Where it hurts

Dooce wrote a post a few days ago about depression and what it feels like. It's strange to pass on second and third hand information through a peculiar ring of strangers connected only by the fact that they like to talk about themselves online, but the article she referenced and the psychologist the author of the article referenced too were both some of the most painfully eloquent accounts of what a life with depression looks like, feels like, sounds like. It's necessary reading for anyone who's ever suffered from depression or has someone in their life they're trying to help. At the very least it sheds light on a disease that seems so common, so easily curable but also so easily sucks out life and leaves a path of devastation in its wake.

I don't have a great deal to add to what's already been written; their words have far more clarity than mine and I believe the world only requires so many mental illness-aware bloggers in it. But there are a few things that, for me personally, make depression far more insidious than its name represents:

The first thing I can only describe as an inability and a disinterest in dealing. I use that phrase a lot because a large source of my personal humor comes from mocking shallowness and vanity and the characteristics of such afflictions. Several months ago at a restaurant with my brother and my friend I picked at a salad and made the comment, "I cannot even deal with how healthy I've been today." We all laughed because we each knew people who would've said that in seriousness. It's become a favorite in my lexicon of stupid things to say..."I could not deal with Grey's Anatomy tonight." "I cannot even deal with how much laundry I have to do this weekend." It's just something to say to make the mundane ridiculous, and so therefore enjoyable.

But when depression hits you, you actually stop being able to deal, especially if it's the symptom of something major and traumatic. Human beings are designed to let emotions pass through them, to experience grief and sadness and anger and then to let it process out of their hearts and minds and into some other part of the world so they can go on being normal again. For someone with depression, those emotions settle in a pool around their feet and while it doesn't necessarily devastate them immediately, it drags them down. Depression means feeling absolutely nothing at all while your brain is silently screaming in white hot rage. A friend of mine describes it as the ultimate torpor, and he's completely right. You just can't move.

And so because you cannot deal with what you're feeling, you begin not to be able to deal with the things that happen around you. Once, a napkin fell off my lap during dinner and floated to my kitchen floor. I stared at the napkin, fork in my hand and mouth half open ready to eat and suddenly the effort of bending over to pick the paper off the ground felt so monumental I just couldn't fathom the idea of actually doing it. The napkin stayed there one day, then two, then a week and soon the fact that I couldn't handle picking up the napkin made me so angry that I started not being able to handle anything else. Unloading the dishes from the dishwasher made absolutely no sense because there was a napkin dirtying my floor. The idea of taking a shower was preposterous when my kitchen was ruined by all the piled-up dishes. I didn't want to go to work early anymore because the likelihood that the normal adults would see my pale face and unwashed hair was completely unbearable. The author in Dooce's link described an afternoon where he waited at a gas station for all the other cars to leave so he could pump gas, but when he realized there was never going to be a break in the traffic he left with an empty tank because he just couldn't deal with seeing people. In both cases, there were major, huge, life-altering circumstances that we should've recognized as the real problem, but they were overshadowed by the hundreds of things in our lives that we just couldn't do anymore. Depression is a silent, vicious, underhanded disease that picks away at your ability to keep your head above water until there's absolutely nothing left worth convincing you to stay afloat and you are no longer a spouse or a friend or a coworker or a person at all. You're just a shell, unable and unwilling to fight the inertia of a slow death by lack of serotonin.

The other thing that I'm always surprised that depression writers don't mention is how desperate we become for a connection. When you expend most of your energy trying very hard not to betray that fact that you are slowly but surely losing your shit, it's difficult to work up the desire to talk to a loved one about it, and it's even harder for them to hear. So you spend afternoons at the hardware store or the post office wondering if maybe you could make eye contact with one person there, they might see how lost you are and would be willing to help. I am sometimes absolutely terrified that someone I know will ask me how I'm doing, or that they'll see the despair in my eyes and ask what's wrong because on the wrong day or at the wrong time, I might just actually tell them the whole truth. I'm scared to death someone will think I need a hug and they'll embrace me and then I'll never be able to let go of them. I have no desire to transfer the guilt and the rage and the fear that goes through my mind on a daily basis to another living person. No one who's depressed does. So we smile and say "Fine" when nothing at all is fine, and our eyes move past that friend, searching for the stranger who will ask the magic questions. The one who'll be strong enough to offer salvation. The one who won't hate us when we suck them dry.

The last thing, the biggest thing maybe for a lot of depression sufferers, is the guilt. If 20% of Americans are depressed, how bad could it really be? That's a disease statistic better relegated to something like toenail fungus or acid reflux, not mental illness. How in the world can 1 in 5 people feel the way I did...I do...and the world still keeps spinning? How can I possibly indulge in such enormous self-pity when nothing really truly bad has happened to me? At the school where I work there's the ubiquitous handful of kids who get carted off to our "padded room" at least once every day. They're the ones who go insane when they've been slighted in some way, the ones whose anger makes them shut down so completely they have to be carried out of the classrooms, and the ones who sob like infants and cling to your neck when you hug them and tell them they're going to be okay. These kids have been abused in horrific ways and they're the children of drug users and drunks and they have every right in the world not to be able to deal. How come I see so much of myself in their behavior? What right do I have to mistrust and hate and fear so much of the world when the world hasn't done me all that wrong? The wretched, overwhelming guilt I feel for not being a successful, happy person like every other individual around me appears to be is the most horrible part of my depression, and maybe it's ultimately the one that keeps me down, afraid to ask for help from the people who really want to give it. Because admitting there's a really huge problem in an otherwise great life isn't just whining, it almost seems sinful.

There is, of course, always a way out for anyone with depression, whether your path leads you to therapy and medication, or whether you simply choose not to deal with any of it anymore and you check out of life for good. I spent a little bit of this afternoon with my grandmother who is dying of lung cancer. She spent 17 years in a cloud of anger and depression after her husband died and the inertia that now challenges me bore down on her too. Strangely though, now that I've seen her in her bed, ravaged by a different disease that seems to be beating the shit out of her a little more each day, I can see that my grandma is trying to deal. They're giving her too many drugs and she's ill all the time and the chemo and the radiation is absolutely ruining her body, but we waited around long enough for her to be lucid again and when I looked down into her eyes I could see that the cloud that had been there for so many years had lifted. She was fighting to be able to eat, to talk, to stay conscious long enough to see her family. In the face of her own death she's chosen life, even if that life is measured only in months or weeks or days. I always assumed that when my grandma ever became seriously ill, she'd just let herself go. She's always said she was ready to die whenever God wanted to take her, but I think this final stubborness on her part isn't out of fear of death or spite or will, but because she actually wants to live out every precious second of the life available to her.

I didn't sit down with plans to write this entry. It's not something I've ever wanted to actually disclose about myself in detail, but after visiting my grandma I received two emails this evening. One was from a former colleague reporting the death of my teaching mentor who was also diagnosed with lung cancer, and another one was from a former student who had been rescued in the middle of a suicide attempt and wanted to let me know she was alive and getting help. One death and one near death, and while both were deplorable situations, I am furious that the latter could've been prevented by my friend or someone close to her. Depression is basically just another slow death until you discover the tools to help you deal, or you hasten your own journey to the end. So please, if you are depressed, know that there's a way out. If you love someone who's depressed, find out everything you can about the illness and remember that they don't always have to be this way.

Above all, no matter what your situation, choose to deal with it.