On Depression I

I’ve never tried to describe my depression before. Mine is seasonal, creeping up on me during October, when I’m distracted by falling leaves and choosing a Halloween costume for my daughter and deciding when is the actual point that I can start eating and drinking pumpkin-flavored things (a side note: time is a construct and the world has been on fire for two years. Have the pumpkin spice whatever whenever the fuck you feel like it. I’m tired of imposing some sort of arbitrary timeline on joy).

The seasonal nature of my depression, and the way people – particularly my peers – reacted to my diagnosis in high school, has always made me feel like my depression didn’t count somehow. It’s not year-round; I have good days during the winter; I can mostly handle it without medication. And so I do this weird thing where I simultaneously downplay and fight it and I always feel like shit.

I hate it. I hate how it sneaks up on me when I’m not looking and it’s five days into a week where I feel like shit before I realize Halloween is next week and I haven’t seen the sun in what seems like forever. On the day it hits, I can’t even conjure a memory of the sun. It’s like the sun has never existed outside of my imagination or a dream, and the current grayness is the only reality I’ve ever known. And I feel both helpless and so angry, because even though I know it’s going to come back every year, every year I’m devastated by it. Deflated, flattened, defeated.

Because depression – any depression – is insidious. It tells you that yours doesn’t count, because someone else suffers more or for longer. It tells you that on the days when the sun is shining that’s enough, and don’t you worry about doing the other things you do to make it bearable. Because depression always wants you to come back. It wants you to sit with it, and forget that anyone else cares. And it’s clever. It knows you won’t believe that the people you love don’t love you anymore or don’t care about you or don’t want to hear from you or see you. Instead, it concedes that sure, all these things are true, but then asks: do you really want to impose yourself on the people you love the most? You don’t deserve a safe place to go when you fall down. You don’t deserve to be loved when you can’t love yourself or you feel unlovable. You don’t deserve whatever moment of peace you can catch wherever you can find it. Depression is your most toxic friend. If it can’t have you, no one can. And it only wants you when you’re miserable. And you deserve to be miserable. Of course you do. So you don’t reach out, and when people ask how you are, you lie. You say you’re living the dream when you’re trapped in a nightmare.

The most difficult thing for me is that this is all true for me at the same time that another part of my brain knows that this is all temporary. The months will pass and losing myself in cooking for Thanksgiving and baking for Christmas will get me to the point when the process of the days getting shorter starts to reverse itself until night and day are equal again and my soul can take a soft, hesitant, shuddering breath. And so I’m stuck between two instincts: to fight it as hard as I can, and to give over completely. And the instinct to fight – by obsessively checking the weather for a reprieve, for looking how short or long daylight hours will be that day – makes me refuse to give in, but all that does is exhaust me.

Depression is a veil that filters out all the good and traps the bad. It separates me from the rest of the world and makes it hard to breathe. And if you’re brave enough to lift the veil to try to reach out, only to be rejected, you flee back under and pull the veil around you tighter. It’s a weight, but not around my neck. It’s locked around my chest, squeezing my lungs and breaking my heart. And it’s so heavy that I can’t let it hang there. I have to lift it, to carry it, but if I ever think about how heavy it is, it will overwhelm me, and I will fall. And I don’t think I’ll be able to stand again.

So instead I’m trying to learn to set it down gently sometimes, to feel its weight and then do whatever I can to lighten it, knowing it’s not a permanent solution. I let love in. I open up. I let myself laugh. I listen to music and watch what comforts me. I can still see it sitting in the corner and it stares at me and even as I’m finally taking care of myself I think: you’re right, you’re right, you’re right. But other nights I look at it and think: I’m too tired to fight today. Let’s call a truce. If you don’t weight me down, I won’t drag you along. And it admits defeat, sometimes just for a moment, and I step into the space I’ve made for myself and take a deep breath and rest before I pick it up and try again.