Reporting from the Eye of Depression

Some Things Are Easier to Confront
Than Others

Alright.


Deep Breath.



Let's start from the beginning.

What were the odds I would struggle with Major Depressive Disorder, recurrent, moderate to severe in this lifetime? 

Close to 100%: heavy genetic loading for the illness including a paternal grandmother who died of the illness at 50. I asked people who knew her and loved her and they described that at the end of her life she was profoundly isolated, disconnected and ruminating guiltily on small things that she amplified in a psychotic (congruent with her depression) way. For example: she had picked up the French equivalent of a dime from the floor once. She was stuck on  that as the decisive proof that she was a terrible, dishonest, thieving, unworthy person.

Besides the genetic loading, I had a childhood with enough factors that especially when interacting with such a genetic vulnerability, led directly and rapidly to the depression square in this weird version of monopoly, the health version.

When, a few years ago, I started opening up publicly about suffering from depression since I was young (8 years old to be precise) and also taking daily antidepressants (more or less since my oldest son, 22, was a few months old), I risked opening up because I had just taken stock of how much internalized stigma there is in the medical community regarding ubiquitous and common disorders of the mind and how much this is even the case in mental health providers including psychiatrists.

 I did not want to collude with that anymore.

Nevertheless, except for a couple months interlude after the Presidential Election results, I was opening up from a place of relative strength: remitted, good at being happy most of the time even in the mist of unavoidable life's tragedies in the world and close to home.

Well, I have not felt strong in a while.

I may be and probably am judging objectively by a number of variables but I feel fragile and breakable.

On most days, I am like a little car wondering how I can go anywhere without fuel.

Mmmh, I enjoy metaphors as you can see, so I had to get that one out of the way.

Going back to my grandma, Anna Glowinski, I've never visited that horrid distorted space she lived in exactly, perhaps because the medicine I take holds me back, but I regularly visit its antechamber (metaphor!!): a space where the distortion is that nothing I do, am, feel etc....really matters so why bother?

It's a heady mixture of existentialism, anhedonia and pain.

So what were the odds of a relapse about now in my life? Close to 100%.  Friends, I saw it coming and actually tried to ask for help to prevent it. I remember sitting friends down and explaining that we needed to have regular dinners at my house. Prevention attempt. I remember explaining that I was at high risk of tanking. Prevention attempt.

To be fair, I may not have been clear enough or talked to the people who were the most likely to heed my ask. But ok, why was it so obviously a high risk of tanking period:

1-My husband Jim moved to Stanford and I've stayed behind while our youngest finishes High School. I encouraged Jim to take an awesome job and I love the Bay Area. But....this is reminding my brain in every way of when our kids were little, I had no family in town, and Jim was working all the time: not fun times. Overwhelmed, isolated, completely depleted times.

2-The kids are not little. For those of you who have been through that adolescent parenting stage and for those of you who will enter it: it is not low maintenance. It's a high acrobatics parenting stage. It's a stage characterized by high criticism and low empathy (for you.)  I often think about the Star Trek episode "Collective" where five Borg teens are encountered and this memorable spot-on musing: they're not exactly drones. Mature Borg are predictable. They'll ignore you or assimilate you, but these juveniles, they're unstable. They are contemptuous of authority, convinced that they are superior. Typical adolescent behavior for any species." (Thanks hard core Star Trek fans for online sharing of super detailed summaries of each episode.)

I'm outnumbered by (lovable) superior unstable contemptuous low-on-warmth juveniles, there is one of me, and the one of me is a full time professional working over 60 hours a week.  As I was discussing with one of my kids this morning, this means that what is like oxygen to keep me well, which is human warmth, connection, kindness and expressed love, is, at home, in shorter supply than Alexandrite (a gemstone rarer than a diamond--metaphoring folks, still at it, I can't help it.)  To be fair, progress is being made here but it's messy and far from easy at this point.

3-We (me but by we I mean the center of the family) are moving to a new state in a year and a half and that means disconnection from what I have built in teams I love at work over decades and separation from a few people that are like family to me. This is for sure reminding my brain of the (still vastly under-processed, because, well, I've been busy in this life thus far) pain and loss of leaving France when I was 20. Pre-internet. Phone calls were expensive. I was too poor to go back and forth and get a home-things infusion. It was an amputation so painful that things did not feel quite real for years.  My brain is worried about getting another amputation and I can talk up the new Silicone Valley prosthesis all I want, it's not working at this transitional point.

4-A lot of other cumulatively depressogenic things have happened: best friends have moved away, support systems evaporated because in the end too personally costly, people have died from both tragically avoidable and tragically unavoidable causes.


So if you've hung on and read till now, two things: I may be sounding much more plaintive and negative than usual. That is the pain of depression talking. I may also be worrying about the way I sound because that's a very unfortunate correlate of depression: this internal experience of burdening others and so forth.  I also want to say that I have been in this place before, more severely in the past, and that I know that one day probably a few weeks from now, I will see something like a sun beam and be myself again: enormously happy and grateful to be alive.

Pivoting out of this: I made myself a promise. I am going to aim to be as compassionate to myself as I can be. As compassionate as I am with others.

That means: telling you about the details it in a next post....I have places to be and things to do (in all seriousness.)


Thank you and much, much, much love,

Anne