Depression--Evil Suck Hole of Pain, or "Growth Experience?" DIscuss

I don't know if you know this, but I suffer from depression.

Okay, so, you might know that, although I haven't be tremendously voluble on the topic. I think. Or so it seems to me. If you are tired of it, you may be excused. It's okay, we'll wait.

Anybody left? Okay. Well.

Depression. I have struggled with it since not long after the birth of my first child, and at times it has been a heavy heavy burden. The emotional pain made it literally, physically difficult to get out of bed or out of the house, and all my personality got swallowed up in the hamster wheel of panic. This went on for a very long time.

The other trap of depression is that I was perfectly incapable of being able to manage my own care. Depression, among other things, stripped me of any perspective on my own life, so I would go to doctors, or therapists, and I had no way to evaluate whether they were actually helping me or not. What did I want to talk about in therapy? I don't know--what would be helpful? Can't you tell me? After all, I was not the professional in this!

Thank god I ended up in a doctor's office (after about 7 years of this) who listened to me for about 10 minutes and said "norapinephrine." I had been taking medication to regulate the levels of seratonin in my brain, but apparently I was a textbook case of unregulated norapinephrine. I got on a second medication, and the world got better.

Not immediately, of course--depression medications are notorious for having to be "ramped up" to reach a certain level of presence in the blood, and that can take six weeks, more or less, to achieve. And even once you have reached the proper dosage, the improvement takes some time to manifest itself. So, medically, it takes a while, even once you are on the right medications, to get back to feeling even semi-normal.

So I found this doctor about five years ago, and over time I have slowly begun to feel better. The experience is like walking on an icy lake: there are some places were the ice is safe, but thin patches can show up unexpectedly and drop you into the icy dark. So, I began to slide slowly across this treacherous surface, learning to trust that I wouldn't fall in.

It is only recently--I mean, VERY recently--that I have come to trust that I won't go under. I have begun to put myself out into the world, and have found that I can do things that I haven't been able to do for years. Mr. Sweetie and I have gone out to social events where I had to meet new people and talk with them--and I found that I can do that, and even enjoy it again.

So, after an appallingly long time, I am finally seeing that I am coming back to the person I was FOURTEEN fricking years ago. That is a lot of time to lose, for anybody. So, I have struck a bargain with myself. I deserve to have some of that time back. I'm not going to be greedy about it, but dammit, I need at least some of those years back! And I don't want to just tack them on at the end. Who wants an extra fourteen years at the END of you life? No, I want those years NOW.

So, I have decided that I should get at least half of those years back, and I now declare myself seven years younger. My birthdate is now officially 1970, and I am the youngest of my siblings instead of the oldest. (Unless they want seven years back too--I'll share!)

This works out okay with my children--the oldest is 14, so I was 24 when she was born, which isn't scandalously young. It does wreak havoc with my wedding anniversaries though--I must have been 15 when we got married, unless we drop seven years off that number too.

So, congratulations, Mom and Dad! You had a baby in 1970! I guess you are entitled to an extra seven years as well.

Coincidence? You Be The Judge

So, after posting a fairly long entry about how modern society drives family life to the margins, I found an article by Barbara Ehrenreich (via Sweetney) titled "How We Learned To Stop Having Fun."

In this article, Ehrenreich traces the rise in depression from the 1600s and couples it with the loss of social celebrations and festivals--a rise in the concept of "self" as separate from the community, coupled with the loss of "community celebrations" which allowed the individual to lose their terrible aloneness and enter into a larger communion.

Even the religions, she notes, had some form of ritual or approachable God where an individual might become part of a larger group. I found this statement worthwhile:

Not so with the Calvinist version of Protestantism. Instead of offering relief, Calvinism provided a metaphysical framework for depression: if you felt isolated, persecuted and possibly damned, this was because you actually were.

