Tag: depression

My name is Phil and I am depressed.

One of the hardest things about depression is living inside your own head. Sometimes it can be very loud, other times it can be quieter than a graveyard. Both times are very hard to get through. When my head is loud is it like a hundred voices all talking at once. Every thought moves at a thousand miles an hour and shouts for attention. But that is actually easier to take than when my head is silent. Usually it comes at a time when my surroundings are quiet. Ever since my wife left, I’ve been living alone. That makes for a lot of quiet.

Most people live in the happy middle ground between shoutings and silences with a normal amount of noise both within and without, and if circumstances arise that unduly quiet or amplify things, normal coping mechanisms help even things out.

My normal coping mechanisms are broken, and my shoutings and silences are way more intense than other people’s, at least from what I have observed and felt.

I can only tune out the cacophony by playing very loud music and focusing as hard as possible on what I am actually hearing rather than what is mental. Alternatively, there is no way to fill the quiet with enough noise to make it less than empty. Again I try loud music or a movie or something, but there is usually too much space to fill and not enough noise to fill it. I just feel empty.

I hate being alone and I get so very lonely, and this only accentuates the silences and the shoutings. For a long time I have felt that if only my wife were to come back and I were to have another person in my life, the shoutings and silences would disappear. But recently I have begun to understand: my wife has nothing at all to do with life inside my head. She can’t help, nor can she make it worse. It is my own particular problem to solve, or failing a solution, since there often isn’t one, my own particular path to tread. To be sure, another person can help fill the silence or quiet the shouting, but that makes them just another coping mechanism when they do. At that particular moment, any person would really do.

Don’t misunderstand, I am not saying there isn’t anything special about my wife, or that a special person can’t make a special difference. What I am trying to say is this: another person can’t abate my depression. It is inside me. The shouting and the silence are my ailments.

I wish my wife would come back into my life. Having her around made things easier to deal with. But maybe that is why she has left me, in part. I tried too hard to make her my fix, tried too hard to make her responsible for how I felt. I was a fool and I was selfish and I was too stupid to know what I was doing. For that I am so very ashamed and so very sorry. But I can’t change the past. All I can do is work on my today, on my future. Only I can find ways to quiet the shoutings and fill the silences. If and when my wife or another person comes back into my life, I hope to be able to quiet the noise or fill the space on my own, and not make it that person’s burden because depression is hard enough for me to bear, and I have a pretty good idea how it works, at least for me. I can only imagine how hard it is for someone who doesn’t know it as intimately as I do.

Hannah, if you read this: I’m sorry. My silences, my shoutings were not and are not yours to bear. I’ll ask you to bear them no longer. I am sorry I ever did. It was cruel and abusive of me. I can only say I didn’t know what I was doing, but that is a feeble excuse. Thank you for all the years you tried to help me anyway. I can’t imagine what that must have been like. You are an incredible person.

To my friends and family: thanks for being there for me. Sometimes I call on you during my silences, sometimes during my shoutings. Sometimes I just need a friend. I hope I don’t make things too hard for you, or ask more than you are willing to give. Depression just needs and takes; it isn’t very considerate. My depression isn’t your burden, it is mine. Please let me know if I ever abuse our relationship. I don’t want to make the same mistakes I’ve been making with my wife. Depression is a poor excuse for abuse.

Depression fools me into thinking I am helpless and hopeless. But I am not. I am only mentally ill, and any illness can be managed, even if it can’t be cured. Easy to say; hard to do; but knowing is half the battle. Now that I know, I can work towards effective management.

Now I can start to fill the silence and quiet the shoutings.

To read what else I have written on depression, search my blog for “depression”.

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.

Hi. My name is Phil. I have a mental illness.

It just struck me as I was typing that line that mental illness is often the punchline of a joke or having a mental illness is played for laughs in some circumstances. I know some people would be upset or indignant about that, but I don’t care.

Not caring is a symptom of mental illness, in my case, depression. It takes feeling and a certain level of self actualization to generate outrage and moral fiber and the will to do something, even if it is to say “hey, maybe there really are mentally ill people and they don’t like being made fun of or something”. Also, I find mental illness jokes funny. A consequence of my long association with depression is a very dark and subtle sense of humor. Mental illness jokes appeal to me on a very wrong level. Well, not wrong so much as abnormal.

Anyway, today is World Mental Health Day. I started writing about my experiences with depression a long time ago as a way to help myself articulate what I was feeling to everyone who knows me and bothers to read what I write, and also as a way to destigmatize mental illness. It is a condition anyone can have, just like anyone can break a bone or get cancer. I am an otherwise normal person who is depressed.

I am not sad because of life circumstances, although I do have plenty of those to feel pretty sad about, the reality is I am sad even when everything is great. Case in point: it is currently October, and I am a baseball fan, and October is the time for the MLB postseason. Usually this is my favorite time of the year. It has magic, wonder, the best teams in baseball, and exciting high stakes games. I have to force myself to enjoy my most favorite thing in the world outside of Star Wars. And I haven’t watched Star Wars in over a year, either. And I love Star Wars most. Most people enjoy what they enjoy. They don’t have to try, they don’t ever think about it, they just enjoy it. I have conversations in my head: “Hey, Phil, look: Star Wars!” “Oh, that’s cool. I guess. I mean, it isn’t not cool.” “What?? That is a salt shaker shaped like a Darth Vader PEZ dispenser on a super fluffy blanket that is also a Jedi cloak!! That is mega-Star Wars-awesome!” “If you say so. Hey, is that the ground? It looks like the ground.” Er, something like that. My point is: depression robs me of my chance to feel and to enjoy.

