I just posted something I wrote in the middle of the night on March 28th. It was one of those weird nights when I couldn’t sleep if my life had depended on it, and I had no idea why. Something was trying to get out of me, and I wasn’t allowed to rest until it had been fully liberated. I have no idea if what came out that night was all of it or not, but so be it. Maybe I will never get all of it out, but I’m not in the same place I was when I wrote that.
Depression is one of those maladies that is different for every person who claims it, and remains invisible to others. It’s not something I asked for, or something I brought on. It’s something that is as much a part of me as my toenails. It hides from me while steadily gaining ground in my psyche, telling me scary stories about how I am the biggest loser and will always be such. Some of that was given to me, I think but some of it has built on itself and created a new darkness. It’s a guest that will not leave, a never-ending trough of misery.
If you’ve never had major depression, you won’t understand how what you see of me does not always match what is going on inside of me. I love to joke, love to solve puzzles, love to make music, and incite my small dog to near hysteria but that doesn’t translate to happiness for me. I’m not sure I know what happiness really is, or how I might go about attaining it.
I don’t need your Google searches around the topic of depression, and I could really not care less about what a depressed brain looks like on an MRI. I don’t need to know that you believe you understand, because your ex-husband was depressed after your divorce, and you have a friend who never got over her son’s death. I want you to know you don’t understand what it’s like to walk through the world with a rain cloud over your head that only you know is there, and sometimes it storms but mostly it just drips and blocks out the sun. It’s always there, and so it seems quite normal to seek protection whenever you venture out into the world. Because it was normalcy for me to feel that way, it never occurred to me that everybody didn’t feel that way.
Depression has been a powerful force in my life since I was at least 11. That was the year my grandmother, my original hero and original angel, died. I was the only grandchild at that time, and I took my job as royalty quite seriously. After she died, there was nothing special about me, I was just a garden variety 11-year old who seemed to be a bit odd. Everyone else was busy managing their own grief, and I was left to my own devices. I felt mostly nothing, not anger, not sadness but I did feel trapped and terribly unhappy. But there was no one to wipe my tears or really understand what I had lost. Worst of all, there was nothing to replace it. I had to figure out how to make it on my own, how to go back to school and know how to behave and how to be respectful and do what was expected.
I remember getting in trouble more and more after my grandmother had died. Anger was always ready to explode from just under my skin, but good girls don’t have that kind of anger. Good girls always do what they are told, are not overeaters, and do not talk back to their mothers. Good girls were not supposed to be angry – you have all that you need to be a brightly shining star so what’s the problem? The explanation you are given for your increasingly errant behavior is that you have no respect, that you are spoiled, that it’s just growing pains. You are told to suck it in, get over it, do what everyone else is doing. You don’t see them acting out, but you are doing a bang-up job of embarrassing yourself and everyone else with your ridiculous antics. What are you crying for? You’re too big to be doing that, but if you want something to cry about just keep it up and you’ll get something to cry about.
So, yeah, those are messages that are spit out to many a sensitive child, but I wasn’t just any sensitive child. I had issues, I had questions, I didn’t understand the rules but was punished for breaking them. I felt trapped in some world that was not my own. I repeatedly tried to prove that I was adopted, or from some other place. Later I became somewhat convinced that I was an alien, and I just needed evidence. I was looking for some way to explain the growing disconnect between myself and everything else. I did not relate to my family, I did not relate to my school mates, I did not relate to anyone. Any connections I had were superficial and aimed solely at maintaining an image that depicted someone just like everybody else. But I wasn’t just like everybody else. I knew it, and everybody else knew it. i may as well have been the proverbial flying purple people eater.
