I hate depression so much. Its presence in my life has become part of me. The eyes through which I see life. Looking back, I can remember my first episode of depression after high school. I got no help. My parents encouraged me to pull myself up by my bootstraps, and I did that. I got on with the life they prescribed for me. Until I’m in sunny California, going to college, getting over dating a baseball player, and I had another episode. This time, my friend called my parents. A medical doctor diagnosed Anemia.
It gets harder to recover as time goes on, and though a dark cloud followed me around from time to time throughout my 20s, I didn’t really suffer again until my thirties. Postpartum, maybe, though no one talked about it. I’ve written a lot about those years elsewhere in this blog. The drinking didn’t help. I’d say that was a symptom of the illness, an attempt to make it all disappear. Not my life but my feelings about it.
Suffice it to say, I have been trying to recover from Depression for most of the rest of my adult life.
I’ve learned with this illness, that circumstances don’t matter, and though medication keeps me “stable” (not wanting to kill myself), it does not make me happy. I flatline in an average place, with few highs and fewer low, lows.
And now my life is beautiful. My family is stable. I do not have to work. Isn’t the American dream to retire and be financially comfortable? I need nothing. I don’t even have migraines anymore the whole reason for retiring. I think I should be overjoyed, pursuing my passions, reading endlessly, traveling, and volunteering. And yet I have never been so low.
I can’t raise my arms up to carry laundry, so I find myself sitting a lot. Though I can turn off my brain and wander through a thrift store, I don’t need anything. I buy books. I can’t read more than a few pages. I’ve started reading half a dozen in the last day or two. I want knowledge. Crave it. Love it. But it just sits on my skin, I can’t absorb it. I help my kids learn to drive and talk through difficult decisions, yet later, I can’t move for hours at a time. I take too much melatonin to sleep and wake up exhausted. I am frozen in time, and my life is wasting away. It feels catastrophic, and it is, sometimes.
“Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to self-to the mediating intellect-as to verge close to being beyond description.” William Styron, Darkness Visible:A Memoir of Madness.
The danger of depression is ignoring it. But I don’t want to make a fuss.
Logic & Imagination 
Navigating the mercurial like you have is something that I truly don’t understand. I know things, but having never walked through those steps leaves me wishing I could offer something other than what you’ve heard from friends and family and counselors for years… Here for you, Sis, as much as can be expected long distance. What I do understand in such a limited capacity is that a person’s whole processing gets affected by going through what you’re going through. I would give anything to find something that would help you and so many others that are trapped within yourselves like this. Again, still supporting and cheering and praying and grieving with you.
We live in the world of “yet”. Everything from the moment we’re being carried in our mother’s womb to the day we pass on, we’re constantly waiting for things that have not been manifest. Perhaps it’s my insanity to believe that there will eventually be a “yet” where there is a transition from this to a new phase in life for you. If I didn’t believe there would be a point, though it has happened yet, I believe I would be crushed under the weight of fear. Perhaps that is a fault. I hope that it’s belief that we’re all not done, and there is hope. My heart goes out to you. And if any of these rambling words make any sense or provide any bit of support or encouragement, then I’m grateful.
Keep writing, pondering, fleshing things out. I’ll be out here lurking and supporting.
Peace and grace to you.
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