Here is What I Know
Yesterday was a lot for me, and seemingly for us. It’s hard to appreciate the heft and gravity of my relationships in those moments, and other feelings kick in that and latch onto my more dominant internal dialogues.
I am loved. I believe it. I love you, too. It’s complicated in practice.
This was absolutely not my first dire episode. As I’ve gone through others, I’ve accrued scars and bruises that flare up in each additional bout with this beast. It does make it feel rather inevitable or imminent — even if it’s only correlative, am I just waiting around for whatever storm will break me? There are a few points that hit pretty hard yesterday, at least one of which was new to the party. I’m going to try to unfurl it all here; it’s an attempt to be seen, and to provide some (perhaps bittersweet) assurance.
First but not foremost, narrative exhaustion was huge yesterday. I feel deeply loved by the signals that lit up. My beacons were not unmet, and I was expectedly overwhelmed. I have no desire to indict the behavior; I’m incredibly appreciative. It’s also not exactly that I don’t “want to talk about it,” it’s much more that I feel like I talk about it a lot.
There’s two aspects at play there. Talking about my depression and “justifying” my feelings tends to involve a lot of replays that feel just as painful in retrospect. It’s a lot of energy to relive many of these moments and feelings, and I definitely don’t have a lot of energy to do much other than send up smoke.
But talking about it is helpful. I’ve talked before about therapy and therapeutic spaces.
Venting is an important part of this process because many problems we face are too big to tackle shortly, or they’re chronic and recurring. Venting helps relieve some of the pressure. Having been in formal therapy for over two decades now, I know this to be both true and infuriating. I’m capable of recognizing it as unrealistic and irrational, but in the moment I am desperate for problem solving over storytelling. More frustrating still, in the worst of these moments (like yesterday), I am furiously invested in problem solving with absolutely no energy or means of facilitating. Venting is probably all I can do, and that makes me feel worse.
Foremost on my mind yesterday was something fairly unsettling for a veteran depression-ist. I was diagnosed with severe depression before I was 10. I’ve grown with it, sat with it, fought with it, and lived through it for years and years. In recent memory, my depression has felt very manageable. I could predict the ebbs and flows with decent confidence, and I was separately confident in my ability to weather the storms that came regardless.
I cannot say that right now. My depression feels very unknown to me.
I can imagine a few contributors for this shift. We’ve all just experienced an undeniable trauma, and for many of us the ripples of that are still peeling outward and hitting us whenever they will. I cannot with any confidence say that the change in my depressive periodicity is not linked to my experiences during 2020. It was compounded by the experience of trying to live in a new city, and convoluted by my attempts to meet others in their trauma states. I don’t think we could have been prepared for last year, and I don’t think we’re remotely done with the emotional impact it made on us. There’s assuredly some projection there; I’ll be wrong if I am when I am.
I am not sure what to do about my depression as it is now. It feels wild and unpredictable. My background speaks out and says I simply don’t have enough data to form a reliable model, and that’s a fair point. In the mean time, I have to survive the experience to make a model…
I don’t have solace in this arena. I am trying. It is new territory for me, and I don’t know what help or improvement look like.
The next few are all important to me, but are a lot less acute. My context is essential for these episodes, because it informs my responses to myself and potential solutions. It’s hard to place them in an order; my experience with them is nonlinear and our structures for communication fail there.
The easiest one is a feeling of anachronistic paranoia, except that sentiment immediately does not capture it well. I have been immersed in the mental health processes of this world for the very large majority of my life. Flatly, we are very ill-equipped in 2021 to handle these emergencies in a kind and useful way. The primary protocol in these cases (in my experience) is a minimal triage to assess the potential physical danger of an individual to themselves and others. Then, airing on the conservative side, is an attempt to quell the individual’s state. It’s not really about fixing a problem, it is exactly about treating symptoms.
This is an indictment on our medical healthcare systems. I get it; it is genuinely a complex issue to care for individuals but this process fails many who suffer purely physical problems, let alone those like me who primarily fall prey to psychological issues.
When I say, “I don’t feel safe discussing my mental health with professionals,” it is exactly because the protocol has been, again in my experience, wildly unkind and inconsiderate of the individual as anything other than a potential threat. In discussing my experience with others who thrash with their own psyches, the most usual response is “oh yeah, you never answer those questions honestly.” If you didn’t know before, now you do. If you knew before, lo siento — my heart aches with yours.
