When depression comes on, it comes like a silent fog that steals into your body, resting heavy and grey inside your brain. It’s inescapable and unavoidable. I’ve always been able to find relief for a few brief moments by acting out addictive patterns, by running on adrenaline: tv, binging, sex. But nothing really works, the depression is there. It comes when it wants to and leaves when it wants to. I’ve been through this pattern enough times to know that it does come and it does leave. It will leave. And when it does, I will feel so good. I will have days where living and working and watering the garden feel effortless. So effortless in fact that most of the time I trick myself into believing the hard, dark, foggy days will never come again. But they do.
Over the last few years I’ve been healing my depression naturally, without the help of medication. It’s been an amazing road and much healing has already happened. The periods of good days growing longer, the bad days fewer and farther apart. But there are still bad days. On those days, I don’t feel like leaving the house with my daughter and my husband. It’s a big effort just to get dressed, to eat well, to sit upright. Anything else feels overwhelming. My chest tightens and it is hard to breathe.
Sometimes, I force myself to do big things on days when I am depressed. “Let’s go for a bike ride,” I suggest with heroic effort. Usually, even if I make it out the door, I feel like I am moving through water, unable to draw enough breath. When we return home, I collapse on the couch, exhausted from the sheer effort of being.
Sometimes, I hide in old familiar patterns- watching back to back reruns of loved tv shows or eating typically off limits food. Sometimes I sleep too long during the day and find myself wired all night. It’s familiar now, these ingrained ways of coping, the lost time. I lose walks with my family on the beach and mornings laughing together in the kitchen. I lose entire days to the dark cave of our bedroom. Sometimes, if it’s not too bad, I’ll crack open the curtains to let a little sunlight in. Just a little.
But I’m learning depression. I’m learning my depression. The necessary grace. The unending waiting. Depression is the warm, dark pool I find myself submerged in over and over again. Before I would have frantically tried to crawl out of it, falling back every time. Or I would have sunk deeper and deeper beneath the surface, drowning beneath the weight of the depression and the things I added to it. These days, I try to float, just on the surface. I try not to add anything or push anything away.
“I’m depressed,” I say softly, out loud to my husband, the most patient person in the world. The words, even after all this time, are filled with disappointment and relief. Disappointment because I’m not the person I think I should be. I might never be that person. Relief because admitting the truth feels like the only way to draw a full breath.
“It’s okay,” Britton says to me.
“It must be really hard to be patient with someone who is depressed if you’ve never experienced it yourself,” I ask him without asking. How could anyone be okay with this— waking up to unexpectedly find that your wife has gone for a time and left behind a shell on her side of the bed?
“You’re doing really well,” he says, locking eyes with me. It’s true. Both of us remember the cutting, the suicidal thoughts, the despair.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I remind myself to breathe. “I think I need to rest,” I tell him. It feels like a big risk, this admitting out loud that I am not who I want to be, that I need things I wish I didn’t.
“Okay,” he smiles, “That’s good.” He puts panties and a tutu on our daughter and takes her outside to see the world, the one that is too much for me today.
I keep breathing, calmly, evenly. I breathe into the dull feeling of panic that tightens in my chest, that tells me to escape from this. Work harder! Or Avoid it! But I have done that too many times. I know my depression. I know it so well that it almost feels like a friend, a friend that you are tired of knowing but trying hard to care for anyways. “Hello,” I say to the dark heavy place inside, “I’m going to to stay with you.”
Breathing comes a little easier. Not easy, but a little easier. I float on the surface of this familiar pool, gazing up into the vastness above me, fighting every urge to leave. Slowly, I am filled with the small, deep thrill that follows acts of bravery. To some, it might not seem that brave. To me, it seems to be the bravest thing I’ve ever done. Breathing in. Breathing out. Being.
