Recognizing something and changing something are not the same thing

I’ve discussed my depression before with regards to events in my life that contributed to my depression, I mentioned that I was going through a depression in one of tam’s recent posts (an awesome post and discussion by the way) but this will still be a first for me.  I am going to describe some of what goes on in my mind and my heart when I am in a depression.  Please be gentle.

A deep well of sadness has erupted inside me.  There is no real connection between my feelings and what is happening to me.  For no reason at all I feel as though I’m about to burst into tears.  At random times throughout the day I’ll feel my heart constrict and next thing I know I’m blinking away tears.

Am I depressed?  Yes

Do I have the big “D” Depression?  Yup, never officially diagnosed but for this I don’t need a doctor to tell me what I already know and given my familial history it’s not a shock.  I can pretty much trace the rises and dips of my moods, a continuing roller coaster of ups and downs with the occassional corkscrew.  I can pretty much predict how it will go – on the upswing it’s fairly normal, my responses are normal, my reactions to people are normal, things are blessedly normal then I hit the top.  And I have to work at holding on to myself.  My heart hammers away with ecstasy and I feel as though my soul will leak through my skin in white-hot joy.  I walk around with my hands clenched for fear that I’ll float away.  I feel like Johnny Depp’s character Captain Jack Sparrow – touched or fay, if you prefer.  Then *boom* I hit the bottom.  Anger, sadness, deep depression, exhaustion, lack of interest or passion, at it’s worst, thoughts of death-dying.  Everything is cause for despair, panic and rage.  Nothing can go right, I have small moments of faux peace – sort of a surface quiet, a peace which is dark in a bad way and hurts deep down in my soul.  It tears me.

Sometimes the ups and downs are gentle.  And sometimes it’s like scaling and then leaping off of a pyramid without climbing equipment or a parachute.  I prefer the gentle ups and downs.  Those I can handle.  It’s the others that damage my soul, my friendships and my relationships with my family.  I know I should probably have some chemical “help” but I’m more scared of that.  I went on anti-depressants once – n.g. (no good), if I can help it I will never do that again.  It made me feel like an alien in human skin, I would find myself staring at my hand trying to convince myself that it did in fact belong to me.  But worse than that it actually caused me to have suicidal thoughts – I spent a whole day keeping myself from leaping into traffic.  I stopped taking them after that.

It’s not always so bad.  Most of the time I do okay it’s just sometimes it goes beyond my ability to control.  I have times where I recognize a certain turn of my thoughts or my emotions and I can stop it from going down that road.  Sometimes, sickeningly, I don’t want to stop it.  I’ve had moments where I realize the road my thoughts are leading me down and I can hear His warning or His attempt to knock me out of it and my response is “Leave me alone,” “I can’t help it,” or “I’m aware, thank you.”  Why?  Because sometimes I don’t want help, I don’t want to feel normal – I want to wallow in anger or self-pity and not be responsible.  I hate that about me and have been working at putting a stop to this behavior.  I don’t talk about feeling convicted on things much, mostly because it isn’t the language I want to use, but on this I can tell you that when I allow myself this course of action I feel convicted.  I know it’s wrong and I know that He knows that I know it’s wrong.

Then there are the times I can’t control it, it spirals away from me and all I can do is hang on.  I have moments that tip me off, I see it happen and I think to myself “here we go.”  I can’t get the bag of cereal open so I explode into a rage and scream curse words and punch walls, I drop my mac&cheese on the floor and suddenly I feel like the universe is against me and I want to dissolve into tears, I’m driving in traffic and I make it through the yellow light just in time and suddenly I feel invincible and untouchable and drunk-giddy, I wake up and experience a moment of disorientation and suddenly I feel one step removed from the world for the rest of the day, I get a rude customer at work and suddenly I’d love nothing better than to go home and sleep for several days.  I don’t like it.

Now it’s true that I’ve used the gentler ups and downs as creative outlets.  I’ve given my characters some of my rage and despair or I’ve used those feelings to charge the language I use to describe them and their surroundings.  And yes, sometimes I allow myself a bit of melancholia in pursuit of my writing, but again it’s something that I exert great control and caution over.  I know when it’s enough and I know how to shake myself out of those small moments of melancholia.

It’s when it comes on unexpectedly, without warning, with no external stimuli and with no control that I am afraid and desire to feel normal or some semblance of normalcy.  I don’t like the way I react to things or the way I treat people or the direction my thoughts go.  It isn’t pleasant.  Frankly, it terrifies me deeply.

The depression is the worst.  The anger explodes like a flash but doesn’t last, the ecstasy vibrates like a tuning fork and eventually settles down but the depression hammers down relentlessly taking all that I have, all that I am until there’s nothing left but me bleeding on the floor, gasping for air and pleading for it to stop.  In moments like that I know how easy it would be for me to take my life in my hands.  But I have made promises to certain people to not do that and I hold myself to keep those promises forever.  No matter what happens I can’t break those promises.