I can imagine a time where this is different. We are discussing it more openly; I hear increased talk of publicly funded social services for exactly these issues. For here and now, I don’t trust our systems to treat me like anything other than a threat.
The other large contributing factors feel pretty inextricable from one another. There’s an aspect of contortion that feels undeniable and exhausting, and it is often partnered with a feeling of being gaslit (almost).
When I say contortion, I mean that I have been approached any number of times with some version of a housewife’s salve for my depression. I should exercise more, eat better, sleep better, find my tribe, shake things up, change my scenery, express myself in other ways, etc. The list of unsolicited and solicited advice goes on a while. At some level, I’m appreciative; a new friend has taken to describing me as an incredibly cognitive person in that I take to cognitive solutions. I do want problem solving.
Where I feel the contortion is that I have been trying so many of these, often in combination. My current life is an amalgam of regiments meant to soothe my depression, and it really isn’t enough. The one I most readily push back against is medication. That’s a tough one because I am right to be cautious; I am pretty convinced that the medication I am currently on was a strong contributing factor to my episode yesterday. All the same, medication works for some and — much like our healthcare system — is the solution we have even as it is very fallible. In the throes of another episode, I was able to say “if my life is to be a contortionist act just to get by, I am not interested.”
I mean that. If I, specifically, will have to bend backward, and exercise, and eat “correctly”, and fix my sleep, and search for the job that suits me, etc. I don’t think I have the wearwithal to do that. I am trying, and I am floundering.
I don’t mean it to sling mud on the advice, or the system I live in. Not to be overly Darwinian, but some attempts at life cannot survive in the system they are born into. Doesn’t mean they’re fundamentally bad or even poorly designed; it means they aren’t fit for their environment.
The gaslit feeling is even harder to describe, especially as I want to do it without contempt. I have “been depressed” for most of my life. All the same — in no small part thanks to privilege that I have as well — I have two masters degrees, I have successfully maintained an extreme body transformation for almost a decade, and I have picked up and moved my adult life over 1000 miles to assuage my demons. And I have done it all in constant communication with those demons. It is very difficult for me to see any of this as an accomplishment; I didn’t do any of it because I wanted to, I did it because I kept getting told that surviving was the thing I am supposed to do.
I did it because up until maybe two years ago, the overwhelming majority of feedback I got regarding my life and my depression fell into camps of “you’re broken and need to fix yourself,” or “you can’t trust your thoughts because you’re depressed.”
To the first camp; look at me. I’m incredible, and I did it all with this storm for a brain. If this is broken, maybe you should give it a try.
To the second camp; I concede that I am not a wholly reliable narrator just as none of us are wholly reliable narrators. For you to undermine my confidence in myself because of my depression has always been insidious and unacceptable. I know that my depression does not completely encompass my being and prescribe all of my actions. It is a part of me that I have spent the better part of my life trying to love, and often I feel like I am the only one making that choice. I wish I felt more sympathetic to the voices that fall in this camp, but at least where I am at for now — fuck you and the insane delusion you rode in on.
This was a lot. This is a lot.
It’s not done. Especially since I’m still here.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s next.
I feel humbled, and a bit humiliated. Like I don’t have what it takes to be human.
All the same, I do feel loved. I do feel seen more and more.
I love to make you laugh.
I’m not trying to distract from myself there. It’s just all I can do that feels useful.
I’ve been trying to be better about calls to action. Reading back what I’ve written, I’ve got this for now.
- This “problem” is immense and complex. It does not have a clean solution, and often the best medicine in the moment is just presence. That’s likely to be shared silence, and not everyone is going to be capable of that. That’s okay, this is also not a problem that everyone has to be involved in.
- Listen a lot more than you speak. This is empathy 101 and is advice I still have to practice for myself. Use more reflective language instead of prescriptive words. Remember that words will ultimately fail regardless here, and my experience of myself (however unreliable) will still be more accurate than your interpretation of my description of it.
- Continue the efforts we have grown to know. We are amidst an increasing number of human rights movements that are all important and are not isolate. Defunding the police in favor of funding social services that are meant to meet the needs of the actual humans is a big step. As we “return to normal,” please do not forget your anger and urgency for these movements.
And hey. I love you, too.
