A glimpse into a life with depression
We are often sheltered from the news of the day by an impermeable force field that keeps us from feeling outside pain. It's necessary for psychic survival. We can't possibly tolerate the hurts of the world or we'd eventually succumb to their crushing weight. We need to have a way of filtering. We enjoy a numbness that protects us, for the most part, from feeling the wounds of those we don't know. The increased knowledge of what happens throughout the world at any given time develops a tolerance for a perpetual state of numbness. We are, however, sensitive to our own hurts and the tragedies that are within arms length. Some of us are even numb to these hurts which then has implications for our capacity for empathy and to have a functioning soul. But every now and then a tragedy happens to someone in the public eye who we don't know but whose story evokes a darkness within us.
A cold dread grew inside me as I read about Rick Warren's son Matthew's suicide. It wasn't empathy for the family, which would be a perfectly healthy emotional response, it was my own fear of the demon's lick and what thin defence we have at times against our own mental mutiny. Until you've been on that ledge yourself it's very hard to imagine what the view looks like. The unending endurance required for depression pain wears down the membrane that prevents one from crossing over into dangerous thinking. And it comes on like a dark destructive force that can take you from relative stability and slide you onto terribly thin ice in no time and a voice emerges that you might not be that familiar with that leaks treacherous thoughts into your mind like poisonous gas. It harnesses the depression pain, brings it to a fever pitch, and begins speaking over the loud speakers like sirens signalling evacuation. The voice is authoritative and definitive. It is telling you to, 'GET OUT'. Get out of yourself. The only way to 'get out' is to put out the heat inside that rages like a runaway forest fire. To put out the fire is to extinguish every flame - even the flame of life. There is no such thing as speaking back to the voice with any success. Have you ever been at the bottom of a pile on and tried to get up? No drug, no therapy, no loving family, no ideal upbringing, no health food, no exercise routine, no love life can drive back the demon-like fury of depression pain in that moment. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never been there. Once you have been in that place you can never be anything but humble when talking about solutions.
If our depression has lifted and we think it’s because of something we did, we are either one of the lucky one's for whom medication has worked or we have too quickly forgotten what it was like to be in the jaws of the monster. Being spit out and not devoured could we possibly think it was because of something we did? The only honest response to feeling the death grip loosen is one of gratitude, humility, and tears. When it is raging we simply hold on like someone clinging to a pier in the midst of a hurricane. So often, depression pain is treated as if it is a one to one cause and effect, as if it was a fractured arm and with the right management can be reset. It follows that if you are lingering in your depressive state you must be doing something wrong. You must not be compliant with 'treatment'. All the talk about treatment and medication rings hollow for many seekers of relief. I think all of us want to believe that we understand the science of depression but nobody does. Medication is effective for a fortunate few in my experience and the rest of us harvest whatever placebo effect we can. It is not the singular lever that once pulled resolves what we think is a magical serotonin deficiency. If you have ever tried to manage the water in a hot tub or swimming pool you will know that there are about a dozen variables all influencing one another in diverse ways. Alkalinity, chlorine, calcium, ph, acidity, hardness, etc. Emotional chemistry is 100 times more complex than hot tub levels.
Let me add this for good measure. When people say they believe that depression is a chronic illness just like asthma or low blood pressure they mean well but few really believe it. The real belief often lies beneath which says that if you just did x,y,z you wouldn't be in this mess or there's the assumption that everyone goes through low points from time to time and to just stop dwelling. They don't think the same of someone with asthma. It just doesn't work that way and maybe they're not the same thing. It's probably viewed more like an illness that is self induced and that can be reversed by eating more vegetables or getting more exercise. If you get cancer, unless it is possible that it's due to lifestyle factors, you are viewed as an honest victim of an evil disease. If you've done something, anything that might have contributed to your own illness it quells the chaos of uncertainty and people can feel safer. Depression falls more into this category in most people's minds. Until...it happens to you. Then every neat solution, every self-assured conviction regarding how one's inner world works gets flushed down the drain and you are left with the raw dread of your own unrelenting psyche. Contorting your previously in tact worldview like a fresh car wreck. And answers come much slower to your tongue. And your only hope is something called, courage.
Fan into flame even the faintest faith that it will not last forever, step outside your front door, move into the world, yearn for peace like a farmer whose crops need the rain. Let it swell in you like a pregnancy, burst with the hard rain of tears, believe / tell yourself that this very same thing has happened to others and they have lived to testify that something transcendent was being born. In the absence of evidence we rely on belief from the basement of our psyche scooped from the very bottom.
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