Hello, Darkness

I've been depressed for about a week now. It's gotten progressively tougher. This weekend, here's what I did:

Saturday:
- Goofed around the house, doing not much of anything until it was time to go to
- Fred's MIL's wake
- Came home, scrubbed off makeup, changed clothes, wrapped myself in a blankie and fell asleep on my bed for five hours.
- Went to E's party.
- Came home and fell into bed.

Sunday:
- Goofed off around the house, feeling increasingly miserable until it was time to go see "Journey to the Center of the Earth - 3D!"
- Walked across the parking lot to a little Thai place that had just opened for Sunday brunch. It was beautiful. And delicious.
- Came home, wrapped myself in a blankie and fell asleep on my bed for six hours.
- Woke up long enough to answer some email, watched a bit of a DVD, then went back to bed.

You'll notice that there isn't a lot of work being accomplished in any of this. That's because when I'm depressed, it feels pointless and idiotic. Besides, I am so busy fighting for my life that I'm exhausted.

There's also a lot of sleeping in here. That's because if I'm asleep, I can't go droning on and on to myself about what a miserable, shabby life I'm leading, how unloved I am, etc. etc. Plus, I'm also exhausted from fighting to stay alive.

I have gone through rounds of this since I was fourteen - probably younger. They've gotten worse over time. I will hit some nice, smooth areas for awhile and I'll be loving life. Then the rogue wave comes along and it's Bec's own private Poseidon adventure.

I know when I Get Like This, I try hard to fight it, but I'll bet it shows. In this manifestation, I am nearly out of my mind about the cats.

Butch is in chronic renal failure. As beautiful as he is, he is losing weight, then more weight and now I can feel each rib when I pick him up. He also once confined himself to the kitchen - to the table and the top of the little china closet. But now he's wandering and wandering and wandering. He's looking for something and I don't know what it is. I put him in the room where the cat boxes are and he freaks out. I don't know what he's looking for and his constant wandering drives me out of the house.

I'm so frustrated about this. But I know if I took Butch to the vet, I would get a sympathetic shrug from Hunky Vet and not much else, because truly there's not much else that can be done. It gives me no comfort to know that Butch has maybe another six to twelve months on this mortal coil.

It goes on like this, you see. A spiraling downwards, a sense of futility and helplessness. Nothing helps - at least, not in a positive sense. I could go lapse into another coma again right now, but when I woke up, the laundry would still be heaped high, the dishes stacked in the sink, no food in the fridge.

I've taken today off work in the hopes that I can get some of this done, even if it means confining Butch to quarters.

This is one of the costs of depression - time missed from work. I think I've only once called in to work because I was depressed that day, but I know that there have been a handful of times when I've taken a vacation day to do what was left undone while I was depressed over the weekend.

I can't help that I'm depressed. I do what my doctors tell me to do. I follow the literature. I also know that this round of depression was kicked off by a change in my blood pressure medication. The best that I can do is hang on, take my meds as prescribed, and find some routine that I can wedge myself into that will give my life a semblance of order, provide hand-holds to get through the day.

If you have never been depressed, you probably don't understand that depression is not self-imposed. You don't understand that the worst thing you can say to a depressed person is something along the lines of "Snap out of it!" or "Just cheer up!" I wish it were that easy.

Just imagine yourself waking up every day for a week or a month or a year with a steel skewer going through some random part of your body. You can't pull it out because your hands are tied. You know it won't be removed until some random time you can't foresee. You try to live as normal a life as you can, try to work over the pain. But the next day when you wake up, maybe there's another skewer. Or the old one has been taken out, but two new ones put in. And imagine how you would feel if someone told you all you had to do was cheer up and the pain would go away.

Imagine, too, how many friends you would have. After a month or six months, how many would be left to ignore your obvious pain? Not many, I'll bet. And maybe after a year of it, you just quit trying to make new friends. You're damaged goods.

But maybe there'll be a day when you wake up and you notice your hands are no longer tied. And the skewers are gone. There are wounds, but you know what to do to make them heal.

And you can go about, trying to repair the damage done when you lived in the shadow lands. And try to get everything ready for the next time it comes around. Because no matter how hard you hope and pray and work to make sure it doesn't come around, it will.

Now. Go cheer up!