My name is Phil, and I am depressed.
My therapist wanted me to write a sentence, and now I’ve written three. I haven’t written in a while because I am depressed. It is so very hard to find the motivation, the will, and the desire to do even the most basic of things when battling depression. She, my therapist, said it well: “sometimes your brain is amazing and you can trust it; sometimes it’s fucked.” Sometimes I am very logical, I can work through almost anything, I have strength and I amaze myself by enduring what I thought was unendurable. But then, my mind flips on me, and even getting through a day without staring at walls is an insurmountable task.
I often compare being depressed to being an alcoholic. Neither is a choice, neither is banished simply through a force of will, both are medical conditions that can be treated, but alcoholics have it one up on depressed individuals: they have an external symptom that while difficult to deal with, is external and is avoidable. An alcoholic can avoid taking a drink. They don’t need a reason to drink, or to be drunk, but in order to be sober all they have to do is not drink. An outside factor is their tormentor, and as such, it can be avoided. Avoiding it is the really tough part.
But no matter how many meetings of Depressed Anonymous I attend, I cannot ever choose to avoid that which torments me: my brain. I live with imbalances, deficiencies, shorts and faulty wires in my head. Short of a lobotomy, the death of who I am, I am unable to be free. I am an alcoholic that cannot choose to stop drinking. I cannot chose to be happy, to not be sad, to change what I feel. All I can do is depend on some medication that makes the swings of emotion less monumental, less forceful, and continue to rely on my therapist to talk through the rest, to keep things in perspective, in focus.
I can’t stop the sadness, but I can keep it at bay, at arm’s length, at a distance.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer said it this way: “the hardest thing in this world is to live in it.” Living life, for me, is the hardest thing I do on a daily basis. Most people get up, eat breakfast, go to work, come home, enjoy some television, and go to bed and that is their every day routine. I have to force myself to watch television and I barely enjoy the process. Some of that is an effect of the medications I am on, some of that is my depression, it is hard to know which at any given time. All I want out of life is the normal routine of normal people, but today, that is out of my reach. Most days it is out of my reach. But I’m never going to stop reaching, and that is what I can do as a depressaholic: I can keep reaching for normality. I don’t have a convenient external tormenter, but in the midst of my unending torment I can reach towards the light, no matter how dim or distant.
My challenge was one sentence. Here are many. Here is me reaching towards the light, today. If this is all I do today, it is a win for me.
To read what else I have written on the topic of depression, simply search for the word “depression” on my blog.
a simple man 