Some people who haven’t experienced depression think it’s simply sadness. But depression is a thick, numbing smoke that rolls in. It clouds over the things you enjoy and care about; you catch glimpses of them sometimes, but they are never tangible. You sit there breathing in the smoke like a blob, hopeless and frustrated. You can’t reach out. You barely see breathing as being worth it. You barely feel anything.
The danger in depression comes when you can’t identify it for what it is. When you think the world has actually become dreary, and that you’ve become pointless. When you can’t see that it’s the same world it was, and that you’re the same person you were, before, when everything was fine, but instead think the sense of pointlessness and dreariness represents reality. Then you don’t know it can be the way it was again. You start to look for ways out—artificial happiness or stimuli, or worse, an exit.
I’ve never been to those darkest places. I’ve been fortunate myself to develop depression late enough in life to have learned from a lot of people close to me what it looks like and how it tricks. I’m not saying I’m always able to quickly react and address it. Only that I’ve never failed to identify it.
Depression happens for a number of reasons. It can be genetic, or it can develop as a result of—or as a side effect of coping mechanisms we develop to deal with—situations we live within when we’re young. The latter is tough to reprogram, but, with a lot of work, it’s very possible. The former is chemical. Depression can also develop as a result of ongoing stress, a life-situation that goes against the things that make us essentially satisfied as individuals. If we try to fit ourselves into a life that isn’t suited to our natures, it’s depressing. Stay married to the wrong person, or stay in a job that disagrees with your personal ethics, and you’ll know it.
I guess I’m thinking about this because I’ve been depressed lately. Steve and I are expecting, and while I know the blog entry about that should be celebratory and wonderful, I haven’t been feeling well, to say the least. I’m on five different medications right now for nausea, feel stressed out by social interaction, have barely left my house in a month, and am finding it difficult to imagine I will like having a kid weighing me down. It’s all very unfair of me, because I wanted this very much and am so lucky to be physically healthy with it. Those of you closest to me know I’ve been saying for two years how much I want a baby. Right now I feel like that was nature taking over and talking through me, and not my essential self talking, and that’s depressing.
I don’t need to hear how much I’m going to love being a mother. I know all that stuff—how I’ll “fall in love” with the baby, etc. I know. And I know this sickness will end, and I’ll probably regret having told the entire Internet how I didn’t look forward to the very thing I’m so fortunate to be receiving right now. All I know is these three things: (1) the Internet—blogs and IMs—has been my life preserver from the outside world many times, (2) this is how I feel right now, and (3) I’m working on it.
Thanks for always being patient with me.