For the last few days, I’ve been in a drugged stupor, struggling just to make my body move and get through the day. The good thing is that this leaves a lot less time for me to focus on the fucked up thoughts floating around my brain. The drugs are like a blanket that covers my depression, anxiety, fears and phobias just enough for me to function. I look at myself in the mirror and all I see is a perfectly normal looking 24 year old, with flushed cheeks and punk hair and I don’t understand how I can look so normal when I’m so fucked up inside. But if you look deep into my eyes, past the slim layer of vacancy, you can see the turmoil that lies within.
My meds were upped again last week after I arrived to see my GP in dark clothes, hiding behind sunglasses, tears streaming out the bottom of them, shaking and clutching a small leather bag full of stones that were supposed to be giving me positive energy. When he left the room for a few minutes, he left the door of the room open and this intense fear washed over me like a wave and I panicked. I was sobbing, shaking and rocking in the corner when he came back and it took several minutes for me to calm down enough to even speak to him.
For me, there’s no more positive energy that can make me better until I get to the other side of the years of abuse. The things that used to always bring me out of a depression – my Husband’s arms wrapped tight around me, my Son’s baby giggles – they don’t penetrate anymore. Or maybe they do, and it’s just that I’ve left my body and fallen into this dark pit in my mind…so far down, and the only part of me getting this loving contact is the shell of who I used to be. I take my meds and I become this numb person who walks the world, head down and missing most of what is out there. I hate this feeling too, but for now, it’s a relief from the constant pain. The drugs take the edge off just enough to keep me from crying all the time. When it’s time to take my next dose, I know because I’m already starting to crash. The pain is already returning.
Before I went to see my Dr, before my meds were increased, I was stuck in this mental purgatory every night. I would lie on the carpet sobbing my heart out and self harming for hours after my Husband went to bed. I hurt so much, I wanted to overdose. Not to kill myself. Just enough to knock myself out for a couple of days so that never ending fucking pain would stop, just for a little while. But every time I thought of reaching for that bottle, I thought of my Son. I would pull up my favourite picture of him on the computer and stare at it and tell myself that if I fuck up that way, I’ll be hospitalized. I won’t be able to see my baby whenever I want, and that to me, would be worse than death. So I never took the pills. That didn’t erase the need to escape though.
Now I sit around, dopey, listening to songs about lost love by Sarah McLachlan and stoner music by Sublime. I read Prozac Nation and identify so much with the author that I feel like this time, I really am that far gone. I can identify with the deepest, darkest feelings of a woman who went through such hell, that her account of her struggles with depression became a national bestselling book. People don’t read books about people who are just sort of depressed. They want the raw, gut wrenching, gritty realness of it. The worst possible case. They try to understand, try to identify, but most people wouldn’t be able to. Like so many things in life, you can’t truly understand unless you’ve actually gone through it yourself. The last time I read it (when I went through my first depressive episode), I was overwhelmed by the brutal nature of the pain she was going through and I couldn’t identify. My ability now to identify so completely with her scares me.
Tomorrow I start psychotherapy with my therapist. Tomorrow we begin the plunge into my deep, dark, disturbing childhood. I’m glad to be dealing with it, but I know at the same time that things are only going to get worse before they get better. That’s what everyone keeps telling me, but don’t they understand that I’m already at worse? What comes after that? Can I make it through it? That incessant spirit that usually resides within me has been extinguished like a small lit candle in a windstorm by all the overwhelming pain, grief, guilt, and whatever other fucked up feelings I have every minute of every day. Deep down, I know that this is the hardest test of character I’ve ever had to and probably will ever have to face. I’m so scared. So alone. Stripped and naked in the dark, pathetically trying to beat back the black dogs of depression. But they’re coming for me. They’ve caught the sent of blood, and they’re coming. And I don’t know what to do to stop them.
