A friend of mine, the other day, told me, “You know, except for a few weird moments, I’d never know you were depressed.”
Of course, those “weird moments” are probably the one in which they catch me looking longingly at the point of a knife or a phone call in the middle of the night where I sob out all of my existential angst.
But, if anything, that about sums up what depression is for everyone around me- a few weird moments. I still go out, I still go to work, I still smile and laugh and joke. When other people see me, I make sure that I do all of the hygiene that’s appropriate for a human being. I’m still logical (or as much as any one human being is). I still care about the world around me, even as it continues to baffle me. Depression doesn’t make you less intelligent. Or, for that matter, more intelligent. The “tortured genius” stereotype is wrong on so many levels.
I only have a mild case of depression. What this means is when I went to visit my shrinks, they didn’t put me under surveillance when I told them that I was suicidal. When I got frustrated with having to talk to them, it meant that I could say some pretty little lies about finding the value of living and I could stop seeing them without any trouble from the university* or the hospital.
But, what it means to me is inside my head I have a torture device. I have a brain that likes to say, on an endless loop, about how much better everyone would be if I were dead. It likes to say about how stupid I am, how arrogant I am, how cruel, ugly, clumsy, useless, talentless, and disgusting I am. And as evidence it brings up every memory for every embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me, from the tiny to the huge. Then it tells me I’m selfish and weak for wanting to die. This loop is powered by my energy and desire, so every time it goes around in my head, I have a little less of each to go about and do the day-to-day life.
On good days, it’s just background noise. It’s something you filter out, like the sound of traffic. It’s something you allocate the energy for. On bad days, it’s worse than a migraine. It’s a bone-weary tiredness that keeps me from wanting to get out of bed. It’s an all-over body ache. It’s quiet, leaking tears, and not even enough energy to call someone to help me out. It’s willing my body to die; fantasizing about all the way it could just happen. Wondering if I got a cord of piano wiring and strung it around my neck if I could decapitate myself, and if I would feel any pain. When it’s a little less than horrible, it’s me getting the rifle out of the closet and searching for the ammunition**. It’s writing tons of stories of all the ways I could die.***
Generally, good days mean that my mind is busy. It’s got to be full with stuff that’s louder than that endless loop. But, life has a tendency of being generally boring. Going over the bills you have to pay and the money you don’t have to pay it isn’t very loud. Checking off the list of groceries that you needed to get while waiting in-line is practically a whisper over “Why do you need to get food anyway? It’s a waste of food that could be going to people who actually deserve to live. I mean, right now you eating that food means that maybe someone who would have been a beautiful dancer is going to starve to death. Whereas when you try to dance, you look like a hippo, and not the Fantasia one. You fell over doing tai chi for fuck’s sake. Stop wasting more deserving people’s food and your Hubby’s money.”
It is a very weird place to be in, learning to trust oneself and one’s own mind when those thoughts speak in your own voice. It isn’t a dark and raspy voice like in Jan’s in The Brady Bunch. It sounds like you, and it sounds reasonable. The things it says are truth with a dose of lies (me not eating won’t get anyone else any food is a lie. Me looking like a graceless hippo while dancing is true enough. Me falling over during tai chi is a fact). And when you don’t have anything in your own voice to counter it, it’s something that you can’t really banish. But yet, you go on living and doing your best to drown it out or ignore it, while still believing you have true and right opinions about everything else on the planet. Being a functioning human being takes more effort for me than learning the scientific method.
The reason I bring this up is because I’m really trying to get people into my head a bit (ironic, since all I want is out of it). But, people really seem to think things like people with depression should just “get over it” and “Why should you be depressed, you’re so rich, beautiful, successful, X?” In someone’s own way, I think they’re trying to be helpful, or just expressing frustration. Hell, I know I’ve thought things like “Why is she depressed, she’s so talented?” before, so it’s not like being depressed can give you any great insight into the disease. On the other hand, you get plenty of comments roaming the internet of “Why don’t you just kill yourself” which is just insulting to people who are healthy, but can be incredibly damaging to people who aren’t, and requires more and more energy for people who aren’t healthy but not on the precipice. Comments like those aren’t funny. They aren’t a joke, they aren’t something that people will just ignore; they’re vicious and can be life-threatening. Comments like those are like replacing people’s medicine with sugar pills. You may not be directly murdering them but now you’re up on manslaughter charges. Those comments make the voices louder.
*I didn’t much want to see the university counselor in the first place. But, you make a suicide joke in front of one of the professors and suddenly you start hearing words like “We take these things very seriously here” and “We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you” and you find you can’t register for classes until you go to a month of twice-a-week meetings and get a sign-off. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was me they were bothering, I would almost say this is a good policy, and I know a few people that this really helped them. But for me it was an annoying stress on my time having to talk to a complete stranger. She didn’t want to talk about philosophy at all, which considering that most of my suicidal thoughts revolve around “What is the purpose of life?” I think would have been helpful.
** Hubby tends to hide it, or give it over to a third party.
***Most people write fanfiction about them having sex with a character they like, or kissing. My fanfiction was all about me dying heroically saving that someone’s life- not only did my favorite character get to live, but I didn’t inflict myself on it AND I got to die. Total win all around!
