Monday, January 23, 2006
Depression: It’s What’s for Dinner
No matter how many therapy sessions I go to…
No matter how long it’s been since my last collapse…
No matter what I do.
I will always be the person that wakes up, gets showered, puts on clothes, combs the hair, grabs the ipod, walks to the elevator and starts to cry.
As to not embarrass myself in front of anyone else in my building, I turn around, unlock my door, take my bag off and sit with my head in my hands. I sit and I breathe and I sit and I breathe and then it takes over.
The anxiety, the sadness, the fear of looking anyone in the face…
The first and last mistake I always make is allowing the thoughts to enter into my head and to actually entertain them.
I was up at 4:30am this morning with intense anxiety. I took a piss, smoked a cigarette and even read part of a magazine. All I wanted to do was relax, calm down, and eventually get back in to bed to have just one more hour of sleep. But I knew from the moment I opened my eyes that today was going to be impossible.
I felt ugly. I felt frustrated. I felt angry.
I ran my day through my head and tried to come up with a way to quench the fear that was coursing through my body. Why scared? WHY? WHY!
I have nothing to be afraid of. I had a fine weekend and was going to go to my job of 5 years and go to therapy to get some cleansing and have a nice quiet lunch. So WHAT about today was so fucking awful that I couldn’t crawl out of my depression?
The thing I hate most about dealing with this type of illness is that I don’t even believe it myself. I worry that other people won’t get it and in turn I sit there and convince myself that I’m weak and not making progress and so pathetic that looking in the mirror is like looking directly into my personal hell.
Depression is a scary and fucked up thing. It messes with your mind. It has the potential to make you hate yourself so much that you think the only way to crawl out of it is to take a bottle of sleeping pills and to just drift off forever. Mostly, I’m not in that place. Thank God. But I can see that place in the distance and I can see how people get there; which is scary enough in itself.
After calling out of work (and for the first time in my life being honest about why I wasn’t coming in – sadness, not a headache), I called my mom who I knew would pull the ache out of me and comfort it enough so that I could put it back inside.
She did, but…
Then I got back in bad and didn’t emerge until 2pm.
The thing about depression is that you are granted the super power of sleeping away your life. I wasn’t physically tired at all, but I was so emotionally strung out that closing my eyes and clearing my mind was the only way to make the ache go away. When I would wake up and see the hours ticking by, I had to close my eyes again so that I could ignore the fact that I was being taken over. That my day was being wasted by forced sleep.
Paul was brilliant with me today and actually got me out of bed and sitting on the couch. From there until now at 6pm, I’ve managed to get some groceries, check my work email and write this post. For most people that would take 45 minutes. For me, it took 4 hours.
At the moment I’m self-medicating by drinking a screwdriver – a drink that I don’t think I’ve ever had in my life. But it’s all we have in the house and I got sick and tired of feeling awful. I’m sipping on it, numbing the ugliness that’s coursing through my heart and praying to God that when I wake up tomorrow, I’ll feel strong enough to wake up, get showered, put on clothes, comb the hair, grab the ipod, walk to the elevator, get IN it and start my day.
But for my life to be a crap shoot of emotions…it’s enough to drive someone mad.
I remember when I was younger; I would get an extreme migraine headache every two weeks, without fail. I remember my parents making plans for the family right after my headache and hoping that I wouldn’t get it the day of the event (if only we planned EVERYTHING ahead of time, we could bypass the obstacle). Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but all times I would be afraid of that moment when the lights would flash in front of my eyes, the ache in my left eye would start, and the migraine would barrel through full force. Once the process started, I was incapacitated for two days, minimum.
That’s how I feel now.
I can’t predict the day I’m going to be debilitated by my depression. I can’t make it happen on a day when I have nothing to do. In fact, it very rarely works that way. It almost always happens during the week, versus the weekend.
But living in fear that I’m going to wake up one day and not be able to live my life…that’s the worst. It’s a day flushed right down the toilet. It’s a day spent in the prison of my mind. If I wake up and feel that ache, it’s almost impossible that I’ll rise above it.
The one positive thing (and what I used to LOVE about coming down from a migraine), is that it’s very near impossible for me to feel as bad tomorrow, as I did today. The odds of me having a bad week now are slim to none. It can honestly only go up from here.
To have a life where you don’t deal with this type of mental handicap…
It’s a gift. Be thankful.
