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.”

Open the Box

“Open the box.”  It wasn’t a request, it was a demand.  And one I could not afford to ignore or question.  I reached out and picked up the box and stood for a moment with it in my hands.  “Open the box.”  The demand rang out again.  I looked down at the box; it was a plain brown box with a wide purple ribbon tied around it.  It almost looked like a Christmas present.  But that was impossible.  And I knew it; Christmas didn’t exist here.  “Open the box.”  The demand would not go away until I obeyed it.  I couldn’t refuse but I couldn’t obey.  “Open the box.”  I was in trouble and they knew it.  I lifted the box to look underneath it.  The ribbon didn’t have a beginning or an end.  It was like it was part of the brown box.  I frowned.  I turned the box around looking for some sort of opening that I could use as a peephole to see what was inside.  “Open the box.”  I vaguely wondered how long they would wait for me to open the box.  I continued to turn the box around.  There were no seams, no taped flaps; the box was a solid piece with the wide purple ribbon wrapped around it with no seams or un-tieable bows.  I shook my head and looked in front of me with an eyebrow raised.  “Open the box McConnell.”  I began to shake.  I can’t.  I put my ear up to the box but there was no sound, nothing shifted, nothing ticked, nothing rattled, nothing crinkled, nothing happened.  I looked back up.  I started to put the box down on the floor.  “OPEN THE BOX.”  The demand blasted through the room and shook the walls.  I gasped and put my hands and the box over my ears.  I took my hands and the box away from my ears.  Silence.  My ears were ringing and I began to tremble violently.  I shook the box.  Nothing.  It felt heavy though.  It weighed in my hands like sin.  “Open the box.”  I looked up and opened my mouth.  A screeching noise resounded in the room.  I put my hands and the box up to cover my ears again.  The screeching noise grew louder.  I looked over in amazement at my hand.  The box was making a noise.  I shut my mouth.  The noise stopped.  “Open the box.”  I shook the box violently.  Nothing.  I opened my mouth again as if to say something.  The screeching started again.  I put my ear up to the box.  The screeching continued.  But nothing shifted inside the box.  I closed my mouth.  Silence.  “Open the box.”  I shook my head.  “Open the box.”  I tried to untie the bow on top but it was like trying to untie your shoelaces when your fingers are frozen.  I tried to pull the seamless ribbon away from the box but that was like separating a five-year-old from a piece of candy.  I tried to tear through the un-ribboned sides of the box.  It seemed to give a little under my fingernails.  “Open the box.”  I dug in harder.  My fingernails began to splinter.  I felt blood on my fingertips.  But the box was giving under the pressure.  I continued to dig and scratch and claw and bleed at it.  A piece of the box came peeling off and fell on the floor.  “Open the box.”  I bent down and picked it up.  It had the color of cardboard but it didn’t look like cardboard.  “Open the box.”  I tore my eyes away from the piece of the box and looked at the portion of the box that I had been clawing at.  It pulsed.  I shivered and reached out my hand toward the dying portion of box.  I touched it and gritted my teeth.  It felt like flesh.  I closed my eyes and began to claw again.  “Open the box.”  My clawing grew desperate.  I moaned softly as more pieces of the box peeled off and fell to the floor.  The screeching sound made a small appearance, then subsided.  I continued to claw.  The box was coming apart.  “Open the box.”  My fingers suddenly met with no resistance.  I opened my eyes, there was a small hole in the box.  The ribbon had turned black.  The box was no longer brown but a bright, sickly red color.  I shuddered and put a finger in the hole and pulled.  The box opened and a bright white light spilled out.  I screamed and the world ended.