Depressioney
2003-06-19 : 12:45 p.m.

"Depression is rage spread thin."

-George Santayana

I'm having a depressioney day. I have a sneaking suspicion that Lexapro is becoming less and less effective for me, which means that I have a medication-switch in my near future. Either that, or a return to suicidal ideation and all the other unpleasantness that goes along with a major depressive episode. So I'll start a new medicine. And ride a whole new roller-coaster of side-effects and adjustments. And hopefully put the shadow back at bay for a couple more years.

"Depressioney" is a word I've coined to try to get at what the ebb and flow of depression is really like. If I say "I'm depressed," the reply is invariably "why?" or "about what?" Which pretty much entirely misrepresents the experience of clinical depression. It's intransitive. It has no "about". When someone says (and of course, people say it all the time) "I'm depressed about...", what they mean is that they're SAD about something. But no one wants to admit to just being sad, sadness being a strongly deprecated emotion in our culture of perpetual pep. You can only get away with sadness if it's a diagnosis. So everyone is "depressed about..."

All of which is to say: some of us are not "depressed about" anything. Some of us, who live with clinical depression as our (innocuous-sounding and yet murderous) daily companion, aren't entirely in control of our experience of experience. We're talking about something else altgether.

I never know how to describe a feeling of "more depressed than usual" without sounding whiney. I'm not sad. Don't ask me what it's about. Don't ask me "why are you depressed?" The "why" of it is the great blind spot in my view on the world, a mystery burbling behind my eyes. It is one of the more ridiculous ironies of my life that this one little problem, rooted in the small chemical processes of the organ that makes me me, is the one that I depend on degreed professionals to help me understand.

So much for cogito, ergo sum. I'm a hell of a lot more confident in the immutable realness of the world than I can ever afford to be about the reasonableness of my own thoughts and emotions. So, at least those of us who suffer with this illness can take cold comfort from being so trendily post-cartesian.

One of the (very few) benefits of my deadly companion is that, as an unrelentingly cheesey and perky therapist once told me, "I have a right to feel bad." Though couched in the flakey rights-talk of pop-psychology, there's a bit of insight there. It's kind of nice to have a doctors note to not participate in the unrelenting and coercive positivity of captialist culture. I have long been loath to ascribe special benefits or insights to this minor neurological imbalance that has threatened me with death for my entire adult life. Still, depression's dubious gift of hypersensitivity has made me keenly aware of the force and coercion hidden at the heart of our most ordinary, everyday relations. R. D. Laing was on to something when he wrote "we are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love."

So, you want to know what it feels like to be depressed? Put all notions of "sad" out of your mind. "Sad" has not a goddamned thing to do with it. Imagine being tired...more tired than you can imagine. Imagine every effort or idea or hope that rises within you flowing immediately away, being absorbed into this all-encompassing exhaustion like water into sand.

Imagine waking up exhausted and afriad for no reason, every day. Imagine not being able to remember simple things. Imagine trying to focus on your work and watching your thoughts melt into amorphus blobs like sandcastles built with over-wet sand. Imagine constantly thinking about how hard and pointless all this is, and how much easier it would be to kill yourself...and KNOWING perfectly well that it's not all hard and pointless, and that your life is really okay, and that you certainly don't want to die, and TRYING your hardest not to think these thoughts....and they just keep coming. All day. You can maybe manage to get by and do the things you need to do that day, but it wears on you.

And then you get to explain this to people when they ask (and they do): "what's wrong?" They're not satisfied with the truth, with "I suffer with depression" or "i'm a little down today". Because you're inconveniencing them by being less-that-totally-jazzed-about-life in their presence. Haveing you seen the latests Abercrombie + Fitch catalogue? It's no more socially acceptable to be non-euphoric than it is to be fat. Your interlocutors feign concern...but their real concern is for themselves. For the fact that you're cramping their style. For the way your depression gives them a vague and disturbing idea that everything's not just great. And so, even though you're barely keeping your own head above water, you now feel obligated to reassure them that you're okay, that everything's fine, it's just a funk. While you're fighting off thoughts of suicide every five minutes or so.

That's what depression is "like". Those of us who live with it would greatley appreciate if our friends could still be our friends without demanding of us the totallizing "pep" and insipid bleached-fang smiles that have become de rigur in this culture. Because if we're up out of bed and sitting there with you, we've worked harder today than you can possibly imagine

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last 5 entries:
a dream of sky, 2003-2005, rest in peace - 2005-05-19
because we can't have people DYING! - 2005-05-17
reality check - 2005-05-17
did you get that thing i sent ya? - 2005-05-17
liberals and their fancy "facts"... - 2005-04-26