I am on medication, which is why my depression no longer completely debilitates me. I used to live in a black fog where nothing ever was anything other than a painful haze. Now, sometimes, I do enjoy things. Sometimes the sun breaks through and I have a good day. Those days are still rare. What is worse, I have absolutely no control over when I have sunny days or when I have hazy days. They happen when they will.

Because of this I cannot hold a job, most days I cannot bother to look for a job. A month ago I did look for a job. I found a job. I got excited about a job. I even got called to come and interview for the job. I then emailed two days later and turned the job down. In the space of two days I went from feeling like I would be able to engage in an awesome month long job (it was working in a haunted house) to feeling like it was the biggest mistake I could make and there was no way I could handle it. Ever since I have gone back and forth over anger at myself for turning down work when I need the money, disappointment over turning down a cool haunted house job, or being so glad I did because I can’t bother to take a shower much less get out of the house and into makeup and feel any sort of enthusiasm for scaring anyone. Although the reality is most of the time I feel nothing one way or the other about the job.

And the struggle with mental health goes deeper than me. I lost all of my close, emotional support because of my mental illness. My wife left me, being completely unable to understand or cope with my mental illness. I don’t blame her, usually because, like with most things, often I don’t have the ability to be mad or sad about losing my wife. In my few moments of clarity, I acknowledge that living with someone who is completely debilitated by something entirely in their head is not easy at all. It takes a supreme amount of patience, love, and self-strength. I should know, most of the time I hate being me. I wish I could get away from me. But I can’t. I never will. And nothing I do can change that. She could leave, and the truth is: I envy that she could.

So I do my thing. I struggle to get out of bed, to do something on any given day. My dishes go unwashed, my house goes uncleaned, my hair goes uncombed. Then, every so often, I get a breakthrough, a surge of energy and of feeling and I can do some or all of those things. Right now I struggle to pay bills and afford what I need because I have no job and employers aren’t eager to hire people with mental problems, even if I could find a job I could con myself into applying for. Life is tough and you would never know it because I seem so normal, I can write well, when you ever see me I am putting on a terrific acting performance to hide from you what I really am. I smile, I converse, I do things, I seem completely normal. It is entirely an act. I rarely feel anything I emote. And the act so completely exhausts me that I spend the next few days in a fog.

I am strong, I am resilient, which is why I am still here, but being that takes everything I have on any given day. And that is why I am a twenty-six year old man living with a dog in an apartment that I rarely leave and struggle enjoying the best sport in the world at the best time of the year: I have a mental illness, and it is crippling.

Today is World Mental Health Day. Remember that not everyone is obviously ill, but many are suffering in ways you cannot imagine because you are normal. Be the best friend you can to everyone you know, because you might not always know who needs that the most. Don’t try to fix a mentally ill person. You can’t do it. Just be their friend and never stop, no matter how hard that seems. That is the only thing that works. Spread love as far as you can. Some of us need it more than you could possibly imagine. Above all, know this: mental illness is real, and it is just as damaging as cancer or any other human condition.

Search my blog for “depression” to find other posts about my struggles.

My name is Phil, and I have clinical depression.

Last night I tweeted this:

“Life is a death of a thousand cuts. The question is: can you find meaning before you bleed to death all over the carpet? Me, I don’t know.”

A twitter friend, a fellow nerd and author, asked his followers to tweet to a woman who truly believed she was ugly and to tell her the truth. I perused this woman’s feed, and was deeply saddened to see that her voice was almost gone. Most of her recent posts were retweets from suicidal accounts. [Author’s note: A suicidal account is an account on social media that is almost entirely thoughts, pictures, and poetry about suicide. They are everywhere on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Most are run by truly desperate people. Take a break from kittens sometime and read the pain that no one sees. It will sober you up in a hurry.] I felt so lost and so small. I had nothing to say to this woman that would ease her pain in the least. But I couldn’t back away, I couldn’t just be silent. So I said this:

“You are beautiful and you are not alone. I know your pain and it can get better.”

It was as honest as I could get. Every woman is truly beautiful. Depression is not something you suffer as the only depressed person on the planet. I do know that pain. And it can get better. Why didn’t I say “it will get better”? Because I do not know that to be true. I have been in therapy for nearly two years now. I am on medication. I have worked through so much pain and childhood trauma. But I still don’t feel much different than I did when it all began. I don’t have the black fog, but I am rarely happy or positive or upbeat. I certainly believe that things can get better. I simply lack convincing evidence that things will get better. I was frustrated that such a small truth was all I had to offer a woman in pain.

I am starting to refer to this year in particular as the year from hell. Ever since Christmas, when some things went horribly wrong and got very, very black, this year has been trending downwards. Me and my wife stopped drifting apart and started racing apart. Then she left, and at the time, I was glad to see her go. I got a job and lost it. I have been unemployed since July. I have sold half of anything I owned of value to simply pay bills. Only recently did I force myself to use a little to buy groceries. I lived for a month on hot dogs and microwave popcorn because the last time I afforded food both were on sale. Last night at my brother’s house was the first time I had a substantially healthy meal in months. I am so lonely I want my wife and my miserable marriage back just so I will no longer be alone. I have lost the ability to hope, to imagine a better future, or to dream of anything beyond my current daily misery. I don’t exaggerate and I don’t sensationalize any of that. I try to present it as mundane and boring, because that is what pain has become to me.