I am such a mass of contradictions.

And a mess of emotions.

But I try – to maintain equilibrium, control and if I can’t do that then I just maintain.  And try to hold on to some emotion because the only times I’ve seriously considered suicide are the times when I felt hollow and numb.  “I’d rather feel pain than nothing at all.” ~ Three Days Grace “Pain.”

My struggle with depression – part two

After I graduated high school I went directly to college in Greeley, CO, my major was declared as pre-journalism with a minor in military science.  The summer beforehand was fairly un-eventful I worked a few jobs and spent most of the summer either working or sleeping.  As soon as I got to school I began to face some of the same questions I had spent the summer trying to forget – who was I, who was God, did I even believe in God anymore, why did those people at “The church” do what they did, what should I believe, was this all (life) worth it, why did these horrible suicidal thoughts keep occurring to me, why couldn’t I be happy like everyone else and why did I feel so empty and dark inside?  I spent my days wearing my ‘happy’ mask and pretending that everything was okay and as long as someone was around I was “fine” but as soon as the doors shut and the lights went off I fell apart.  It is difficult for me to recall my mindset during those times but I feel like it is necessary and worth it to understand what drove me to those times when I seriously considered suicide in order that I might see the warning signs if it should happen again.  I started keeping a journal, an idea I got from one of Frank E. Peretti’s characters, so that I could try and understand the dark, twisted thoughts that ran through my head and I felt like God had abandoned me – I called this feeling “the silence.”  I wrote things like “the silence hurts a little less today” and made declarations like “I will figure this out no matter how long it takes.”  One night as I sat in my dorm room feeling utterly lost I picked up the phone and held it to my ear until the dial tone turned into a busy signal and that turned into dead air and talked into the phone as though I was talking to God and just pled with Him to pick up the other end.  If He did that night (metaphorically) I don’t remember.  I just remember feeling lost and alone and hurt.  This next part is quite frankly a miracle; I had decided that I wanted nothing more to do with God and church but when I got a postcard in my mailbox about a college church group off-campus I searched out the location and went.  I still look back on that and go “what got into me?”  The answer is obvious; this was God’s way of picking up the other line.  Anyway I began going and through that to one of the small bible study groups that met during the week.  I started going regularly and I put on such a good show of being okay that I nearly believed it until I started on my way home and then I’d sit in the parking lot crying and calling out to God to take all this hurt away, erase it and make it as though it’d never happened.  I was trying to understand why I felt so depressed and why I’d think that my family would be better off without me.  I just remember feeling like there was this great big sucking hole of darkness and it was slowly swallowing me whole.  But I kept going to this bible study group and every time I went I felt like they might be able to understand what I was going through.  I still held back though, unwilling to let anyone get close to me again and I think they sensed that somehow.  I remember at the end of the semester the last time we met before Christmas break we went around the room and shared a little bit about how the semester had gone for us and what had changed for us and I, truthfully for a change, told them that I was surprised that I had ever come back a second time.  One of the guys said he was surprised as well given how I acted the first time.  Christmas break was pretty good, I honestly don’t remember much about it, according to my bro it didn’t compare to other Christmas’s we’d had.  Second semester went about like the first.  I was still struggling with figuring out my faith and belief and moods as well as understanding them.  I went through up and downs though it felt more like a lot of down than any ups.  I remember days where I felt fairly normal and then I’d start thinking about “The church” and it would set off a storm of thoughts and emotions beginning with anger and usually ending with pain and I’d be miserable the rest of the day.  Then there were the days where I just wanted to hide in a corner and cry.  And then there were the days where I was so angry that any little thing would send me off in a rampage of swearing and hitting my computer.  I felt like my carefully constructed façade that was supposed to protect me was tearing me apart.  It was an odd year for me.  On the one hand I was going to a bible study group pretty regularly and finding more and more that I was enjoying it while on the other hand I was digging deep into several other religions trying to find answers to my questions while discussing things with my atheist roommate, who incidentally was researching Mormonism.  I bought books on Mormonism, Taoism, Judaism, Buddhism as well as several C.S. Lewis books – I was searching everywhere for an answer including the Bible.  On top of all this I was falling apart.  Now I want to make it clear that the only reason I don’t talk about my family a whole lot is because I didn’t tell them what was going on and I’m not sure they knew but they supported me in school and helped me as much I would let them in my search for an answer.  One last note before I end this “installment” – towards the middle of the year, probably sometime after Christmas break I was sitting in my dorm room reading through one of the Old Testament books of the Bible and reading C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity I was asking myself again whether or not I believed in God and I decided that whether or not I felt His presence and despite having been hurt by “His people” I believed in Him and I haven’t wavered from that decision since.  But my trial and search were far from over.

 

https://gothiquefae.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/my-struggle-with-depression-part-three/