Depression's slow leak. [4 min read]
I went supermarket shopping yesterday.
Eggs. Milk. A bottle of wine.
I had the day off and babysitting lined up for a couple hours. No toddler to wrangle, no rush, no hurry, no pressure.
No pressure.
And I could barely get myself to push the cart through the supermarket.
The urge to curl up in a corner of an aisle and just cry was almost overwhelming. The urge to simply disappear. Or hope to disappear.
But I didn’t. Mostly because aisles don’t have corners but also because that’s crazy. And I’m not a one year old. I can’t succumb to my emotions. No matter how overwhelming they are in the moment. I’m a responsible adult who has a real one year old to take care of, to buy food for, to go and pick up from babysitting when I’m done.
No disappearing allowed.
Also — physics.
But that’s how it is sometimes. No rhyme, no “reason”. Sometimes everything, anything at all is too much. The air thick and heavy. Not because things are hectic or stressed, or my plate is too full. Those things can happen, but this is not that.
This is when you reach the end of the endless to do list, the end of the day, the end of distractions, turn the corner out of a busy moment and a room buzzing with people and feel gravity multiply.
When there’s no pressure.
There’s nothing.
One of my front tyres has a slow leak.
I’ve had several flats in the past few weeks.
Every couple days I find myself at a gas station fighting with semi functional air pumps trying to avoid an emergency tyre change. Every morning I glance and check. Is it ok to drive on? Soft? Flat? Often I doubt myself. I can’t quite tell.
I felt a strange sense of camaraderie with my leaky soft tyre the other day as I left the office and made my obligatory glance to make sure we were ok.
Have we pumped ourselves up enough to keep going? Is there enough pressure to make it through the day? Or will we find ourselves stranded somewhere, in the middle of the countryside, or a supermarket aisle, deflated and questioning the basics of how to keep going?
This feeling isn’t new to me.
I remember sitting on my mothers bed and sighing to her “I feel depressed”. I wasn’t being melodramatic. I was just a kid going to mum with an ache in the pit of my stomach who wanted to feel better. Only it wasn’t a stomach ache. I don’t know how old I was but it must have been before the full swing of puberty hit, before I secluded myself into the cocoon of hormone fueled teenage-hood where mentioning anything of substance to your parents is tantamount to sacrilege.
I don’t recollect what she said. I don’t have any other details to fill out that memory, other than the feeling. I remember the feeling… of gravity multiplied. Of even breathing feeling like a labour of necessity that you have to convince your mind to go along with. A brick sitting on your chest. A general miasma of hopelessness, pointlessness.
This feeling isn’t new to me.
“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
I know nothing about Kurt Vonnegut except for this quote of his that I stumbled across and saved many years ago.
And, over those years, I’ve taken his words to heart, holding onto and celebrating periods of happiness almost desperately.
Because of this I know…I remind myself… this is just a season.
Just a year ago these feelings were a faded, yellowed memory in a journal. Well… several journals, to be honest.
I’ve learnt to expect this shift of tides. This cycle of seasons.
But the reality of it is always more difficult than the memory. The slow vague downhill slide, the gradual daunting dim of twighlight, the lonely uncertainty of waiting in the darkness of night for dawn to break. You can use all the flowery, poetic language in the world to try to describe it but all it is really is hard.
It’s fucking hard.
Some days are better than others.
And, based on experience, eventually enough good days will string together in a row and you’ll wake up and realize with a deep sense of relief — I’m ok. I’m ok.
You’re ok.
Like getting over a horrible vague prolonged cold.
But until then I wake up and remind myself that I can make it to the end of today.
One day.
I can do one day at a time.
One more aisle of the supermarket. One more email. One more trip to the gas station to pump my tyre up.
And some days will be better than others. Cling to those days.
‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
And one day, soon, the night will be a memory. And memories are good because it means you made it through to the other side.
Which, sadly, is more than some can say.
You have to be positive in all way what we do ...the most important things it is to be alive ....live ..because tou have just a life....every minutes it is very precious....every second....make it matter for you and for other hw
You're a really good writer, but your topic is a bit depressing ;)
There are times when I wonder whether I'm bipolar or not, because I have moments when I feel embarrassingly happy, like psychedelically blissful, for no real reason, then, sometimes in the very same day, do a hard fall into emptiness and apathy and a total lack of energy, as if the happiness has sucked all my energy away.
I'm such a stubborn and prideful SOB that I refuse to see a doctor about it and I've never once mentioned any of this to a friend or family member. I'm a MAN -- I have to be STRONG, ya know?
And I do feel strong most of the time, even when I feel really low.
One of the tricks that I've taught myself to help me overcome the extreme burden of depression is to take control of my attention and to focus it on the subtle feelings involved. I've got to a point now through continued practice where I essentially override the feelings of depression with "pure curiosity". I focus so much on the observation of "this thing called depression" that it seemingly becomes "separate" and "distant".
I become so magnetized to all the subtle intricacies and sensations of diving deeper and deeper that I leave it (the depression) entirely , to the point of forgetting that it was ever an issue, then peace settles into the emptiness.
One downside of this practice is that I become SO OVERLY SENSITIVE, to every.little.sensation inside of me and emotionally/ psychologically "raw" from doing it that I can hardly manage to have an intelligible interaction with people.
It's kind of difficult to explain. It's like I become a very curious child, empty and vulnerable, yet too fascinated with it's own peculiar world to pay any attention to those things, or to other people, for that matter. It can take many hours and sometimes more than a day for me to "come back" to....to what?
I don't know... I suppose fear, heaviness, stress, suffering, sometimes joy, a lot of "efforting", straining, laboring, desiring, comparing, envying, competing, pretending, deluding, having an occasional moment of clarity, back to stressing, straining and suffering, oh, and here comes depression again. You know, the "adult life".
Hey man, thanks for the comment - sorry for the delayed response - Busy life!
"I'm such a stubborn and prideful SOB that I refuse to see a doctor about it " I hear ya
Your method sounds similiar to mindfulness techniques some people use to combat negative thinking - allowing the thought to just pass through you. etc. Except - I suppose you focus on it as an item to be studied, whereas that technique is more about letting it all just pass by you.
I don't know though - I haven;t figured out the right approach myself.
I wouldn't say that I focus on it as an item to be studied so much as I focus on the "self" that studies the item. Hopefully that makes sense...?
I see it like "layers" of consciousness (awareness). I'm trying to relax my attention into the deepest layers where the deepest anxieties and fears can be discovered (again?)/ released. Instead of dealing with the branches of the trees (psychological symptoms), I'm searching for the roots of all the problems.