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.”

Saguaros

It is summertime here in the desert.  The Saguaros are flourishing and there are various other small green things growing around on the ground.  The dust is blowing and obscuring surrounding areas.  But it is the Saguaros that capture my heart.  The Saguaros stand tall and proud and have so much character packed in their spiny arms.  The wind whips my loosened hair into my eyes and I brush it back and tuck it sloppily into my ponytail.  The sun touches the horizon and I look up from my sketchbook and wait for the sunset.  My bare feet rest underneath my knees warmed by the desert rock I sit Indian-style on.  A lizard scuttles past blithely unaware of the larger world around him.  I smile as he darts underneath the rock and then out into the desert.  A hawk cries lazily circling above me looking for something to dive onto and devour.  I smile as the sun sinks lower into the horizon.  The colors take my breath away; rich golds, bright pinks, deep purples, light yellows and the fiery dark orange of the sun, all on display for the world to see.  The Saguaros look even greener in this sunset light and I can really see the spikes jutting out from their trunks.  I sketch a few more quick studies and wait for the next phase of the sunset.  The second to last phase of the sunset the yellows and golds and pinks are pretty much gone, but the purples have deepened and are nearly black and they are joined by a dark, sapphire blue and a little jolt of gold from what’s left of the sun.  The Saguaros look nearly black at this point and I can only see the root of the spikes now so I sketch a few more studies and look up eagerly waiting for the sun to finally disappear below the horizon.  I look up to see if I can find the hawk but it appears that he found his dinner and ran.  The lizard is long gone but there is a lazy scorpion doing a scorpion dance in front of me and a sidewinder a few feet from the scorpion winding his way away to somewhere.  I hear an owl hoot in the distance and imagine that the sidewinder is putting a little bit of hast in his gitalong now even if the scorpion continues his dance.  I watch him a little longer to see how much closer he is going to get to my shoes before I have to shoo him away, but he doesn’t get any closer and I go back to watching the sun set.  It dips below the horizon shedding its last colors as I look up and watch the last jolt of gold disappear from sight and watch as the purple and blue blend into the black of night.  I make one last sketch of the Saguaros.  They look like forbidding sentinels now all dark and tall and arms outstretched towards the sky as if warning the traveler to back slowly away.  I tuck my loose hair into my ponytail yet again and slowly unfold my legs.  I set my sketchbook down next to me and bring my knees up under my chin adjusting myself for the best view of the stars coming out to play.  The air grows cold and I feel a few bats flitter by my head.  I close my eyes and breathe in that cool summer desert scent and smile.  The first stars begin to twinkle at each other and slowly they all come out for a game of “let’s see who can twinkle the most.”  I sit there for about another hour watching them in their slow dance across the sky and let my legs down onto the ground carefully.  I grab my flashlight and shine it down onto my shoes, carefully examining them for desert nightowls that may have crawled in their looking for a nice hidey-hole.  There isn’t anything there tonight so I slip them on and grab my sketchbook.  I walk slowly towards my Jeep, shining my little flashlight on the ground in front of me, carefully listening for any of the bigger night-time creatures that haunt this little piece of desert.  I climb into my Jeep and start it up carefully negotiating the terrain that leads back to the main road.  Eventually I find my way back in town and drive blissfully through its empty streets.  The streetlights and the lights shining from doorways add a mysterious air to the sleepy little desert town of Saguaros.