged into pointless, terrifying rants that came packaged as reality, revealed at last. Life is ugly. No one will help. No one could help. Help with what?

Like rheumatoid arthritis, depression turns your own body against itself. It chews not on your cartilage, but on your brain cells and your sense of reality. It’s as seductive as a wife-beater, shutting out other voices to turn itself into your only friend. The only one who tells the truth about the bleakness of the world. All your energy goes towards getting through whatever stands in your way—struggling, slogging, pushing, through work and small talk and getting food—whatever it is you have to get through until you can be alone again with the voice who can be trusted.

And the last thing it feels like is an illness. No, this monumental, world-swallowing suckage sits outside you: it comes from the project, the job, the love affair, the city, the family, or the decade. For me, these low cycles have always led me to abrupt life changes. It’s a kind of shock therapy: uprooting jobs, careers, relationships, and countries. Those shifts feed the craving for anonymity and reinvention, and they leave behind the shame of a condition that breeds shame.

When I was eight years old I got glasses for the first time. I put them on in the living room, and when I looked out the window, I could see each blade of grass, crisp and bright and distinct, where before there had been a soft green blur. I looked at everything that day, and said hello to all the small things. It was amazing, that all this had been there all along.

Getting better from depression was like that. Missing dimensions popped back up. Plain old normal days tasted crisp and delicious. And then there were the bittersweet replays, when I traveled through the previous months and years, and counted all I’d misheard, misfelt, and missed. Depression isn’t noble or interesting; it’s monotonous, self-absorbed misery that leaves little room for art or kindness or other people.

I’m back, I wanted to shout last spring, that hunched crone was a changeling, not me! I wanted to learn how to get better without running from the site of misery; how to return to people who hadn’t realized I’d been away. I would have liked some scars to point to, to explain my absence. It was shocking, in a way, this drug-borne proof that I’m an animal, washed with chemical tides, turning seasons, light, and food into moods. When you reduce my suffering to a curable disease; to symptoms, postures, and intonations, I’m no longer especially special. All those causes for my sadness fluttered down like snotty Kleenex.

It’s been more than a year since I got sick, and eight months since I got better. Every day I think of the scientists who mashed up rat brains to create the drugs that brought me back to life, and I’m grateful. And I wish more people could shuck that hollow shell.

-

Fate brought me to her page.

TeeVee
Lates.