Back in law school, I remember have a couple of conversations with friends of other faiths about which type of guilt was the most damaging: Jewish guilt, Catholic guilt, or Protestant guilt. Jewish guilt was focused around disappointing your family, and having to leave with people disappointed in you--summed up nicely, I recall, by the following joke:

Q: How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Don't worry about me, I'll just sit here in the dark and not be a bother.

Catholic guilt was more widespread, but also absolvable. Yes, nearly everything is a sin, and will send you to hell, but you can go confess and it goes away. Sure, confession isn't easy, but there was an official way to get rid of your guilt and to not have to go to hell.

Protestant guilt was tricky. It was the devious product of circuitous thinking--a lose-lose proposition. Protestants were supposed to work hard, but the risk was being successful, because that was often the sign of inappropriate favor by the devil. This is why New England was such a great place for them: they could work very very hard at their farms, but the rocky soil made it certain that they weren't too successful however hard they worked.

Calvinism itself was logically flawed: if you were predestined to heaven or hell, then it didn't matter what you did in this life, right? So, as my Jewish friends pointed out, if you were predestined to heaven, you could enjoy yourself without worrying about what was going to happen to you. If you were predestined to hell, you had nothing to lose by enjoying yourself. So, logically, early New England should have been Party Central.

But trust the dour Northern Europeans to spoil this game--no, your status as predestined to heaven was supposedly apparent though your conduct, and failure to behave in a suitably saintly fashion convinced your neighbors that you were hell-bound, and thus you were likely to be shunned, exiled, or burned for a witch.

No wonder depression is about the 5th leading cause of death and disability in the world. We sure know how to make ourselves unhappy, don't we?

Something Is Wrong, or TMI

I think I am sick. At least, something is wrong. I cannot stop sleeping. In fact, I am actually typing this post while lying on my belly in my bed with my face pressed into the pillow and my jaw open and drool coming out of my mouth. Literally.

And by "literally," I mean "figuratively." Because that's just how trend-savvy I am.

Anyway.

I went to bed last night and spent the night having wide-screen, technicolor, Sensurround dreams populated by many people that I actually know in real life! That never happens! I had a dream in which I re-married Mr. Sweetie is some half-assed unrehearsed wedding where someone accidentally elbowed me in the nose and I FELT IT! For reals!

Then I went back to high school (still in my dream) to finish my schooling, and had to face down the Popular Girl, who couldn't quite believe that I was married and kept sneaking glances at my rings, while vowing to themselves that their engagement rings would be AT LEAST two full carats biiger than mine was. (Which, FYI, was and is a lovely, tasteful solitare.)

And the sad thing? Was that I was awake enough to realize that, even in my dreams, I was still an unclassified outsider in my own school.

To continue: I got up, got the kidlets to school, and went back to bed. Where I proceeded to sleep and sleep and sleep, even though the dog announced the arrival of the mail (Bow! Wow! bowwowowowowowowowowowowowowowow! BOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOW!)

It was one o'clock before I woke up, and my nose was stuffed with opaque and bloody phlem that had hardened in my nose and turned into slabs of ossified snot that came out of my nose like scabs. (Yes, that was too much information, but I did warn you.) There is something chilling about finding that your head is bleeding inside, isn't there? Something, well, scary?

But, on top of all that, I am feeling the familiar gravitational pull of depression. It seems to be worst in the shower. That is where I start feeling the feelings of failure, coupled with the complete physical inability to prevent whatever may happen next. I get to relive, psychically, all the mistakes I have ever made in my life, with the added bonus of feeling both guilty and inadequate in the past AS WELL AS obviously inadequate for the immediate future.

Dog needs a walk? Can't do it. Kids need to be picked up from school? Thank God for cars, but can I really do all that driving between schools and music lessons? Dinner? Who the hell cares?

It's not so bad that I can't see the foolishness, but I still can't stop it. And I can see the chicken-and-eggness of it too. Am I feeling like this because I am sick, and that's making me feel depressed too, or am I depressed and that's making me sleep and feel sick?

How can I tell?