To my way of thinking then, and well into adulthood, there had never been anybody that was more unattractive, more awkward, more stupid than me. I got lots of reinforcement for that from my parents. My father didn’t much talk about too much, but my mother was constantly sounding off about my weight, my nappy hair, my sassy mouth, my stupidity. There was very little that I could do right, at least not at home. Bizarrely, I was elevated to near mythical status in public by the same people who neglected me. I did not understand, and became convinced that I had somehow screwed up my reality, ruined it. That was because I was such a loser, such a screwup, such a disappointment to everyone.
It’s no wonder that I began to feel very sorry for myself, always wanting to be someone that I was not. I wanted to be a jock, but that’s not where my skill set was. I wanted to be a musician, but while I had some talent I wasn’t going to be performing in Carnegie Hall anytime soon. I wanted to have good hair, like my classmates, but couldn’t do much about my genetics. Nothing was going to change, mainly because I had screwed it up so grandly. I think I gave up trying to be like everybody else, gave up trying to fit in, gave up trying to pretend I knew what the hell I was doing. In actuality, I just wanted people to stop kicking me in the gut and telling me that if I just behaved better, that wouldn’t happen. In my mind, I was simply defective and it must be true that I would never amount to anything.
At some point, I took on responsibility for my mother’s emotional well-being. That wasn’t my job, but I remember telling myself that it was. I told myself that I had to make sure she thought well of herself, that I wasn’t doing anything to bring shame or dishonor to her, that she knew she was smart and capable and that anyone who thought differently was an asshole. I performed spectacularly at that job, even when I had to literally punch myself and repeat to myself that what I wanted didn’t matter. That was just how it was, and she was right about everything and I should just suck it in, accept it, deal with it. If I was lucky I’d get out alive.
My personal rain cloud lasted through adolescence, through college, through my 20s and 30s, my 40s and 50s. I did not know any other way to be. I had come to accept that people you loved died, or left, and that was just the way it was. Usually, I wove into that narrative that I’d been the cause of them leaving, that if I’d been better or doing more of what I was supposed to be doing, they probably would not have left. I understood that my grandmother had died, but my father,,,he chose to leave. Chose to leave me AND her. She made very clear to me that was how I should look at it. Thanks, mother dear. I’ve got that loud and clear. She apologized to me much later for having said that, but I couldn’t hear her.
Depression made me not recognize myself in the mirror. I saw a hideous creature that must have been painful for others to see. I saw a disappointment, a fool who didn’t know the most basic things about good manners or social conventions. I saw something that would be better off dead and put out of its misery. It’s hard to keep up a professional appearance when out in public with all that boiling in your head. But to everyone else, I looked like a sullen fat girl with a bad attitude. I suppose that is the self image I had as well, and then I began to do everything I could to perfect it. It did not go well.
All of my relationships were contentious, or so false as to be maddening. I always felt like the beggar at the door of other peoples’ homes. In many ways, I suppose that is exactly what I was. People called me needy, and I could not deny it. They did not understand, nor did I, what they could provide that would fulfill some of that deep need. I gave up trying to communicate that and decided it was fine to simply get lost in the bottle. It helped me to be more numb to those continuing kicks to the gut, the never-ending disappointment of being who I was. Let’s have another round. At some point, it will do its job and make alll of the hurt go away. But that’s not what happened.
I got sober at 28, but that didn’t make the pain go away. At least I was no longer adding to it, or making things exponentially worse for myself. I understood the process of reclaiming my life up to a point, but the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous had never encountered a force so powerful as my mother. I managed to make a strong stand in sobriety, however, and was able to dispense with quite a bit of the shame of it all. I had treated people very badly, but they didn’t know what I knew, that I was only re-enacting what I had experienced. To this day, I still do not handle rejection well, but that’s another story.
It was good that I was no longer sabotaging my life, but there was still quite a lot missing. There was no such thing as happiness, or joy for all those years drinking or for all the years since then. Apparently there was an instruction book for how to achieve that, but I did not have a copy. Eight-year old kids knew better than I how to live like an adult. I shut down all of my systems that were concerned with partnering or, god forbid, sex. Too complicated. Ain’t nobody got time for that, and besides, the outcome is always the same – one plus one makes 2 for a time but then one leaves and the other one is less than zero. Same story, different day so why bother.
