Tag: depression

Whew. It’s been a tough few weeks. As I write this, I am cognizant that compared to many people’s experiences right now in the world, I’ve got it very good. *gestures at Ukraine, Florida, the world*

My job cut my hours in half, taking me from a sustainable, if barely, job to a ridiculously low level of employment. I have been struggling to work out more than three times a week, and as a result have seen few gains in my fitness level and health that I can measure. Sleep is coming more readily during the day as I take more and longer naps when before I had been cutting back. Depression is looming in my soul.

My 52 Week Photography challenge continues; I am working on a painting; a new project is in the early stages (but won’t be realized most likely until the fall or next year). My body and spirit feel very run down. I’m exhausted.

Today I could barely muster the energy to work out, though I did make it all the way through. I am obviously writing now, but I feel that I am just going through the motions on other things. There is more I want to do, to achieve, to accomplish, but right now it seems a hill too high to surmount.

I need a new job, one that can’t or won’t arbitrarily cut my hours while also paying a sustainable wage that my current job isn’t. An interview for such a job seemed lined up, but then was made to disappear for reasons beyond my control. I loathe few things as I do job hunting, but it appears I need to be back at it. My family is depending on my financial contributions, and in the future I can see needing additional funds for things yet beyond the horizon.

Not long ago I wrote about how my life was going well and I was feeling contented and I was working on my projects and challenges consistently. That has ground to a slow progress. And I don’t know precisely why, though I have mentioned a few things that seem contributory. Maybe that is all it is? I don’t know precisely. I wish I knew how to combat this cyclical depression I am in, and am hoping that my current doldrums don’t stretch into a new gloomy existence.

Complaining is not my agenda. If that is how I come across, I apologize. Frustration is shot through what I am feeling. Can I get a break? or better yet: can I push through this wall, over this hill, to the next plain or plateau? I want to get above where I am currently, and not go backwards. In some ways, I have done precisely that. Awareness of how far I have come over last year at this time, or two years ago, reaches me. Having tasted a little of that, I want more, and find it bitter to sample regression.

The only thing I can see is to keep grinding forwards. I will look for employment elsewhere. I will take my pictures, write on my blog, prepare my projects, and sleep when I can’t bear to be awake. Even slow progress is progress, and I mustn’t forget that. Here again I offer a real look at where I am and what I am going through. Life and Depression ain’t all roses and sweet cakes. It’s exercise and slogging and setbacks in between triumphs and achievement.

I’m listening to the soundtrack to the 2016 science fiction film Passengers as I write, and it is both haunting and beautiful. Despite its flaws, I really like that film and this music is part of why. The score strikes me in a deeply emotional way, and the story of that film reminds me that even when things are terrible, wonder and amazement and a life are still possible. It just may not look like what I envisioned when I set out on my journey.

The word for my 2022 is still challenges and I guess I am seeing a few knuckleballs thrown at me right now. I thought that my challenges would be mainly artistic and expressive, but boy do other aberrations intervene in a smoothly running operation, too. Best grab my tools and get to fixing what’s wrong, get to overcoming the current challenges.

My name is Phil, and I struggle with depression.

I’ve been writing a lot about depression recently, and I apologize if I am wearing out the ears of those who listen. But rarely I have little else I can do, and writing is my way of speaking to the world. I don’t really know how big my audience is, beyond my mother, but I write anyway because if I can reach just one person, that it is worth it.

If you are reading this, then you know me, and that means you know at least one depressed person. Knowing is half the battle. Part of being human is caring for your fellow human. It helps to know what someone is feeling so that you can adequately and appropriately care for them. Helping someone with a broken leg walk on the leg isn’t helping. You have to immobilize the leg and keep pressure off of it, and help them walk on crutches. Knowing how to help is everything, and you can’t do that unless you know what is wrong in the first place.

I write about my depression so that you know what it feels like. Depression is such a hard thing to understand precisely because most people think they do understand. The “blues”, feeling sad, or dealing with life’s normal problems is what most people think of when they contemplate depression. That isn’t it. Those things fade, or come and go with life’s ups and downs.

Depression, that is, clinical depression, what I suffer from, is a constant feeling of heaviness. Constantly being sad or weary for no reason at all. Life goes up and I stay numb. Life goes down and I stay numb, or get worse. Something sad happens and I cry for days. The blues, and most other colors, are black or shades of grey. There is no color.