So you can see how that can resemble a year from hell.

Most days I do not know how I will endure until evening. Bedtime is a weariness. I toss and turn most every night and sleep badly.

At this exact moment, I have no idea how I will pay the next two bills that are due soon. It is hard to focus on anything else at the moment. If you are a friend and have been following any part of my social media life lately, you will see that on this blog I have been writing a little, and on Facebook I have been posting lots of Lego Portraits. I have no idea where the creative spark is coming from these days, but I jump into it whenever I feel the slightest twinge because it is all I have. I barely enjoy it, I certainly should, I love Lego, but enjoyment isn’t something I have much control over. I try my damnedest, but usually I only manage a lukewarm enthusiasm. But when you are freezing, lukewarm feels very hot.

This is turning into a bit of a ramble, so I think I will end it soon. The rambling fits, anyway. I’ve hit half of tank of gas and have no idea if I’ll be able to afford to fill the tank when it runs empty, but I’ve started to obsess again over how far I need to travel to do anything. I just want this all to end. Not in a slash-the-arteries and swallow-the-pills suicide ending, necessarily. I’d be happy if there was no tomorrow. If everything just ended. No fanfare, no heaven, no hell, no afterlife, just an end to existence. That wouldn’t bother me right now. I don’t want to die, I don’t want to miss the upcoming Ender’s Game or Hobbit films, but right now, I wouldn’t care if I did. I might even prefer a nothingness because nothingness isn’t pain and frustration and misery.

I’m living a death
of a thousand cuts
my blood spills slowly

I watch each drip
drop into the carpet
soaking microfibers and dust
dead skin cell fossils
splashed with the facade of life

given proper suction
you can drain the body of blood
in 8.6 seconds
so why has eternity
come and gone and I still bleed?

I guess that’s life
with blood and pain and carpet
stained corpses of a million dead cells
each having expended purpose, exfoliated

my purpose remains, I’ve yet to be scrubbed
from the skin of the world
so I endure the thousand cuts
seeking my purpose
and my dessication

That’s not very good, but I do get so poetical and more than a bit macabre during these times. Forgive me.

My name is Phil, and I am depressed. Search my blog tags for “depression” and you can read all about it.

Yesterday was an interesting day. I really don’t want to talk about it, but because I made one of the darkest parts of my everyday reality public, I feel like my friends and family deserve a little explanation.

The truth is I lie. A lot. You can be all shocked if you want to, but you lie, too. If you are reading this, I can assume a few things about you: you understand English, you are human, you lie. Our religious culture would have us believe that lying is an abomination before the Lord or a bad thing to do, but it is deeply human. Most lies are not harmful at all. Most lies are necessary. Colloquially, we refer to them as a social contract. I don’t tell nearly every single woman I meet that I admire the curvature of her breasts, or that I really want to have sex with her. I am not a sex fiend or a creep, I am a heterosexual male that is biologically programmed to find females physically attractive. But I lie by omission. And almost every single woman I meet knows this. Don’t ask, don’t tell: web of lies. And that is just one very, very small example.

A bigger example of the lies I tell: I am doing just fine. Yes, I am handling my every day reality. No, I do not want to kill myself.

Yesterday, I posted a suicide note to my Facebook page. I don’t remember what it said, and I have since deleted it. I then ignored my phone and my computer. Because I suffer from back pain, high blood pressure, and mental illness, I have a variety of medications available to me. I don’t know exactly how all of them work, and I have been assured that most of them work fairly well together. Being that I am an intelligent person, I know that becomes less true when you mix non-recommended dosages in non-recommended combinations. I dumped a few pills on the counter and wondered which cocktail would help end the pain the easiest. I’m no pharmacist, so I experimented. I don’t remember what I took, except that there were a fair amount of the pain killing variety included.

I was unaware that my Facebook posting had alarmed the people who saw it. I became aware when my Aunt Jane called me. I can ignore my wife, I can ignore my mother, I can even ignore my dog. I cannot ignore my Aunt Jane. She commands too much respect. All my life I have known two things about Aunt Jane: she is awesome. You don’t cross her. If she tells you to do something, you do it, no matter how much you don’t want to. If she asks you a question, you don’t lie. If she says something, she means it. So I had to answer the phone when I saw Aunt Jane was calling. She convinced me to live. Fortunately, I also did a bad job picking out pills because all I did was get a little fuzzy, dizzy, and sleepy. She may have convinced me to make it through the day, but it was my lousy attempt that made it possible.

Why did I try to end all things? I will try to explain, but it will be hard to understand. Most of you are normal. I am not. I have a mental illness. I do not want to die. Let’s be clear about that. I have many things I want to do, and experience, in life. I love my family and my friends. I love my puppy. I do not want to live. Every day is a constant struggle. Every minute is a battle. I am in constant physical and mental pain. Stress is destroying me. I barely sleep. I cannot relax. I hallucinate (mostly sounds, rarely I see things). I hear knocking at the door. I hear a phone buzzing, or ringing. I see bugs crawling on the floor. The problem is, there is no one at the door, my phone isn’t buzzing, and bugs don’t move that fast. Believe me, I have investigated rigorously. What I experience isn’t real. And that freaks me out.