As I leave this comment, a character from a book I once read pops into my head, saying, “If you’re going to wax poetic, don’t be trite.”
I’ve never been diagnosed, though certainly we all have a bit of that Seasonal Affective Disorder going on this time of year. I recognize that Depression (with a capital D) is different from just being low every now and then. Regardless, I thought I’d share a favorite quote that helps when I’m low or thinking self-defeating thoughts. I hope it’s not trite. I also hope that, whatever your thoughts on religion or spirituality, you can pick out the good parts. I know I do.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
–Marianne Williamson
“The reason I bring this up is because I’m really trying to get people into my head a bit”
I liked this bit a lot. The second time I went to therapy, one of my stated goals was to stop doing something I didn’t have a word for, but was best described as “withdrawing.” Something would trigger that inner voice of hate, and without even thinking about it or trying, I would turn on my “normal” face and be just completely unable to tell other people how I really felt. I’d have my “normal” face up for a few days while the rest of me stewed in this thick and evil world in my head that was all about how wrong I was. This happened less when I got healthier, but it still happened, and I wanted to know why I kept doing this even though I was so much better.
For a few sessions, my therapist had me describe times in my life when I’d withdrawn this way, and what I’d done while in my own head. She eventually told me, “I’m sort of jealous. You have an incredibly rich, vibrant, detailed inner life. I don’t blame you for not wanting to share that with anybody. I don’t think you realize how uncommon it is to be able to retreat into your own head and be so satisfied and comfortable and safe, even if your definitions and understanding of satisfied and comfortable and safe have been damaging.”
That really helped me see that part of me, and that thing I did, as less of an evil wrong broken thing, and it helped me understand why I didn’t like sharing it. All the creativity and intensity and passion I had for life got funneled (for various reasons) into depression and self-hatred, and I ended up with a creative, intense, and passionate inner world of self-hatred. The self-hating part didn’t mean the creativity or intensity or passion was any less, and it made sense that I was reluctant to give all that up, externalize it, and have it called ordinary “depression,” which leads people to say ordinary things like, “Cheer up!”
Scraping out the inside of my head and sharing it with other people that I loved and trusted was a big first step, and I discovered how important it was for me to find people who understood that I was sharing something more than my “depression” with them; the way I expressed and lived with my depression was the biggest manifestation of my personality that I had, and that’s what I was sharing. I was sharing who I was, fundamentally and at my core, not something to be gotten over like a bad cold.
I’m battling depression right now because I have the sneaking feeling that when I check my work schedule in a little while – my boss is basically going to have taken me off the schedule completely, or my hours are going to have been drastically cut.
I’m really not looking forward to this because, since I lost my last job, I couldn’t pay my bills and, since I’m single, there was nobody to help me out. I’ve ended up having to move back in with my parents and my relationship with my father has always been an absolute nightmare.
And if this thing with the job happens, I know I’m going to be sitting here feeling like the biggest loser, the biggest fucking failure, because that voice in my head is going to be telling me – You see, this is just one more thing you’re no good at, just one more thing you can’t do right. Being bipolar, I don’t need that voice.
Everybody tells me that I have a real talent for writing, that they think I can be published, and I’ve gotten the first draft of a novel written now. But I simply feel like – until I actually get published – then what good is this talent for. Right now, I still don’t feel like I can do anything with it.
I’ve been thinking about going back to University and getting a PhD in English but, when I found out about the entrance tests you have to take – I felt like throwing up. There’s math on those tests and I was barely able to pass college Algebra. I suck at math. So the voices in my head are telling me – boy, it’ll be a real bitch if you can’t get into Grad School, no matter how good you are at English, because you can’t pass the math portion of a test.
You look for ways to drown out the voices in your head – my parents and my sister can’t understand why, at my age, 34, I still love going to concerts and to clubs. That’s why, because when I’m around the music, and the dancing, and the lights, with all my senses being bombarded, it makes the voices in my head shut up.
Just for that little while, they leave me alone, and I feel at peace. Right now, I’m not feeling at peace, and it’s too late to go out. So I’m sitting here – putting off checking my work schedule for as long as possible.
I call that loop my brown bat, because I don’t really want it to be a part of me exactly, but it certainly pays a vist every year. My psychiatrist is ok with the anthropomorphisation, as long as I don’t start talking to it regularly.
but the loop, the constant reminding that I’m pretty much not worth the air I breathe, that sucks and I get tired of it real quick. Tho it is kinda nice to know I’m not the only one that feels like that.
I don’t mean to belittle the nature of abuse, but I honestly think that the nature of depression, at least for me, is very similar to having a verbally abusive boyfriend living in my head. Constantly telling me I’m too pitiful to deserve anyone else, and do I really think there’s other thoughts that’d be willing to exist in my pathetic excuse for a head. And, oh, sure, I’ll leave them now but in an hour or two I’ll see that there’s no point in not being with him, anyway. And he keeps me from seeing other people, isolates me.
And then I hate myself for staying with him, and he points out how I’m too pathetic to leave him, cause I basically suck.
I sincerely apologize if this analogy is insulting to those living in (or escaped from) abusive relationships. I don’t claim that my pain is anywhere near as bad, just that the nature seems similar to what I’ve read about abusers.