I’ve dealt with chronic depression ever since I was a teenager. It’s often related to lack of sunlight, so it hits worse in the winter, but it’s not always to do with that. Maybe it’s hormones. I’m not really sure. For all I know, it’s a food allergy.
What I do know, clearly and with intimate detail, is the way I feel when I’m in a low spot. It’s starts to feel like I’m wading through pea soup fog. It starts to feel like I’m all alone in the universe, that no one can help me and no one even CARES enough to help me.
Now, considering that I’ve got a wonderful husband who I’m quite sure loves me as well as two children who hang on me for attention every chance they get, I’m pretty sure (when I’m thinking rationally) that there are at least three people in the world who do care. When I think logically, I realize that I have a large and loving family who cares, as well as many friends who love me.
The fog does not allow for rational or logical thinking. It chews up all common sense and spits it out. It blinds me to everything that I know is true in my world. It even fouls the way I feel about other people. So, I could be sitting there, sobbing my eyes out, drenching my husband’s shoulder as he holds me close. But still, I’d feel totally alone and bereft. Still, I’d be unable to tell that the love we’ve shared for ten years is not something that will fade away, that it’s not something that will break simply because I didn’t have the dishes done before he got home that particular day. There is no logic to my thinking when the fog envelops me.
It’s frightening to realize how disconnected I do get. When I can look back to the times when the fog in my brain was thickest, it all seems unreal. I scoff that anyone could ever think like that, feel like that. Certainly, I couldn’t! Certainly, I’m not depressed. (Oh, a voice whispers in my ear, you know better!) I tell myself I’m not so deep in the fog that I need to be on drugs like Wellbutrin or Zoloft. I tell myself that a therapist would be of no use to me. I tell myself that I speak from experience there since not a single therapist I’ve ever gone to has ever been helpful.
The voice of reason, these days, breaks through the fog and speaks through my husband. “Take the medicines. See the doctor. Go to the therapist.” He must be sick of saying these things over and over for the last ten years, with mixed results. At some point, he’ll get tired of supporting my black and blue spirit. Ah. See, in that one sentence, I can see the breath of the fog sliding into my mind. That’s how it works. It insinuates itself into my otherwise rational thoughts, corrupting all that I think.
The fog itself doesn’t scare me. It’s not even the low self esteem, the loneliness or the bitterness that bothers me (aside from the fact that they frustrate me!). What bothers me is that I always wonder if or when the fog will ever drift lower than it has in years (since before my marriage). It bothers to me to wonder if this period of depression will be the one that begins me on a journey of inflicting pain on myself, of physically punishing myself for being alone, of deciding that this family I’ve been nurturing for ten years no longer needs me and it’s time for me to move along and leave them to a life that is unblemished by the likes of me.
These thoughts scare me. These are the thoughts that drive me to once more take the meds, see the doctors and try the therapists. Maybe this time, one of these things will actually work.