The only peace I ever get is when I am in a movie theater watching a movie, or when I am building a LEGO set. Immersing myself into a film, in darkness, in front of a large screen, with loud surround sound makes everything else melt away. It doesn’t even have to be a particularly good film, but it makes everything else disappear. For those two hours or less, I am free. Similarly, when I bust open a LEGO set, spill the pieces in front of me, and start working through the instruction booklet, nothing else can intrude. Clicking one brightly colored plastic block onto another allows me to concentrate only on which brick I need next to complete the build. Seeing a building, or a robot, or whatever emerge from the chaos of scattered pieces fills me with ridiculous joy and peace. I cannot explain it better than that. But it is real. That is as close to relief from what I feel as I ever get and it does not last. I cannot build LEGOs constantly. I cannot go to the theater constantly.

If you know me, you might wonder if writing does that for me. Nope, not at all. You have to think to write. Writing for me is another compulsion. I can’t help it. Words beat at my brain demanding release until I get up and let them out. I have been woken up by words that demand to be written. In the middle of the night I will get up and go to my computer and type. Sometimes it takes five minutes. Sometimes it takes hours, but until they are all out, I cannot stop. That is not really much fun, relaxation, and it certainly isn’t peaceful. The only solace I get is that I am really, really good at writing. It is better to have a compulsion you are good at, I guess. But then, people with a cleaning OCD usually clean very well, too. So I’m not special.

Who wouldn’t want to escape my life? Does that sound like fun to any of you? To make matters worse, I am alone. The only other thing that usually distracts me is human interaction. But I have almost none of that any more. My wife left. She isn’t coming back, no matter how much I want her to. No one else is really eager to come over. Most people don’t enjoy hanging out with someone who lives on the ragged edge. I am angry, volatile, sarcastic, acidic, very awkward. I make people uncomfortable. I exude an aura of anger, or negativity. This isn’t intentional. Most of time I am unaware of it. I am just so uncomfortable I don’t know how to act, much less react, even around people I know well, even around my family. It is no wonder my wife did leave, I don’t blame her. I am actually surprised she managed to live with me as long as she did.

So, back to the suicide. I don’t say anything I’ve said to garner sympathy or attention or pity. I am merely trying to explain why yesterday morning, so many people became inescapably aware of the fact that I was actively seeking death. It was, as they say, a call for help. I wanted somebody to know that I was dying from pain.

What can you do to help? Very little. Do not call 911. Nothing makes me trust people less than people who call the cops on me but can’t show up themselves. If you are concerned for my safety, come to where I live. If you find me actually dying, then call 911, ride in the ambulance, and be there when I wake up. Do not tell me you struggle with depression. Unless what I have described is 85% of your daily reality, you don’t. Even if it is your reality, I find no comfort in knowing that other people are as miserable as me. That actually makes me feel worse. Do not tell me what you have endured. I know that my life, objectively speaking, is fantastic. It simply does not matter. Depression does not care about socioeconomic divisions. I gather from the news that a member of the Glee cast died of a heroin overdose. His life, objectively speaking, was better than mine. And yet the guy was alone with heroine and alcohol. In any case, reminding me that some people live worse than I do does not help. It makes me feel guilty, petty, and stupid, none of which relieve the depression. Do NOT tell me how upset I made everyone or how badly I scared X family member. First, I know. Second, I cannot care. It isn’t that I don’t care, I can’t. If I am at the point of trying to end my life, worrying about how my mother will feel is probably not on my mind. That would be on the mind of a rational person. Suicidal people are not, strictly speaking, rational. The decision of death is one made under extreme duress and not as the result of a logical thought progression (usually). Also: it doesn’t help me feel good enough about my life to stop trying to end it.

What can you do to help? Be here. Physically be here. Come to my house and hang out with me no matter how angry, bitter, dark, or un-fun I am. Deep down, I know you care enough about me to be with me, to make the effort to come to me and to stay there. Failing that, simply tell me you care about me. Period. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. Then I know that even if you won’t or can’t be with me, chances are you would if you could. That’s it.

And, while I appreciate the offer, no, I do NOT want to talk about it. I have a therapist. She is the only person on the planet I will tell anything and everything. She is the only woman on the planet that can move right past that and still talk to me about what really matters. The only social contract we have is that she won’t judge me and I can tell her anything. Unless you are her, no, I probably will not willingly talk to you. But I DO appreciate the offer. Just don’t worry or be offended when I don’t.

So that, right there, is the brutal honest truth about my everyday and specifically yesterday. Today, I’m ok. I am handling things. (Lying? probably a bit). The truth: I haven’t ODed today. I haven’t thought about driving my car into oncoming traffic. Physically, I am safe.

I’m depressed. Today isn’t as bad as yesterday. Today is a win.

I haven’t written about my depression for a while, mostly because for a while I was feeling pretty good and felt like I was finally getting a hold on this slippery thing called life. I won’t say I was wrong about that. I now have a job, a dog, and I don’t spend my days staring at walls like I used to.

