Sensing the Storm

It’s been a long time since I last posted. Far longer than I’m really okay with, but at this point, it is what it is. A lot of stuff has been happening over the last few months, and I’ve tried to start a few different posts, but I have a talent for rambling more than I should and then not being in the right space to finish a post later if I don’t manage to finish it in one sitting. I keep feeling the impulse to try and write about everything that’s happened since… when was my last post? February?… but it’s honestly too much to try and cover all of it, and even if I did write about all of it, it should really be broken up into different posts.

Anyway… as I catch myself starting to ramble again, I really sat down on my laptop a little while ago because I had a few hours – the majority of the nonprofit I work for (4 out of the 5 of us) was driving home from a trade show, and I was sitting in the back seat for around 3.5 hours or so – and the depression is coming back.

 

 

Over the last couple of months – really since mid-June – I’ve had the strangest sense of foreboding that I couldn’t quite place. The timing didn’t help, not that there’s ever a good time for your gut to suddenly start telling you something bad is coming. I was in the middle of trying to write a hefty grant application to fund the program I’m developing, and a few weeks before the submission deadline, I felt it. Just this certainty that there was emotional hell on the horizon, even though I had no circumstances that could really explain why it would be coming on now.

I spent weeks trying to clamp down on it, my biggest goal just to finish my grant and get it turned in, but I don’t think I had a lot of success there. For about a week, I just shut down; I felt completely fried, and doing much more than getting out of bed and pulling out my laptop was a struggle. Admittedly, this was in part due to having my wisdom teeth removed and then getting a severe dry socket, but still. Long story short, there were other factors that played into this, but I didn’t get the grant in on time. While the degree to which it hit me it feels disproportionate, I was crushed. I’d put around 100 hours into the application, just to have it fall apart in the last two weeks. It wasn’t what brought the flood on, but it blew open what was left of the flood gates, and I’ve just been trying to remember how to swim.

 

 

It’s weird how I’m noticing things this time around. I don’t remember knowing ahead of time that the last couple of rounds were coming like I did this time. I don’t think I was quite as conscious of how the last couple of rounds were impacting me in the moment. I don’t think I noticed the apathy creeping in and wedging itself between me and my work, hobbies, and relationships until after I had started pulling myself out of it. This time, I can feel it all encroaching. I feel the fatigue, the urge to isolate myself and hide, the beginnings of apathy clouding over everything. My reaction to it has been oscillating between hopelessness and anger, and I’ve been trying to cling to the anger when I swing that way. Anger at least has an energy to it – something with a spark. Hopelessness is paralyzing.

Last year, during my trips with my mother and sister to and from D.C., my mom and I would sometimes talk about depression. My grandmother, who has bipolar disorder, was in the depths of a truly crippling depression that summer, and my mom and I had been trying to figure out how to help her weather the storm without becoming permanently disabled by it – she was staying in bed as much as she could get away with, and with her age, it was leading to muscle atrophy that could have lasting damage if allowed to progress too far. While trying to puzzle out how we could get her moving, we talked about her patterns with depression, specifically how she described it and approached it. Over the years, she’s gone through several long cycles of depression, mania, and stability, and she’s typically been able to feel the depression cycles coming – she can perceive the chemical shift happening. She also doesn’t tend to try and fight it in any way, shape, or form. My grandma’s approach to her depressions is to just give into it and wait for it to pass, and then – using her spectacular capacity to modify her own memories – forget what it was like to be in the throes of it.

Even now after taking time to try and wrap my head around it, I can’t. Our conversation about my grandma led into me reflecting on my own experiences with depression, and while it must be said that I’ve never been in a place nearly as dark or severe as what my grandmother experienced that summer… I have experienced depression that stopped me from being able to function independently. I had to take a semester off of school to figure out how to acknowledge the depression and learn how to essentially reclaim myself from it. While talking to Mom, I was trying to figure out how to articulate what it felt like immediately after I got home that semester, when I would spend most of my time (that I can remember) either in bed or sitting in a chair out in the living room, watching tv or looking at my phone without really paying attention to what was happening.

 

 

Depression can stem from a number of causes and manifest in a number of forms, which can make it hard to describe to people who haven’t experienced it at all, much less your version of it. For me, though, depression is like a void. A void that constantly pulls at you, dragging you deeper and deeper into a dark corner of yourself. It’s that cloud of apathy that creeps in so incrementally at first, that if you don’t know what it is, or to be on the lookout for it, it will have already dampened your ability to experience your life the way you normally would before you notice it. The beginnings are subtle:

• You start to lose interest in things that you know you do, in fact, find interesting and important;
• Your attention span shrinks as your interest does, and you just can’t seem to make yourself stay engaged with anything, be it an article, book, movie, tv show, game, conversation, etc.;

These initial effects kick off the process of retreating and isolating yourself… You slowly stop trying to engage in work and hobbies because the lack of success is aggravating and feels terrible. Talking to friends and family gets harder, and the longer you go without talking to someone, the less likely you are to initiate anything because guilt compounds the difficulty that’s already introduced by the depression. And then the next stage really kicks in – getting cut off from not just the tangible things around you, but from yourself.

