Saturday, July 8, 2017

Illness, Injury and Insanity (plus Depression)


It is slight disconcerting that my last post was in March - but I am going to do my best not to beat myself up about it.  It's something that is so easy and automatic to do - we are our toughest critics but we get a lot of help from others with putting ourselves down.

I had pneumonia, and injured myself a couple of times, but the real issue I've been fighting is my ever present depression. It seems to be getting more and more prevalent with every passing day and I'm running out of ideas to fight it.  It's affecting my motivation (which wasn't that great to begin with) and my energy and desire to do anything (even things I used to enjoy) is vanishing.

I think that when most people think of clinical depression, they think it is sadness, most likely brought on by specific events coupled with sleeping and crying a lot. My depression is not quite that simple, and yet... might be easy to explain.

Imagine waking up every single day in a pitch black room. It is never the same size or shape and there is no furniture whatsoever. You have to stumble around and try and locate the door in order to exit the room and interact with society in a semi-normal way. Unfortunately the room can be as small as a coat closet or as big as a sports stadium. Sometimes the door is open a crack and you can see a sliver of light guiding you out. Sometimes the walls are thin enough that you can punch a hole through even if the door is locked. Sometimes the key is hanging above the door, or you find a window, or someone is on the other side and can open the door for you. However... sometimes the door is locked tight or even non-existent, and the walls might be impenetrable concrete with not a window to be found.

So every day you have to try and get out of the room. It can be easy, difficult, or even completely impossible, and by the time you get out you have already expended a chunk of energy that most other people take for granted. And those days when you can't escape because you don't have the energy or the ability?  Those days are the hardest - you end up staying in the room all day. You can still handle the most basic of things as far as eating (usually random garbage) and normal bodily functions, but everything else is seems far too difficult including interacting with people.

Now imagine that the room in question is your own mind and that every day you fight against your own mentality to function like a 'normal' human. Imagine that you do that every. single. day. And even on the good days, even on the BEST days, you know that you will wake up tomorrow in the same room and you may not be able to get out. Like Groundhog Day but with a lot less humor (and no Bill Murray, which would make the experience so much more fun).

It's worse when I'm single, because the walls start to whisper to me that it isn't worth leaving the room. That there is no one on the other side of the door who wants me to come out. And even though I know I have friends and family, it just feels so pointless to expend all this energy only to end up in the same place over and over and over again. But I try. Every morning, every day, I try. I keep pushing forward to try and exit the room. Because I have hope. Buried deep and slightly fading, but I still have hope.