But life has a way of sending us down roads we never knew existed. Things transpire in life and relationships that we never could have predicted, setting us up for decisions we never thought we would have to make. I’m being vague here because there are some things that are very real and large in my life that I am not quite ready to address publicly. Hell, I don’t even want to address them in my own mind.

I recently made a trip to see my doctor. I’ve been forgetting things lately, but it is less like memory loss and more like aphasia, where you search for a word but can’t find it. I can’t remember the names of everyday objects, and am forced to describe what it is I am trying to say. “You know, that thing you use for eating…it is metal, and has pointy things on the end, you stab with it…” “A fork?” “Yes, that’s it! Can you grab me a fork please?” No, that isn’t an example. That happened. I also forget things that I know I know, facts and details I would never forget. I don’t have a brain tumor or dementia and I’m not on medication that could do this.

Stress is making me lose my mind.

Stress is a constant companion to depression. When I was in my darkest places, stress was pulling the trigger on the gun labeled depression. I didn’t stare at walls and fail to engage with the world through fear or doubt or lack of imagination. It was the stress that each situation presented that kept me powerless and weak. A trip to the grocery store to purchase food became all about how I would walk, how I would pass people in the aisles, what I would say to the cashier. The stress of how to handle each situation mounted until the easiest way to remain calm was to remain at home. I’ve made a career out of avoiding stress.

Now that I have a handle on my past, and have dealt with some of the overwhelming sources of stress in my life, I can now go to the grocery store with little problem (most days). But what they don’t tell you is that knocking down the giants that surround you only allows you to face the demons you couldn’t see.

So, back to the vague things and the stress that is making me lose my mind. After talking with me for a bit, and a consultation, my doctor told me that I am stressed. Stress (barring the appearance of physical symptoms) is what is making me unable to think, to remember, or to recall that a fork is a fork.

Yesterday, I had a meltdown. My stress caused me to regress backwards into black depression, with the accompanying rage and malice. The one clear, rational thought I had was to put my new puppy in her crate so that, if the worst should happen, she wouldn’t be in danger. I would never, in a million years, willingly or consciously hurt an innocent animal, but depression has a way of making a million years a nanosecond under the right conditions. (No, I didn’t hurt her, but she was very sad at being crated for most of the morning while I inexplicably, to her, was only a few feet away, seemingly asleep.) I called into my therapist and left a message for her to contact me. I was barely able to focus the words over the phone, but I knew I needed something extra to get me through the morning. By noon she called back and we talked through what was eating at my brain. “Phil,” she said, “this is normal. I would have worried if you didn’t have some sort of freakout episode.” She proceeded to calmly guide me into a few healthy behaviors and coping strategies. We will have a real meeting soon. After that, I felt a bit better, and I played with my dog for almost an hour (understandably, she had quite a bit of pent up energy).

I still have no idea what to do about what is facing me, what is clawing at my mind. I’ve moved beyond shopping for cookies and milk to larger life issues that were unavailable for processing when I was trapped in dark depression. Now, I have no choice. They stand before me and I have no recourse but to face them, somehow. I cannot go back. Retreat ends in darkness and death, non-metaphorically speaking. But the stress of how to handle what I must handle is luring me back into depression. Things I once enjoyed, I stare at listlessly. I barely eat. I take my dog for short walks. I can’t sleep (which is why, as I type this, it is nearly 0400).

For most people, stress is what makes a hard day hard, a challenging week challenging, or a situation unpleasant. For those of us among the depressed, stress is the little thing obliterating our mind.

Right now, I don’t know what to do except to return to bed and try to sleep. Short term, I need to work as hard as I can for solutions and a way to move beyond stress, because no one can live under this much stress and tell the tale for very long.

That I am able to articulate all this is a measure of how far I’ve come. I hope through this you understand a little bit what dealing with depression is all about. It isn’t the momentary blues most people talk about: it is a constant life battle.

My name is Phil, and I am depressed. Well, sort of.

I’ve been writing about my depression off and on for a few months, and I stopped because it seemed like I didn’t have anything more to say. I had hit a bit of a plateau and nothing seemed different or noteworthy. I did my thing every day, some days better than others, not too bad, nor too good. While in therapy, I resolved issues and finally brought to an end sources of mental and emotional pain. But I did not feel better.

I was intellectually happy to be clear of what had tormented me for so long, but resolving conflicts did not bring me emotional happiness. Closure, to be sure, maturity, definitely, and depth. Depth of understanding, and of insight. I felt like I had grown as a person, had emerged from a period of mental confusion, but I wasn’t better.

I longed to feel normal, to be happy, and to grasp the ability to exert power over my will. So I took the only avenue left to me: I did drugs.

It is amusing to me to phrase my recovery in those terms because the American “War on Drugs” has given drugs, and some medicines, a bit of a bad name. I’m not sure where we got the idea, as a society, that trying to outlaw and violently eradicate various drugs was a good or effective idea, since the exact same policy didn’t work for alcohol in the 20s. Anyway, my only previous interaction with mind altering drugs was in college when I experimented with kidney stones and their wonderful side effect: oxycodone. Boy, that stuff made me feel great. I’ll admit I went to a few classes high, and for a week or so I had no pain. Then my wonderful girlfriend, who is now my wonderful wife, eradicated my remaining stash. She did that because she realized what I didn’t: oxy may make me feel good, but it wasn’t exactly the best way to achieve that feeling. It may seem as if I am arguing for removing oxy from those who would seek to use it for other purposes than physical pain alleviation, but I’m not really. I could care less if people are getting high, much as I care less that people get drunk, or smoke themselves into cancer. Personal choice shouldn’t be curtailed. What I am saying is that while oxy fixed my symptoms, it didn’t fix my problems and Hannah wanted me to face my problems and get better for real. The end result would be about the same, but one method would be much more effective, permanent, and less annoying for those around me.