When I say you get cut off from yourself, I’m referring to the void that pulls you into itself and away from everything else. I have more of a mental image of it than a verbal description, which makes the experience harder to explain from here on out. In my head, I picture two… layers, almost… of myself. There’s the outer layer, which everyone sees, and then there’s the mental layer – a little bit like Inside Out, for lack of a better comparison. Normally, the mental me is in synch with the physical me, and is able to access all of the controls, emotions, and connections in my head. When the depression sets in, the mental image changes, so that I’ve become partially hollow inside and the mental me is being sucked into that dark, hollow space. As the depression ramps up, the hollow portion grows and the mental me gets dragged down even farther into it.

 

 

From that hollow space, I can’t reach things as basic as my emotions, much less things that stem from them, like interest or enjoyment. The deeper I get pulled, the more disconnected I get from those things, going from being able to see the things I normally engage with easily, but not being able to reach out and touch them, to not even being able to see them. I ultimately find myself drifting through an abyss, usually without anything to ground or orient myself. Occasionally, an emotion will spike strong enough that I can just reach out and grab onto it, however briefly, but it feels incredibly rare when I’m that deep. Usually the emotions that make it that deep are the less pleasant ones, like anger or sadness. When I’m able to reach one, I cling to it like a lifeline.

As terrible as it sounds, when I’m depressed, I strive for the anger whenever possible; it’s easier to hold on to than anything else at that point, and it’s more energizing. It has to be understood that at that point, I’m usually not feeling much of anything – I feel empty, and like the things that make me who I am are being stripped from me. Going back to the mental image, it’s like I’m just drifting through space without any touching points; as contradictory as I know this is, I feel cold… I feel lost… I feel alone… and it’s terrifying. I don’t know how I manage to experience an all-consuming apathy and feel terrified of it at the same time, but that’s what it is to be in that void. I cling to any emotion that cuts through it because at least it’s something, and I especially cling to emotions that come with an urge to do anything. Those touch points give me something I can use to try and pull myself out, even if it’s only an inch or two.

 

 

Which brings me back to my grandma and the disconnect between us where I cannot understand her approach to depression. There are few things that scare me more than that void now. If I just gave into the depression, I’m pretty confident that I’d be sucked right into the heart of that abyss, where I really wouldn’t be able to reach any of my emotions, reach any passion or motivation, or anything that I could use as a source of energy. My gut says that I’d be letting myself fall deep enough into that hole that there’d be no guarantee of finding a lifeline to eventually pull myself back up with. I don’t trust it to eventually blow over, and even if I did, I don’t want to fall any deeper than I can help. I don’t understand how someone could not fight against that undertow…

I hate sensing the undertow, just waiting for me to slip and lose my footing. I hate the paranoia that comes with the onset.

• Is my fatigue stemming from an actual lack of sleep? Did I catch a bug? Is it just the fatigue that goes with my meds? Or is it a symptom of the depression? And is it trying to give me the heads up that the depression is getting worse?
• Is my trouble focusing due to being overworked? Over-stressed? Is it the difficulty that can come with my meds from time to time? Or is it a symptom of the depression? Is it a sign that the apathy is creeping closer?
• Are the really long bouts of facial pain and migraines just due to irregular sleep and whatever the weird problem is that’s triggering the pain in the first place? Or am I perceiving it more strongly than usual because of the depression?
• When I want alone time, is it because of my natural tendency to be an introvert who finds interaction with multiple people, or extended interaction with a couple of people, incredibly draining? Or is it because I’m falling into the void of depression, and starting to struggle more with being around anyone?

Anything that could be even remotely tied to the depression, I second guess. In the last two months, I’ve wondered whether I caught something at least ten times, even though only two of them actually drove me to the doctor and my doctor only thought I was sick one of those two times. People ask me how I’m doing, and I’m at a point where I’m not even trying to bullshit a “I’m doing good, how are you?” although maybe I should. When people ask me how I am these days, I either respond with “Meh?” while shrugging my shoulders and probably making a weird, awkward face, or I respond with a brief summary of the last week or so, trying to pull in a couple of good things to offset the more negative stuff. The deciding factor as to which I go with typically depends on how well I know the person, and how long it’s been since I talked to them.

People rarely seem to have any idea of how to respond to me when I do that. I don’t try to hide my pain and problems from my closest friends and my family; when I keep starting conversations by honestly answering their questions and saying that I’m struggling, I feel sick with fear that they’re going to stop talking to me, much less wanting me to visit. I get scared that no one would want to be friends with someone who deals with depression and the associated complications as often as I do… that I’m more burdensome as a friend than helpful… Who would want to be friends with someone like that? Who would want to be with someone like that? It’s the poisonous trains of thought like those, which play on loops over and over and over again in your head, that lead you to isolate yourself… to hide from your friends and loved ones for fear of scaring them off, not realizing that hiding is probably doing more damage than you were doing by being honest and open with them…

 

 

I’m trying to be more cognizant of the symptoms I’m experiencing this time. I’m trying to do the things you’re supposed to do to help mitigate them. I’ve started exercising again – admittedly probably not as much as I should, but it’s a start – and I’m trying to make myself expand my diet to include healthier things. I’m making sure I leave the house every day and I’m going places where I’m around other people.

I don’t know if it’s enough. But I’m trying to make this round different. I’m trying to make it better. And I suppose that’s all any of us can really do.