There is fear as well. In my case, debilitating terror. Fear that I will never feel better, which is, in part, justified. Clinical depression can be managed, but not cured. Fear that I can’t do anything. This fear they tell me is irrational. It doesn’t matter, I feel it all the same, and most days, it overwhelms me.

There is guilt. Did I do this to myself? Answer: no. But it doesn’t matter. I feel guilty that I am not normal, that I don’t function and live like everyone else. My mind constantly tells me that I screwed up, that I made this happen, and that if I just bucked up and got with it, I could be better. Nothing is further from the truth. No, I didn’t make this happen, and I can’t unmake it either.

There is sadness. I am sad for all that I have lost, all that I don’t have, all that I am not normal. I have lost a wife, friends, family, several jobs, self-sufficiency, happiness, pleasure, enjoyment, a full palette of emotions. I know that I have lost or lack those things. I can’t will them back, or make them happen just because I want to. Sometimes I feel vestiges, sometimes I hear echoes of those things, but sometimes I merely remember or imagine what they must be like.

There is anger. Anger is born of helplessness, in this case. I know exactly how little I can do to alter my situation. There are no bootstraps, and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps usually results in you smacking your chin on your knees and getting nowhere. I can be proactive. I can get out of bed. I can take my medication. I can do something, no matter how inconsequential or irrelevant. But nothing will banish my depression. Nothing will make it go away. And that makes me mad, angry and upset. It is unfair and frustrating. It is wrong. But it is nonetheless.

And that is just four little things. I hesitate to keep going for fear that it will sound like wallowing or self-pity or “woe-is-me”. This, too, is a symptom of depression. It is difficult for me to fully articulate what I feel because I don’t want to sound like I am merely complaining or moaning. But someone needs to tell it like it is, someone needs to speak up about how it feels. I have no pride left, so it might as well be me. Judge me all you want, tell me to suck it up and be a man if it makes you feel better about who you are, but this is my everyday reality as of right now. I wish 1000% that I could just change it. I pray and ask God to make me better. But wishes aren’t real. God, if he is real, doesn’t do that sort of thing. Medical science can only make my condition manageable, and right now, barely so. What else is there to do but speak up?

But speaking is only half the battle. Now you know how I feel, in part. How do you help me walk with a broken mind? Be a crutch.

It is a failing of American culture that we abhor help. Americans are all about “do-it-yourself” and “self-made-men”. Mostly that’s bullshit. Sorry, but there is no better term. Be a crutch, be a help, do not make me do this myself. Being alone only makes all of this depression worse. Trying to go it alone is mostly impossible. Speak to me: let me know that I still have friends, people who care. Help me out: literally. Offer to come over and help me clean up the apartment. Offer to pay for my laundry and or help me haul it up the stairs. (I’ll probably say no out of humiliation or misplaced pride.) Come and cook with me so I have meals to re-heat. (I don’t know how I’d respond.) Come and go grocery shopping with me. (That could work.) Come and play games with me or hang out and watch a movie or hang out and talk or just hang out and be quiet. (I’m always up for this.) Take me out somewhere to do something. Depression keeps me apartment bound so much of the time. (I’ll almost never say no.) Every little gesture means the world. I can feel and live vicariously. By literally being with me and helping me I can be, even for a little while, normal through you.

Is it your responsibility to make me better? No. Do not feel guilty if you can’t do any of those things. Don’t make it your place to be my everything. That is on me. But anything you can do is a help. I have to walk on the crutches, but without crutches to walk on, it is hard to walk. Crutches come alongside the injury and lift up the heaviness. Help by being a crutch.

And that is why I write. So that you know how I feel and how to help. But not just me: there are millions of depressed people. Some function better than I do, some worse. All need crutches. Get out there and help people walk.

To read what else I have written about depression, search this blog for “depression”.

Hello. My name is Phil and I battle depression.

What I am about to say is both difficult to say and strange for me to admit: I’ve been depressed. It is difficult because for a long time I didn’t know what was happening to me or why. I felt pain, I felt sadness, I felt guilt, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. It is strange because Depression, or Clinical Depression, is my every day state of affairs. Little d depression isn’t. Strictly speaking what I am experiencing is death, death of a very dear relationship, but the symptoms of that death are depression and sorrow.