In the course of my therapeutic recovery, I was put on some medication. Not being a doctor, I can’t really explain what it does, but having paid attention in health class, I vaguely understand how it works, at least well enough for my own peace of mind. My initial dosage helped, it really did. I didn’t notice much change, but my wife did. I’ve described depression as being in a black room, and trying desperately to reach a door, through which there is light. I also talked about my everyday life as being one in which I am completely aware of my surroundings, of things I want to do, of actions I want to take but being completely unable to make the decision to act upon my wishes. It is a feeling of inertia, of moving through a chest deep pool of syrup. My initial dosage made the syrup knee deep, and made the room a murky light grey. I was better, but barely.

Recently, both my therapist and my doctor recommended increasing the dosage. So I did. And the difference has been remarkable. The very day in which I took the increase, I noticed a huge difference. I was content, even borderline happy. I had the power to exert my will. I saw things to do and I did them. I had complete freedom of movement. I looked around and was no longer in a black room but a light meadow. No longer was I held back by invisible forces; I could move freely. The only drawback with which I had to contend was ordinary, everyday, human laziness.

In other words, I am myself again. The best part is this: all of that was two weeks ago. I’ve waited to write about this new step, this new development because at first it was so strange, so overwhelming, so weird to me that I didn’t trust it. I wasn’t sure what to make of this new reality. It was wonderful and frightening all at the same time. And while, unlike oxy, I was not high, I was happy and energetic. I felt no pain for the first time in a very long time. So I waited to see if it would wear off, if my brain would adjust to the medication and things would simmer back down. So far, they haven’t. These days I get more done in an hour than I used to do in a week. I have made and enacted plans. I am getting my life moving again, simply because now I can.

Sure, I have bad days. But they are normal person bad days. They are bad because bad things happen in them. They are not bad simply because. I have good days that are normal people good days. They are good because nothing bad happens. I delight in little things again. Bleakness isn’t part of my reality.

So I wonder: am I still depressed? Yes. Clinical depression is a medical condition. If I were to stop taking my medication, I would be back in the black room before I knew it. There is a deficiency in my brain, just as there is a deficiency in my cardiovascular system that results in high blood pressure, just like there is a deficiency in my eyes that makes me nearsighted. I offset the other problems through the miracles of modern technology, namely other drugs and contact lenses, so too I offset my depression with medication. Also, I have learned to cope with the emotional trauma that is a part of life. Alcoholics can get treatment for being drunk, but the other part of their continued life as a sober person is the constant coping with the emotional part of alcoholism: the lack of control and the necessitation of constant vigilance. I learned, through my therapist, how to approach and understand emotional stresses so that I no longer allow them to overwhelm me, to take over my feelings, or to bar me from living a full life. I don’t do it perfectly yet, I am still very much at the start of this new journey, but the point is that now I can walk. I can start my journey anew.

I am, as the song goes, “walking on sunshine” and boy, does it feel great!

(read about my depression by searching my blog for the tag “depression“)

My name is Phil Martin, and I am depressed.

Last week, I had a breakthrough in the treatment of my depression, and I’d like to share that with you.

I did not have an entirely happy childhood, and someday when either my family is dead or is ok with it, I will share more details about that. In the unhappiness, fear, and pain, I did have some pleasant experiences. I loved to play with LEGOs, those brightly colored plastic bricks that allow anyone to build to the limits of their imagination. My brother and I would spend endless hours in the afternoons, mornings, evenings, and any other time we could, building with our LEGO bricks. We would coordinate on buildings, starships, and sculptures, or we would have contests to see who could build the best model. We tested the structural integrity by dropping them from the top bunk of our bunkbeds onto the hard wood floor below. Whichever brother’s masterpiece exploded into fewer pieces won. And then we would rebuild the broken bits.

This all lasted until my brother moved out to go to college. The LEGOs were then left to me, and I played on by myself. Then my parents decided to become missionaries and move to Papua New Guinea. Not wanting to lose any bricks along the way, I packed most of them up and they were kept by a friend of the family’s, along with many other belongings.

It wasn’t until I graduated from college, got married, and lived for a few years that I ever got the LEGOs back. In the meantime, of course, I had started to collect my own sets and continued to build, but I still remembered and longed to regain what I had from my childhood. At the same time, my depression intensified and I finally sought treatment. I never thought these two parts of my life would intersect in a way that would radically shift my thinking about everything.

My mother visited the family friend, and collected everything that was stored in their attic. She mailed me my boxes, and with abundant joy, I unpacked the LEGOs. I immediately gathered my old instruction booklets, sorted all the bricks, and started to build. I started with my very favorite set, a small red biplane.

Alas, I only made it a few pages through the build before I realized that I was missing quite a few pieces. I was heartbroken. My favorite set, all my pieces, and I couldn’t complete the construction. It remained a broken pile of pieces that couldn’t be put back together.

