This is my depression: a conversation-starter

I’m just coming through a period of what I call “going underground.” It’s a phase of my depressions where I find the need to withdraw from contact and the frenetic pace of everyday life (including, apparently, blogging!). When I come back online, I find a deep appreciation for the relationships I temporarily put on pause. That ability to pull back is a refresher I need to stay psychologically healthy. In the manufactory model of the 9-5, M-F workday, however, we don’t usually have the luxury of saying “I need a couple of days” and expect to keep our jobs. Instead, those of us with depression are expected to pop some pills and carry on like “normal.” “Normal” being some absurdly optimistic and extroverted insta-worthy plastic mask that drives the relentless economic engine.

While classing depression as a disease has helped many get the treatment they need to stay well, it has also resulted in a stigma that carries shame and makes us clam up, hide it, and try to soldier on in circumstances that only exacerbate the condition. I have to confess here that I don’t take meds to manage my depression because they don’t work for me, but I 100% encourage those experiencing depression to seek treatment and try medication in consultation with a doctor. What I find keeps me six feet above-ground is being hard-nosed about what I need: at least 7 full hours of sleep every night, exercise at least 3 times a week, and a manageable stress load. Most of the time, this carries me through when I can manage it, but our culture makes a healthy lifestyle almost an impossibility. It takes way too many hours of way too much stress just to make ends meet, let alone “succeed.” We can talk the day long about “self-care,” which is vital, but my experience is that our culture and economy have stacked the cards against us for actually being able to practice it. In addition to “self-care,” we need to talk about the structural problem of a culture and economy that make physical and psychological health untenable for most.

I used to think that I needed my “dark side” to write, or at least to write well, or interestingly. I no longer think that’s true per se, but I also think that our culture in the US cultivates a destructive brand of polyanna-ism. I have trouble understanding those who have failed to hike at least a little ways into the abyss to question the point of existence, both general and personal. We push away the darker elements of life: death, failure, frustration, anxiety, hopelessness, fear, despair, as though they were diseases we can inoculate against and continue on our merry lobotomized way, but they’re not. These are also life. We can and should feel them. Depression, of course, isn’t just a hike into the abyss and back out, it’s a tumble to the bottom and a cross-country backpacking expedition through days or months of punishing bog. I’ve made it back out countless times, thankfully, and I think we should talk about what’s down there. Not as some kind of therapy for the afflicted, but as a part of our normal. Depression is more common than we want to admit. I think if we talk about it, both what causes depression and what happens during it, instead of shoving it in the closet or papering it over with prescriptions as though they were the only and final solution, we would be much healthier as individuals and as a society.

So let’s talk. When I experience depression, life doesn’t feel worth the effort. I don’t see the point of continuing to beat my head against a wall that beats back. If life is so much pain and failure, why put up with it? Why continually disappoint myself and those that depend on me? The thoughts, though, are just window-dressing, ad hoc justification, for the feeling of a gaping void at the core of what is which pulls relentlessly down and in. There is too much. Too much noise, too much light, too much motion, too many people, too many variables. I cannot make sense of it all. All of it, and I mean everything, all, stops making sense of any kind. The incomprehensibility is overwhelming, resulting in complete paralysis. I want everything to stop. I want myself to stop. It isn’t an active desire to do myself harm; it’s just a desire for relief from the onslaught, a wish not to be in order not to experience drowning. This is not some form of sadness that can be reasoned out of, or where remembering the good things in life or expressions of love and validation can somehow vanquish the despair. It is not cognitive and not really emotional, either. It is existential. Ontological. A fracture in the core of being itself. And, if I’m being honest, I think there’s a kind of necessary sanity in it, an encounter with vastness and inexplicability that reflects a fundamental contingency at the heart of physics. If we aren’t overwhelmed thinking about the nature of existence, we’re not looking at it rightly. The important thing is to have a lifeline back to a realm where we can once again start to take it in manageable chunks and frame what we can in comprehensible bite sizes.

It is dangerous for me to say that I accept my depression, that I feel it is a part of me, and I’m fine with it. The professional psychological community will roast me alive for saying that it’s ok for me to experience depression. I think more people would come out of it safely if society would support their need to take a break, to realign, to talk about it openly, not as taboo, but as a part of the human experience. And maybe more would seek the treatment they need if these conversations were held out in the open instead of behind closed doors. This is my experience. Others with depression will have different needs and different experiences. Let’s talk about that, too.