Blue

Living with major depression

A fabric cyanotype of my painting of Frances, ready for applique flowers and embroidery. Part of a new series I am calling “Blue.”

I have suffered from depression for my entire adult life. Most of the time, it’s a low-level depression, like background static, like an itchy wool sweater that I cannot take off, even on a humid day. It’s uncomfortable but bearable. Every once in a while---more frequently, lately---a dark force inhabits my being, and in these moments, the only thing I can pray for is to die.

It may be pointless to try to describe depression to someone who has never felt it. It’s kind of like sadness, except that sadness can have a note of sweetness and longing. Sadness feels like an appropriate emotion to have when sad things happen. Depression is never sweet, never appropriate. It is not a response to trauma; rather it is trauma. There may be a why that begins an episode of depression, but soon the why is unimportant. The brain becomes susceptible to every negative thought, the heart cringes at terrible, imaginary injuries. If you peel back the face of depression, you’d see maggots and old bones, the ordinary becoming a nightmare.

For years I’ve been trying to see if depression has something to teach me, some lesson that would set me free if I learned it well enough. But after my most recent experiences, I am convinced that depression is trying to kill me---but not yet. First it wants to watch me suffer the pain of anhedonia, to suffer agonizing loneliness (because there is nothing more lonely, and more isolating, than depression). First it wants me to squirm and suffer, watching all my hopes turn false and saccharine.

One of the hardest parts about depression is that while it is consuming you, you must try to manage your life. The world does not stop when you are depressed. You are expected to get up and make a reasonable attempt at things like dressing, eating, and work. No one else feels the urgency of your situation---that you are being pursued by monsters in your own brain, whose determination to end you is relentless. When you try to explain it to someone, the look passing over their face and the weight of their silence proves that you really are that crazy, that it is more hopeless than you had thought.

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I am what might be called a functional depressive, meaning that I can pretend. I can weep in my car before work and then wipe my face and go teach a pretty good class, while inside my heart dissolves.

I can even go to a yoga class during a major depression. Perhaps a yoga class is the only place I want to be. In a class a few months ago, a very young woman sobbed silently next to me on her yoga mat as we practiced savasana. I wanted to roll over and take her hand. I wanted to tell her that the quantity of tears I have wept during yoga could have filled the whole studio up to the ceiling. There was one place, since closed, where the teacher encouraged us to scream, laugh, and wail as we moved, and in this space, I unleashed the full depth and breadth of my depression---the pointless, hopeless hole of it.

After yoga classes where I cried, I did not feel better as people with sadness might feel unburdened after a good cry. Actually I felt worse, because there is nothing cleansing or productive about the tears of depression. Tears are only part of the menacing cycle, pain and hollowness, hollowness and pain. But yoga is one place where I feel less of the meanness of depression, and for that I am grateful.

The depressed me is a facsimile of me---and I hate her. She is a person I don’t want to be, a downer, a melancholic, a control freak, a critic, a real drag. When she smiles, it’s totally fake. She reads books about depression, and she weeps or white-knuckles it through yoga classes---that’s all she’s good for. She has the ingredients of an excellent life---a beautiful husband, cuddly dogs, dear friends, a career, a house, a garden, countless hobbies---but out of that she bakes a gray toxic cake, chokingly dry.

The thing that pisses me off the most about depression is that it’s such a waste---a waste of a good life. All of the stupid conversations I’ve had with my husband about my depression feels like a colossal waste of time---his and mine. I would much rather be out hiking with our dogs, or spending the day making art, but depression grabs me with its bony fingers and I find myself stuck in the mud again, filth all over my mouth, gasping for a breath.

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I have a lot of theories---none of them totally convincing---for why I ended up this way. Maybe it was bad karma for being an unconventional introvert in a conventional family, payback for all those years that I preferred to be alone and didn’t care who knew it. Another theory is almost too cliché to mention: a distant and unloving father who gets more distant, more unloving with every year---but I am 50 now, too old to be so tethered to my parents. Sometimes I think there is just something wrong with my brain, and this is the scariest thought. For a brief period I found some relief with antidepressants, such that I managed my life fairly well for a few years. However, the last six months is proof enough that the drugs have stopped working.

Other drugs prescribed by my psychiatrist actually gave fuel to the depression, to the point where I had thoughts of suicide. Buspar toned down my anxiety for three days and then pushed me into a canyon of darkness the likes of which I have never experienced. Pain, then hollowness. Hollowness, then pain. Pain, then insomnia, because of course depression is like a torturer playing heavy metal music at three in the morning to make sure you never have rest or respite.

Two drugs prescribed to help my insomnia, Gabapentin and Hydroxyzine, turned out to be depression’s BFFs. I thought I knew what I was up against, but depression combined with these drugs was a ‘roided up version, sweaty and huge, its elbow on my throat. By sheer chance, I was shredding documents when my eye fell on a list of side effects for Gabapentin:

• thoughts of suicide or dying

• attempts to commit suicide

• new and worsening depression

I felt my body go totally cold. I couldn’t even feel rage. I was stupefied at a mental health care system that would prescribe such a drug to a depressive.

Major depression is not something one could survive for an extended period of time---because, as you’ll recall, it is trying to kill you. Fortunately, just when it seems impossible to bear any longer, it inexplicably lifts. The sun is shining and I can actually feel its warmth. I have entered the phase that I call the depression hangover, a period of exhausted, numb relief.

This is not happiness, but it passes for happiness after the hell of the previous weeks. My brain is trying to catch up to the new reality and also trying to perform a post-game analysis: How did things get so bad? and What is wrong with me? and How can I make sure that this never happens again?, knowing, of course, that it will happen again---that depression is unfailingly reliable, my most loyal companion. It will never turn its back on me.

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I don’t yet have the answers, but I have a teaspoon of hope that I will. I write in this space to give voice to depression, because maybe it will wither under light, because maybe my words might give courage to others facing similar demons. Even in our enlightened culture, no one wants to talk about depression. It’s probably one of the most uncomfortable topics of conversation, and I know because I sometimes bring it up with my friends, hoping to open the door just a crack. The silence around depression helps it flourish. If we can’t talk about it, we know it must be shameful. If we can’t name it, we know it must be scarier even than death.

Here I share my experiences with depression as honestly as I can, and the practices and rituals I use to fight it. Stay with me a while if you so choose.