This is where my brother comes back into the story. A year or so prior to my mother retrieving my things, he went on his own to where our belongings were kept and removed one container that held what he believed were his LEGOs from back in the day. I thought that he should have contacted me to ask and make sure before he did, but ultimately he did nothing wrong. But I thought he did and I blamed him for my missing pieces. Not realizing what was really going on inside my heart and my head, I villainized my brother. I started a crusade against him, with the LEGOs between us, until he got so fed up with my anger and persistence that he sent me what he had taken.

Again, I was overjoyed. I finally was going to be able to complete construction on what I once had, and find the joy and happiness that was once mine. This time, I left my little red biplane until last. I built everything else I could find first, but it didn’t make any difference. I did have a few more pieces, but once again lacked everything I needed to make it whole again. I was livid. In a rage I called my brother and let him have the full brunt of my disappointment and bitterness. I accused him of holding back, of stealing, of being an instrument of my pain. Only, he wasn’t, and he really had nothing to do with what was really going on. Hurt by what I said, and upset at seeing our friendship destroyed over a pile of plastic blocks, my brother started to try to remind me of all the good times we shared. Suddenly, in the middle of it all, listening to him, and staring at my incomplete model, surrounded by piles of bricks, I realized what was really going on. In an instant, I knew.

This wasn’t about LEGOs, my brother, or a little red biplane. This was about my pain and my broken childhood. This was me trying to put my life back together. I’d fixated on a physical symbol of my joy, my happiness, and the best parts of being a kid. I thought that if I could just manage to put that little red biplane back together, and set it on my dresser, then not only would a little LEGO model that I loved be reclaimed, but my childhood would somehow be fixed. In my mind, my healing was dependent upon a few LEGOs. My past could be fixed with a few pieces of plastic and a simple instruction book.

But what my brother was telling me was that could not be true, that it is not true, and that life works differently. My brother lived through much of the same pain, the same family trouble, the same unhappiness I did, but what he knew was that by choosing to remember to better parts of a shadowy past, and by actively choosing to make better decisions every day, he could make a better future. For him, it wasn’t about the past, and its pain, it is about the future, and its hope.

In that moment, hearing his voice, and staring at the avatar of my brokenness, I knew that while I cannot rebuild the broken past, I can construct a brand new future.

Crying, I told him what I had just realized. I told my brother that I loved him, and that I was sorry for blaming him for my brokenness. We reconciled and we said our goodbyes. In a week, I’ll see him for the first time in two years. That will be a great time.

And the little red LEGO biplane? The irony is that I could have rebuilt it anytime I wanted. That was a fairly popular set back in the day, and at any given moment there are five for sale on eBay. Any time I wanted to, I could have bought one and had all the parts I lacked. So after I finished the call with my brother, that is exactly what I did. Yesterday, someone else’s little red biplane arrived in my mailbox. Using the old pieces of my past and the new parts of my present, I built a brand new model for the future.

I am a little more complete because I chose to incorporate the good from yesterday and integrate in the good from today to make a new tomorrow.

I am still depressed, that is a medical condition and a psychological reality, but I am now seeing things in a whole new way, and my road to healing is a little more certain. Things are not so black as they used to be. I have found peace that I have lacked, and a weight is gone from my shoulders.

I can fly a little higher.

My name is Phil, and I am depressed.

Do you want to hear a joke? “Depressed individuals would attend regular group therapy if they could ever just get out of bed.” *pause for laughter* I don’t know, it might need some work. It seems I am cultivating quite the dark sense of humor lately, which when most of your days are black and not very funny, one must do to cope. As they say, it’s only funny because it’s true.

My therapist is always telling me that it is ok to stay in bed if I don’t feel like getting out, but in my own superior arrogance I always smirk (on the inside, at least) because I am not that depressed. But lately I have slowly become aware of the fact that I do, indeed, struggle with something as simple as getting out of bed. I wake up, and the first thing I do is check my email and twitter, which isn’t unusual, most people these days do that, but then I spend the next few hours checking my email and twitter. I excused myself because, blessed by my iPad, I could bum around online and not have to get out of bed and stumble over to my computer to do so. But the reality is that without my iPad, I probably would still stay in bed.

Even when I do drag myself out and get dressed and eat breakfast, I still end up back in bed my mid afternoon for a nap. I wake up sometime later and then spend a few hours doing whatever before I am back at it for “bedtime”. So, what is with all the sloth? Am I lazy? Am I exhausted from all the nothing I do? No, not really. I am depressed, and a physical symptom of depression is decreased energy and perpetual tiredness.

The irony, of course, is that I have trouble sleeping. At night, in the morning, in the afternoon, it takes me hours to drift off, and I don’t sleep very heavily when I am asleep. I wake easily. Many, many times, my body is very relaxed, but my brain is still very active. I might look as if I am asleep, but I am aware of everything and am not unconscious. It is rather torturous, actually. During the winter, I lay aware at night listening to the pipes groaning and knocking as they freeze, or thaw, or distribute heat. In the summer, I hear birds all night long, twittering and singing. I listen to trucks idling in the parking lot behind the apartment. I can’t not. I am not quite awake, but not asleep either. The mechanism in the brain that shuts off sensory perception during normal somnolence in normal people doesn’t seem to work for me. So I am always tired, perpetually sleeping, and never refreshed.

