Lived experience: Depression
Lived experience: Depression
Content Warning (CW): It gets really dark
CONTENT WARNING (CW): mental health, mental illness, anxiety, depression, death, suicidal ideation, suicide — please consider not reading beyond this point if any of these topics tend to trigger you in a bad way
Throughout my entire life I’ve worked really hard to articulate what I feel and how I feel, thinking that might help (me or others). I think I’ve become rather good at it, but I’ve also learned it hasn’t helped me or anyone else. Still, I’m writing this, if only to be rid of it.
Again, my posts here are self-centred and navel-gazing, because I refuse to speak or write for anyone else, and as for me, I find my feelings invalidated or outright dismissed at every turn in life, which has only strengthened my will to die. I survive day by day but, really, I’m done with this thing called life.
It doesn’t mean I don’t care for anyone else – I do! – it just means I don’t speak or write for anyone but myself. I know no one cares, I know I’m just sending words into the proverbial void, but at least I’m rid of them.
Anti-climax
Still recoverying from the cold from hell that I brought home with me from the hospital last December – which had been getting better but flared up again a couple of weeks ago – this morning I woke up with mucus so sticky, I struggled to breathe or swallow.
So, for a brief moment, I thought my time had finally come.
Despite my ability to string sentences together, I have no words to articulate how wonderful that felt: the thought that I may finally be dying. It was so double: I felt myself panicking as I struggled to breathe either through my nose or mouth, or swallow, yet simultaneously filled with elation that this might mean I was about to die.
And then the mucus ‘popped’ and my airways opened. The feeling was, again, double: relief as I was able to catch a breath, coupled with crushing disappointment that I hadn’t choked and died.
“But [this person] does not [appear] unwell…”
Regardless of how unwell I’ve been or felt, and whether my unwellness was physical or mental, I’ve rarely lost my ability to appear my usual self and construct (reasonably) coherent spoken or written sentences, even as I am going through things.
It was a skill I actively worked on in my teens, thinking that would help me—especially in the presence of trained professionals or volunteers tasked to deal with me as part of their jobs. Teen me was wrong.
I've been seriously struggling with my mental health but have also been seriously afraid of telling people or posting publicly online about how I've been seriously struggling with my mental health, because even professionals see/hear me construe full sentences and therefore do not believe me. Even if they say they do.
Moreover, I've been seriously struggling with my mental health but people whose job it was to hear that (and possibly listen) turned out the best at pushing all the right (wrong) buttons to push me further into the next panic attack or deeper into the darkest of depressive episodes.
And I've been doing much better lately, working really hard on making my life, my physical health, my mental health and everything else better, and much of that I've achieved thanks to kind people on Bluesky and in real life.
On a day-to-day basis I will appear to the world at large as a functioning human being who work and eats and cleans and all that jazz. Because I am a functioning human being. But I am also still really struggling with my mental health.
Meanwhile I have hospital paperwork from one of my attempts to take my own life, in which the physician literally states "patient has no suicidal ideation" right after I'd been admitted following a failed suicide attempt. Because, as they state: "patient is coherent" so somehow I could not be doing so badly?
The Big Sad
The Big Sad has rarely been sad for me. Even though I am better at crying than I used to be, I still don’t do that a lot, either. More often than not when I feel like crying or wanting to cry, I am unable to. Most often when I feel like wanting to cry it’s for other reasons that sadness.
Am I sad? Sometimes… but, most importantly, when in the throes of an episodes of depression, I am no more or less sad than outside of a depressive episode. Depressive episodes are mostly dark and empty voids that tend to swing me be between feelings of fatigue, apathy, numbness, and despair, and moments of raging anger (though the latter may be my anxiety rather than my depression).
“What has [this person] got to be depressed about?”
If you ever find this question bubble up in yourself, consider not expressing it out loud. There are plenty of resources to explain this better than I can. Use the device you’re reading this on to find better explanations than I can give or step inside a library to find further information.
Just speaking for myself here: I can’t be asked to explain time and again how depression often does not care about how well or how badly my life is going. My life was going fine when my current depressive episode hit a year ago, and yes, subsequent circumstances in my life made that depressive episode my worst and longest one yet. If those things hadn’t happened I might have already come out of the episode a long time ago, because getting up after being knocked down is harder when you’re already weak, even if you have no specific trigger or cause to point at when asking what caused that initial weakness.
One of my past depressive episodes years ago did have a trigger. I remember it well, because in my memory that’s the only time ever in my life that there was a definite trigger to spiral me into a depressive episode. I also remember it well because said trigger was a kind compliment someone gave me… go figure.
Make it make sense.
Life can throw all its goodness at someone but depression is indiscriminate. Societal systems and structures aren’t indiscriminate and may determine someone’s ability to access treatment, but depression itself can hit anyone.
Work in progress
I am immensely grateful for the help and support I have received in recent months; they are the reason I am still here and not actively seeking a way off this mortal coil.
But please understand that I am still struggling and much of that struggle lies in what I’ve written above and in previous posts. I don’t intend to leave but I also don’t particularly want to continue to stick around this experience called life. I hope to find my zest for life again, but right now it’s not there and finding it back takes patience and understanding, both on my part and everyone else’s.
I am sorry if that’s not something you wanted to read but please don’t seek to deny or dismiss it for that or any other reason.
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For now I am staying alive, even if only to spite people.
