There's got to be a morning after

Hello readers,

There isn’t anything I can write about depression that hasn’t been written before. I have no cure to offer, no “hacks” to stave it off, no one weird trick.

I have found, though, that writing about morbid psychological states can encourage interesting conversation and contributions from all of you, and I see good in that. Your comments often alert me to things I was ignorant about, and prompt me to see things differently than I would otherwise.

If the world could be arranged to my taste, there would be an answer of set of answers. Why now? What triggered this? Is it organic? Is it purely psychological? Is there a circumstance subtly triggering an unconscious fear? Can it be identified?

The mind is a field of confounders. We all carry a childhood in which our emotional temperament was molded. We all have unique brains; we respond organically (wiring, chemicals, etc.) and psychologically to everything around us, and to the past that lives in our minds. It’s impossible to say with certainty why State A happened last Tuesday, but not this Tuesday.

Every couple of years I fall into a profound depression, such as the one I’m starting to emerge from. These are not states of sadness or listlessness; they’re states of actual depression. Despair, constant fear and anxiety that the worst outcomes financially and emotionally are bound to happen (and by tomorrow). Sometimes there’s a return to the magical thinking of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which drives me to perform magical mental or physical rituals to appease the false Gods my mind has created to bedevil me.

In this state, I can’t take pleasure in anything that normally gives me contentment or happiness (let’s not speak of “joy”; that’s asking too much). I don’t want to light an antique lamp. There’s no way I can listen to music, as a chord change will break me apart and I’m certain I’ll never stop weeping again. My favorite comfort reading is too much because the people I never knew but love like family are dead and gone, and I know how it all ends. Food is actively revolting, and anyway it refuses to go down because my mouth simply refuses to swallow without threatening to vomit. This, of course, contributes to the terrible moods that low blood sugar bring on.

Sleep? How I long for the ability to do avoidance sleeping when I’m in true depression. That’s not how it works for me. In a melancholic state, I can do avoidance sleeping like a champ. In true depression, I can’t stay asleep for more than a few hours before waking bolt upright with my heart racing and my stomach so tight it’s sore.

Now, for some perspective. It’s different, and somewhat better, than it used to be. I remember the onset and duration of my first major clinical depression at nine or 10 years old. It was an overcast but bright day as I walked home from Wagner Elementary School in Placentia, dawdling so that I’d get home as late as possible without getting in trouble with mother.

That afternoon, the phrase, “I’m a homosexual. That’s me. I’m that person they talk about” came into my head literally and explicitly for the first time. I knew, of course, but this was the first time my mind told itself the truth in plain language. Mother mustn’t know, because she screams at the radio about “those people” asking for legal rights they weren’t entitled to. Those People needed to be kept away from “normal folks”, she would declare out loud to the radio reports while I did housework as quietly as possible.

At the time, and in the adolescent years later, I blamed all my psychological woe on the fact that I was a dirty gay. That became the narrative I believed in to explained my unhappiness. It wasn’t true, of course. The life my brother and sister and I had lived before any of us reached ten years old included beatings by a violent man, sexual abuse that everyone pretended they didn’t know about, a mother who both provoked a known violent man into exploding and then cowered in fear in her son’s bedroom, asking him to comfort her. We’d already watched the patriarch of the house try to murder our mother in front of us like we weren’t even there.

Being gay wasn’t the source of my problems; if anything, it may have been just another symptom.

But that realization was the formal beginning of my first major depression. And also a partial, but substantial, break with reality that lasted at least until I was 12. Always a reader, I lost myself even further in books. There were several series written for children that depicted farm, prairie, and Victorian town life in the late 19th century. They captivated me. And I began to believe I had slipped through a crack in time. I had phase-shifted. I was out of place. That boy in the story was actually me. If I could turn my body in just the right way, or angle my head just so, I would be able to slip through that dimensional crack and return to my real family and my real time.

Though I wasn’t 100 percent disconnected from the real world, this was not just idle fantasy. I really did believe this was true, mostly. Sure, I remained tethered enough to the real world to know, when push came to shove, that I couldn’t say it out loud or tell anyone. But it would have taken very little for me to go all the way over the edge into some schizoid-like state where I insisted that I really was a farm boy from 1878.

That fantasy kept me partially checked out of the world for a few years, and in some way shielded me. It was disassociation, I guess. Then it all came crashing down as I realized none of it was real. It was 1988, not 1878. I wasn’t a farmer boy, I wasn’t The Great Brain, and Caroline Ingalls was never my mother. There was no dimensional portal behind the left-hand door of mother’s wooden wardrobe where she kept her sewing supplies. My crystal prism from the kids’ science magazine couldn’t fold space-time to let me escape.