In high school and college I didn’t notice so much, but before I got married I had adapted my lifestyle to my depression. For one thing, I would routinely stay up until 3 or 4 am. I found that being truly exhausted made it easier to actually sleep. Sometimes I would stay up for several days in a row in order to be able to fall into a deep sleep. I wouldn’t wake early, something that is impossible now with a wife who rises early every single morning. I would be able to stay asleep until 10 am. I never was a morning person, but I have no choice now and the result is I feel more like a zombie than ever.

But all of these reasons, and schedules, and troubles, the fact of the matter is this: it is easier to skip painful hours of a depressed life by existing in a drowsy, dream like state. I don’t have to face the constant, conscious pain that is my life. I never can totally quiet the clamorous thoughts and endless analyzations of my life and everything that is broken in it, but sometimes, while nearly asleep, the mental anguish simmers to a whisper. Sleeping a lot is a mental and physical coping mechanism.

And this doesn’t even get into the dreams. I never know if I am going to have a psychotic, horrific nightmare or a fully lucid euphoric dream. I have way more of the former than the latter. My unconscious mind is a horror film. It literally scares the hell out of me. All my dark energy, repressed rage – sorrow – pain, and the trauma rises from the deep midnight to assault me. Sometimes I am afraid to fall asleep. But I still do, because, very rarely, I get a good dream. I am fully me, and fully powerful, and I can do things, and feel things, and I am happy and full of light. I feel like a person, right up until that moment I wake. These good dreams are a cruel fantasy, but at least I am able to live, however briefly. This is why abusing medication is such an easy thing for depressed people: we know the high is not real, but it ceases to matter. Any chance or excuse to feel good, we’ll take. A drowning person will do anything for one gasp of air, no matter how toxic.

Which leads to the conclusion of this sad examination: I am so very weary. I just want it all to end. I am so tired of being tired. The minutes are growing ponderous and I don’t want any more. I just want it to stop, finally, and not continue. *pause for laughter* but it doesn’t. It can’t. I won’t. My body isn’t worn out yet. Rib cage. What an apt name: cage. I no longer believe in a heaven or an afterlife, but I don’t care. I don’t need paradise when I die. I’ll take silent, eternal oblivion. But not yet.

So if you’ve ever wondered how depressed people can sleep so much, there’s a little glimpse. I’m sorry, I wish I could give you a happier look into my life today, but that wouldn’t be accurate or honest. This is the reality of depression, and if you live with or know depressed people, it’s better to have an honest look into their world rather than a manufactured image. You want happy, look elsewhere, I don’t have it.

I’ve been writing about my depression lately, and if you missed the previous ramblings you can search my blog for “depression” as I’ve tagged all the entries thusly.

I’m Phil, and I am depressed.

Last night I was depressed, and I was a little angry about it. I hope I didn’t alarm anybody, but I know I did cause at least one person to worry. I was asked if everything was ok, and if the people around me are safe from physical violence as a result of my dark depression. Yes, I am ok. No, the people around me are not in danger.

I wrote last night specifically because, unlike right now, and the other four times I had written about my depression, I was not functioning on a higher, happier level. I wrote last night specifically because I was darker and deeper. This is an honest, straightforward and authentic account of one man and his depression. I don’t want to edit or censor or sugarcoat because I want the realness and the rawness to be evident, however that appears through the words on the screen.

Not only do I want those who know me to understand me, and perhaps know me better, I want other people – out there in the world – who are depressed to know that they are not alone. I can’t do that if I do not tell the truth and don’t shy away from unpleasantness. I also want those other people – out there in the world – who know someone who is depressed to be able to have an insider’s glimpse into the mind of a depressed person. Depression is extremely hard to understand, cope with, and live around. It doesn’t make sense, it isn’t constant, it is messy, unpleasant, and downright annoying.

But how do you have compassion, how do you support the depression of others unless you are able to sympathize? Sympathy, according to Wikipedia, is “the perception, understanding, and reaction to the distress or need of another human being”. It is fundamentally impossible to sympathize without “understanding”. Empathy, by contrast, is “the capacity to recognize [the] feelings [of another human being]” (Wikipedia). Other depressed people don’t need to understand. They know. They empathize, and I have heard from them as a result of my writing. But those that don’t know, who haven’t experienced, need a little help. I am here to educate, partly. I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t therapy for me.

Furthermore, the point I made badly last night was that there is no need for something to be wrong for a depressed person to be in a dark, bad place. Everything can be just fine and dandy. All can be right with the world and a depressed person can still be in a dark place. Earlier, I talked about how weather affects mood, but that is only a generalization. Plenty of bright, sunny days dawn upon a darkly depressed me. During the winter, there were a few slate grey dead days that brightened (winter days in Wisconsin don’t always dawn) that I was very light and relatively carefree. Everything can go right on a day free of responsibility or worry and I can be depressed. Everything can go wrong on a stressful, worrisome day, and I can be happier depressed. There doesn’t need to be any instigating factor.

An alcoholic always wants to be drunk. Stress doesn’t make them drink. Success doesn’t make them drink. Alcoholism makes them drink. So too: whosoever puncheth a wall puncheth the wall simply because they are depressed.

But don’t worry. I don’t usually punch walls, and the only person I remember punching was my brother. I was 13, he was 14, and believe me he deserved it.

I’m depressed, not violent.