Photo by Gary Meulemans on Unsplash
It has been 1,715 days since my 4 days in 5 East.
That means I have written 0.35 blog posts per day for 1,715 days. That is 2.85 blog posts on average per week. Being very competitive, I feel the need to justify my efforts. The simple fact that I am still writing these blog posts means, to me, that I haven’t figured it all out yet. But I want to explain what I am doing and why.
When I started, I told myself this was just for me, so I could begin to understand my relationship with my depression.
And yet here I am, almost 5 years later, still wondering if I am making a difference. Even though writing about my depression has been ever so helpful to me, I find myself wanting to see a bigger picture. And I keep writing because I am not confident that I have this picture in my head. Ok, I have a picture of what I think I am accomplishing, but I have little evidence that I am making a difference in anyone’s life.
I am finding it hard to see that I am even making a difference in my own life.
Reviewing some of my earlier writing, I can see that my relationship with depression has changed. Initially, everything was new. I had never stopped to look at what I was going through with each depressive episode. And I was so relieved when my depression began to dissipate, that all I allowed myself to do was focus on returning to normal.
I had no desire to recap what had happened or search for any strategy to keep it from happening again.
All I wanted to do was sweep any remaining crumbs of my experience under a rug and walk away like nothing had happened. “Nothing to see here.†And I was so focused on returning to my more balanced life, that I never even stopped to see what my actions, or lack thereof, had done to others.
I have not been brave enough to ask what others saw during my deepest episodes of depression.
The truth is, I am sure it was way different than what I imagined. Working from a concealed, or high-functioning depression posture, all I could see was what it took to project a positive, can-do image each day. This posturing was very draining, but I was convinced that there was no other way to be.
If I let someone other than depression into my thoughts and feelings, they would see I was a fraud.
My whole life has been a lie. I am seeing that if I had come clean about my depression years ago, I might have saved a lot of grief for myself and others. But at the same time, I am reminded that the psychological community and the available medications were still in their infancy.
39 years ago, the medication available to treat depression was not as advanced as it is today.
Recently, I took a DNA test, to identify what depression medications were most effective for me and which ones I should avoid. It turns out Remeron was on the “bad†list. This confirmed what I was feeling. It also confirmed my work with my psychiatrist who identified this as a problem.
We were already weaning me off of Remeron when the results of the DNA testing were received.
I am also jaded because of the threat of stigma surrounding depression and mental health in general. In the early 70’s, I would walk in Williamsburg, VA on a street with a huge stone wall surrounding the property. At that time, this was the home of the Eastern State Mental Institution. If you knew where to look, you could find slivers of plaster missing and you were able to look into the lawn.
I am ashamed of what we thought and may have said.
Now I see how stigma has affected even my perception of mental health issues. And I know that I still carry some of this around with me even today. So, when I read of people who share their depression with their boss or someone within the company where they work, I am impressed but frightened for them.
Even in 2024, it is more comfortable to talk about a broken rib, than it is to talk about my relationship with depression.
The reality is that the pendulum is swinging towards more acceptance of mental health issues as a category, but there is still fear of not understanding many types of mental health issues. This lack of understanding is not just related to depression but flows to many areas of our lives.
And because we are carrying around all of our personal experiences, it makes it hard to be objective.
All of us see the world through the lenses we were given. Some of us challenge the shape of the lens, while others rigidly stick to their interpretation of what they see. From my experience with depression, this looks a lot like “all or nothing†thinking. I have written extensively about my depression and 10 unhelpful thinking styles.
600 blog posts later, I have a better understanding of the tricks my depression has used to keep me under its wing.
Unhelpful thinking has been a huge part of my depression’s ability to help me think like it thinks. When I checked into 5 East, I did not even know unhelpful thinking existed. Nor did I understand what a huge impact it was having on my day-to-day life.
Now I often see what is happening as it comes out of my mouth.
And sometimes I can catch myself in unhelpful thinking before I even say something out loud. That, for me, is a huge milestone. I cannot thank the staff at UVA enough for giving me such a valuable tool to help me understand my depression.
Coming up on my 600th blog post, I had envisioned many ways to celebrate this milestone.
For one thing, I am celebrating that I am here to write about it. There were moments when I was up against the wall, and I saw no way forward. I was way past any feeling and numbness I had known. There was no sensation, just a chasm, an abyss. And this abyss was all that I could see.
There was a way back to balance, but I hadn’t discovered it until I forced myself to seek professional, medical attention.
As I have said many times before, I was way too chicken to plan out a suicide attempt. That option was the most frightening of the three choices I had. Second, I finally understood that was doing the same thing after each depressive event, while always expecting a different outcome. Now that to me is a definition of crazy.
Third and finally, that left me to be my own advocate for the help I needed.
For the entire day, with each professional, I had to advocate for the professional medical attention I knew I needed. First, it was the ER doctors, then the admitting physician via Zoom, and then the intake doctor on 5 East. All of them couldn’t understand why I wanted to be admitted. The admitting Psychiatrist was more interested in talking about my employer than he was in getting me admitted.
Or at least from my jaded, depression-laced perspective, that’s all I could see.
So, as I write blog post #600, I am a mixed bag. I had this plan to include links to many of the posts I wrote in the first few months after my discharge from 5 East. These are the starting points on my road to leading a balanced life with depression. I latched onto “balanced life: from SMART Recovery, an organization that I credit with providing answers to and strategies for leading a more balanced life.
I was never looking for rainbows and unicorns.
What I am expecting is to have ups and downs, successes, and failures. I want the same type of life as any person who doesn’t have depression. Every one of us, I am convinced, has ups and downs in our lives. Just look at the volume of writing on the subject. And the number of quotes related to falling and getting up is legion.
If I can find that balanced spot, then I can feel proud and successful.
I am still working on the whole self-care thing. I am pleased with the success I have achieved in this area. But I still have a difficult time loving myself. And As Rue Paul says. “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you going to love someone else?
This points to the fact that I still have work to do.
In future posts, I will go through some of my earlier writings, and attach links to some of them. I am very interested in knowing more about where I started and where I am today. And I can use that, in my competitive way, to project my progress into the future.
Stay tuned, because even after blog post #600, I am just getting started.
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