Bricks are Falling: The Uncomfortable Reality of Depression

Depressed person: “I feel like shit. My house is a mess and everything is horrible.”

Caring individual: “But look at all these great things you are managing to do!”

I intellectually understand and appreciate the pep talks.

But, depressed brain just sees it as a constant lowering of the bar while at the same time trying to convince me that I am not really as depressed as I think I am.

Depressed person: “I stayed in bed all day. I barely managed to feed myself.”

Caring individual: “You fed yourself! GO YOU!”

It feels invalidating and dismissive sometimes. As though others aren’t comfortable with the thought of depression and therefore need to show you how you’re actually doing ok. Every well-meaning attempt to comfort me feels patronizing.

I see the bar being lowered and it feels like pity. Involuntary responses are hardly what I planned to use as a benchmark of happiness.

Depressed person: “I am experiencing deep existential exhaustion.”

Caring individual: “You kept breathing! All day! YEAH!”

After a while, it seeps into my subconscious that maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps I’m not depressed, maybe I don’t have the right to feel how I’m feeling. But it doesn’t change the facts of my mood, just my own personal ability to even validate the experience.

I don’t begrudge the people who try to help in this way. I’m sure I’ve done it myself. It’s just that my brain will run in circles to figure out ways to perceive everything as negative right now. The real problem is that we’re never taught how to actually, compassionately, and helpfully deal with mental illness in loved ones. That’s a flaw in our society.

Depressed person: “I didn’t get out of bed all day except to use the bathroom.”

Caring individual: “Hey! You didn’t pee in your bed!”

The bar may be practically nonexistent, but the goal is for everyone to believe we are functional, even as the load bearing walls are shedding bricks.

Functioning, at some point, is just throwing bricks back up and waiting to find some mortar. For me, hopelessness isn’t a staunch belief that it will never be better. I can acknowledge that a mortar salesman might stop by someday, but I wonder if I will have been crushed under the weight of this wall, and would I be able to afford it anyhow?

Depressed person: “This entire wall is collapsing around me.”

Caring individual: “But at least you still have the bricks!”

Here’s the thing… last week, when I put together some awesome Halloween costumes? I was depressed. Last weekend, when I basically didn’t get out of bed, I was depressed. Yesterday, when I rallied and cleaned all the things and ran errands and played with the kids, I didn’t feel depressed, but I also knew it was likely to crash back down, which it did. It’s possible to enjoy a moment, to function, to get shit done, while also falling apart. Sometimes you’re just better at dodging the bricks.

Sometimes, I am just so tired of functioning. I do it, but I want more than anything to just give up. I start wishing I felt worse so that I could give up any pretense. Then I beat myself up, thinking this means that I want to be depressed.

The other thing is the tendency for depression to make me feel the need to comfort everyone else. To make sure you all know that my psychiatrist and I have a plan. We’ve upped the meds. We have an idea of what to try next.

It’s exhausting, trying to manage both my own emotions, people’s feelings about them, and my reactions to their feelings about my emotions. It feels like a carefully orchestrated balancing act to get people to take me seriously, while not leaving me in a position of caring for them, and also not eliciting pity.

Today, when the nurse practitioner informed me that I have been walking around with a double ear infection for who knows how long, I was actually happy, because it meant my day home from work was internally valid in a way that calling in depressed will never be. My ears have been bothering me for months, but I no longer even know what is brain sick and what is body sick. And of course, the way those two things intertwine just makes it more confusing. Who knows, maybe not feeling like my head is underwater all the time will help my mood. Of course, that will just make me further invalidate my experience.

Depression also makes my brain not form words so well. And thoughts are foggy. Really, you should just go read Allie Brosh’s Depression Part Two comic. She says it better. And with drawings!

Brains are fun.

 

THERAPIST: do you want to talk about
ME: no no nO doc that’s a load bearing neurosis, you move it and this whole thing comes down around us

— meth lab for cutie (@AliceAvizandum) August 29, 2017