As many already know, my wife is divorcing me. Don’t ask me why, I don’t really know. Ask her. She left last May on a mutually agreed upon separation and the very next time I saw her, November, she was submitting paperwork for divorce. We have barely spoken, not through lack of my trying, so I really have no idea what is going on or why this is happening. All I do know is that it is happening. Somehow, somewhere, the relationship died. That is a tremendous burden that I have been bearing for almost a year now. But ever since the divorce papers were filed, I’ve felt something different, something more. At first I didn’t know that I was bearing it, or what I was bearing, or that it was different than my day to day depression, but now I’ve come to recognize it for what it is: little d depression.

I didn’t know big D Depressed people could feel the depression of ordinary folk, the fleeting, down in the dumps blues. In fact, I’ve written quite a bit about how large D Depression doesn’t go away, is much more intense, and is a constant pain in the head. But to experience little d depression on top of that is new for me. To grieve a death of a relationship is new for me.

Back in the day I lost my grandmother to indifference. As far as I know she is still alive physically, but the last time I saw her was 20 years ago when I was 6. One day she just stopped coming around. I was young, carefree, and not terribly close to her, so I can’t say it bothered me all that much. Sure, it was sad to have a grandmother who didn’t care about you, but I don’t remember grieving over her. She just ended in my life.

Around the same time (I think) my great, great grandmother died. I remember my older brother and my mother being very upset, but again, I was young and I didn’t really know her so I had little grief. My first real brush with the grief of death was when Larry died. Who was Larry? Larry was an older gentlemen who lived on the street where I grew up as a little boy. He was an old, crusty salt of a former sailer and a surrogate grandfather. I loved hanging out with Larry and he loved to spoil me and my brothers with ice cream from the ice cream truck and we had all sorts of fun together. He used to decorate his house outrageously for Christmas and always was an interesting person to be around. Larry died from lung cancer brought on by a lifetime of smoking. Larry I mourned, but I remember being more angry that he was taken from me than sad that he was gone.

The first time my sadness outweighed my anger was when my grandfather died. Grandpa Curwin, my maternal grandfather, was a constant in my life and I loved him so much. I still remember how he smelled, how he smiled, and his loving affection. I used to love to talk to him and wheedle out stories of his time in the Army during World War II, or stories about his many automobiles and girlfriends. My grandfather was loved by many people, and he was such a nice, wonderful person it isn’t hard to see why. But he died suddenly of many things. His was the first funeral I ever attended and to see him lying in that casket is something I will never forget. I was angry, but I was also so very sad to know that I would never hear his voice again or see that twinkle in his eye or smile on his lips. He was gone, and I had to say goodbye.

The death of a relationship is different altogether. The person still lives. The feelings still exist. But the relationship is deemed to be over and there is nothing you can do about it. Unlike a physical death, where there is an acceptance of the circle of life, a grave to visit, and a body to see to sink home the reality, here the vibrancy and immediacy to life still exists. The person lives, and breathes, and laughs, and continues, but is no longer accessible. You want to accept it, you want to feel the reality, but every time the person is seen, or heard of, the heart wants to say “they are alive, run, embrace them and be joyful! death has ended!” only it hasn’t and you can’t. There is little possibility of real mourning. There is only the pain and separation. And thus my depression.

I had to have my therapist explain what I was feeling and why, and fortunately she is wise and experienced and knew almost immediately what I was describing. Still, it was a revelation to me. To be ordinarily depressed is new. Usually I am a happy, upbeat kind of guy. According to my therapist, my mother, and most others I talk to about how I feel, these little d depressed feelings will pass. I will come out the other side and I will be ok again. Grief lasts but a moment in the long term of life, so does loss, and where one relationship ends, there is always the possibility that another will begin, or so they say. I had just become used to the idea that my sadness, my mental inertia, and the dimness that is my Depression would be with me always. I didn’t know I could also get depressed, but it is an encouragement to know that depression lifts, and that I can return to normal.

I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but I am coming to accept there is nothing I can do about it, and that the only actions I can take are those that I do anyway: get out of bed, do something, take care of myself and my pup, and get through the day. Anything more is a good day, and while you are depressed through grief over death, you don’t have good days, especially when you are also Depressed.

Still, it is nice feeling to know that in being ordinarily depressed, some part of me is truly ordinary. Life is strange and wonderful and dirty and confusing and sticky and bad and good and full of feelings. No matter what you feel, or why, remember that. When you feel you are alive, and never more so than right in the feelings.

To read what else I have written about depression search this blog for “depression”.