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 three

Hello all, I know I’ve been AWOL for a few days so let me explain (no too much to ‘splain, let me sum up) I gave an analogy to NorEaster and Michelle about how writing about bad stuff is like sucking the poison out of a snake bite.  Well I forgot that sometimes sucking the poison out can make you ill all over again, point being I got a little sick from the poison I was sucking out.  That is why I went AWOL.  But I’m back now and if you all will allow I am ready to suck out the poison and after that look back on all of it the dark spots and the light and smile about it knowing it has ALL made me who I am.

Once summer hit I moved off campus and into a house with a few of the girls from the church I was (kind of) attending.  Despite the fact that I did so well in my classes freshman year it wasn’t that great of a year and the summer was shaping up to be more of the same as far as my moods went.  I felt alone, isolated and un-natural.  My view of the world was this – everyone was always smiling and it looked like their lives were perfect or if they weren’t happy it was usually because something really horrible had happened in their lives.  And all of this only made me feel worse.  I should’ve been happy and I wasn’t and I felt like there was no reason I shouldn’t have been.  I had a pretty awesome family and nothing terribly traumatic (like parental abuse) had happened to me.  What was wrong with me?  It tore me up and made me even more hesitant to confide in anyone about what I was going through.  I spent my summer working again at a restaurant in Greeley and since I worked nights I spent most of my days either sleeping or watching movies and since most of the people I had gotten to know over the school year worked during the day and were free nights I felt even more isolated.  I know that my childhood wasn’t perfect; my family moved about every three years, we took on foster kids, I had a difficult older brother (but then again I wasn’t the perfect sister), my grandmother developed Alzheimer’s, as previously mentioned we experienced discrimination due to my dad’s job and we had several bad experiences as far as church was concerned.  But on the other hand I had parents that were loving and open, a pretty cool older brother (albeit difficult) and my family supported me in my decisions.  So you can see where the confusion about why my moods and thoughts went where they did developed.  Towards the end of the summer my brother joined the Navy and my parents moved to South Dakota, I stayed in Greeley.  The church I was (kind of) going to also hosted a college group church in the same building which I went to faithfully; I enjoyed the college group more than the regular church, I felt they were more open and honest and real.  This next part is difficult for me to put into words so far every time I have tried it just doesn’t come out right so I am going to start by sharing a dream I had that preceded what I consider to be one of the most important developments in my life.  A house sits in a field there are trees on one side and the house looks to be a beautiful farmhouse.  But on closer inspection there appears to be something wrong.  There is a large crowd of people being frantically directed by a young woman to work on the house.  They are frenetically trying to protect something inside the house from somebody, anybody.  There is a lot of shouting and gesturing going on until a man walks up; he walks with his head held high and full of a natural confidence straight to the young woman.  The workers stop and watch.  She looks up at him and he smiles down on her.  He says something that is barely heard it could be “the deadline is up,” or “this house will fall.”  The young woman scoffs and rebelliously asks how that will happen.  He smiles and there is a certain sadness in his eyes and he looks over where a wrecking ball has taken up residence next to the house.  The woman panics and makes an aborted attempt to rush towards the house but it is too late.  The wrecking ball has swung towards the second story and now it is obscured for a moment by dust.  The young woman looks betrayed but the man simply gestures towards the house.  The house still stands but it is different.  The house has changed from its original design, it no longer hides the young woman from the world but now it offers shelter for her and anyone else who would come down the road.  Now let me explain this in relation to the next part of the story.  For about a year and a half I had been taking drives in my car and usually wound up sitting in a parking lot either by target or next to the building the church was held in and crying.  I always wished someone from the church would find me and finally see behind my mask while at the same time (without actually realizing it) I was terrified someone would see Me.  So anyway the same day I had the aforementioned dream I went to the college group since it was one of the rare nights I had free to be able to go.  In the last few years I have come to the realization that the part I enjoy most and feel closest to God is during the music portion.  I’m not sure what it is but the music lets me let go and live in the moment, for me it feels like the one time (other than when I’m dreaming) that I can forget whatever is going on in my life and just be.  During the music portion that night I once again had let everything go, I wore no mask, I simply was.  Well apparently that night God had decided would be the night I would get what I’d asked for but never expected.  I forget the song that was playing but it moved me and in that moment God reached in and took away my ‘walls’ and my mask.  I couldn’t have felt more naked if I’d suddenly lost all my clothes.  I responded in terror.  Usually when I began crying that soul-shuddering cry I’d experienced before usually I can stuff all the emotion into a box and forget about it in a matter of minutes.  That night I couldn’t stop crying.  I wanted to, I desperately wanted to, I felt like I was reaching out and grasping for what used to be solid brick and instead was finding air.  This was God’s answer and now I had to actually deal with everything I’d shoved behind those walls and I had to be real with people and trust God that my heart could handle it.  I was not sure I was onboard with God’s plan.

 

https://gothiquefae.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/my-struggle-with-depression-part-four/