No amount of making myself invisible to the public at large kept me as isolated as I wanted to be. It was raining inside my head, and I needed to stay inside. And so I did, for a number of years. I have friends, some very close, but the rain still beats against my windows and shuts out the light. I have come to embrace that, make it my own. Nobody understands how deep I have to dig for pieces of my heart that had been torn off in one betrayal after another, another disappointment, more closed doors. I presumed it would always be raining in my head, and somehow I had faith in that. It was a constant that I needed for a long time, one that somehow reassured me that I was still in here and that I knew what the hell was going on. It was normal, and I stopped questioning it long ago.
Even though I took myself out of a lot of social circulation, there was apparently some part of me that knew my life was not as it was meant to be. After my mother died, I attributed the emotional flatness to grief. After I got fired from the awful job I had (they called it a layoff but we all knew the truth), I attributed it to anger and wounds from the past. At some point, though, I knew that how I was living was simply inadequate. I have been in cognitive therapy for many years, because I have always known that sometimes I will have to pay for someone objective to listen to me. I am usually prepared for them pointing out the river of depression and its associated tributaries of lack of focus, lack of follow-through, and chronic half-assed performance. I was not, however, prepared for more than one of my care team characterizing this as “treatment resistant major depression”. Hm.
My mother probably had major depressive disorder, as did my father. My father medicated his with alcohol and philandering. My mother treated hers with staunch refusal to explore professional help or medication and her faith in God. She left big messes for everyone else to clean up. Somewhere in there I decided that I didn’t want to follow either parent’s example of how to deal with depression. So, I said I would try this esketamine treatment. I was skeptical about the outcome, but what the hell else do I have to do?
The esketamine treatment consists of a nasal inhalant, closely monitored by professionals. I don’t get to take it home and experiment with dosage, or change my mind. It’s been very interesting, to say the least. After getting the dosage on board, I literally go into what feels like the old trips I used to take on blotter acid. I get to leave my body behind and connect all kinds of dots, make realizations that can only be made when my mind is cruising free. I rather enjoy the sensation, like I enjoyed nitrous oxide at the dentist. I know that it is temporary, and I do not have the option to extend it. No actual hallucinations, but lots of visualization and I get to keep the progress I’ve made with the puzzle I’ve been trying to complete for years.
Since I’ve been receiving that treatment, I have been sleeping better and writing like crazy. Some things are now connected, and other things are more understood than ever before. I am getting a lot of guidance from the ether about how to let some of this toxic crap go, how to reclaim more of the missing pieces of my life and of my soul. That’s a good thing. My little addict brain loves the high of the trip, but knows better than to manipulate the process in hopes of extending that. Over the past 72 hours, I’ve had two days when I woke up to a feeling that all is well. I navigated those days without the impending sense of doom that has become so much a part of my landscape. There was no terror of another shoe about to drop. It has been much easier to tell myself that I will be OK, much easier to have a smile for people, and far easier to give a shit about them. For the first time, I can see where it is that I have a choice about the raincloud, that I can actually take another route and disconnect from it. That is a very good thing, and truthfully I did not believe it was even vaguely possible. I am choosing not to question it, choosing not to jinx it, and choosing not to engage in negative self-talk that says this won’t last.
At this moment, as I am gearing down for sleep, all I can think is…bring it on. I am feeling stronger over the past few days, both physically and emotionally. My dog still shits inside, but I am going to get back to those days of wearing her chubby butt out with long walks. I still have money problems, but as I said before, it’s easier to tell myself that it will be OK. I have accepted the fact that a part-time job is probably in my future, but it will get me out of the apartment. So be it. Life on life’s terms is a phenomenal concept, and I believe I am fully committed to it. That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.
The Sound Hole 