The depression that accompanied this awakening back to reality was profound; I said little, did little, and spent most of my time staring into the middle distance. No one knew why, no one knew what was troubling me. I never told.

Because I knew I was crazy, and no one else must ever know.

I’ve gone a little far afield; here’s the part about perspective. Today, even in the worst despair, I know that it is a temporary state. It will not last, though I may not know how long it will take to pass. It will end, and that knowledge is a blessing I didn’t have as a child or as a young man, when I believed the next time would be the final one. My insanity would trap me inside a mind that would be aware of its own insanity and powerless to escape it. Forever.

At 23 I was sure the “final one” had come. I had a panic attack so severe—trapped in a professor’s apartment in Manhattan for class, losing my mind in public—it was nearly hallucinatory. This led to a months-long course of a moderately high tranquilizer regimen that, say what you will about benzodiazepines, kept me competent enough to continue at school. The taper-off had been planned with my psychiatrist at the outset, and it was easy and effective.

But this propensity started years earlier. At about age 15 or 16, I had my first real, clinical panic attack. I was on a weekend trip “home” from the boys’ home institution. My mother had just bought a double-wide trailer; I was going “home” to some place I’d never seen.

She sat in her recliner in the corner of the living room farthest from the door. The curtains were pulled tight so it was night inside the house despite the sunny day out there in the world. As she pulled on her endless cigarette and stared at me, the world tilted; I felt dizzy. What I know now was a full panic attack came over me. It’s not the physical sensations for me that bother so much—the racing heart, the shaking—but the mental ones. Panic attacks for me have never been about dying, but about losing my mind. When I have them, I know that I’m going insane and I’ll never come back.

That day I learned to keep talking and to sit in a way that would hide my trembling so that no one, not my mother, not my teachers, not the people on the street, would know that my mind was shattering in front of them.

I learned to keep talking a good game through mental crises so that no one would see who I really was. I’ve given public talks and classroom-style sessions while fighting back panic, and I’ve done it so well that no one suspected what I was really thinking. “I have a feeling you could talk yourself into almost anything you wanted,” my therapist once said. Broken people build iron-strong defenses. This is mine. And it is both for better, and for worse.

Perspective, again. Panic attacks (real ones, full-blown ones) are very unusual for me now. Thank God. I haven’t had a full one in years. Though my too-high baseline anxiety is unpleasant, it’s better than watching yourself go over the edge of sanity and know that it’s happening right there, right now.

For no reason I can suss out, the depression began to lift a day and a half ago. This is a first-time experience for me, coming out of it without antidepressants, which I stopped taking four months ago for the first time since I was a teenager. Last night I laughed for the first time in a week and a half; losing my ability to see humor disorients me more than anything else. Yeah, I know. My humor is another kind of defense. So be it. It’s also a genuine part of who I am. When it’s not accessible, that is the closest I come to asking myself, “Who am I?”

Broke my musical fast last night, too. In true depression, I cannot tolerate even a bar or two of music. At my best, music affects me emotionally to a degree that seems unusual for most people. I will cry out of the blue at the sheer painful beauty of it. In depression, I can’t risk that chord change that provokes a tear because it will start a torrent that brings the entire dam down and destroys the town forever, like Streganona’s magic pasta pot that buried the village.

But I let myself listen to a bit last night, and I let myself sing. It was a good voice night, too; I could hit that lowest note in the score without cheating. Why are the notes at the bottom of one’s range harder than the ones at the top?

This essay feels like tempting fate, begging the universe to laugh at me. But that’s childish magical thinking.

It’s also self-indulgent; I know that too. And I thank you for your forbearance, if you’re reading this. The truth is that it’s so lonely to be in this state, and I want some connection. I want to keep coming back to the world and other people.

If you suffer from depression, whether it looks at all like mine or not, I wish I could offer you something more than this. If I’d figured out how to handle this better, I’d tell you. My therapist reminds me that I have a troubled relationship with suffering. I want to end it immediately; in myself, in other suffering people. This can blind a person to the lessons and value that can come from experiencing suffering and looking directly at it rather than running.

Still, I would take away this kind of suffering from another if I could.

There is something I offer you that I know is true. It will end. Recognize it when the new day comes, and grab hold of it.

There's got to be a morning after; we're moving closer to the shore

I know we'll be there by tomorrow

And we'll escape the darkness—we won't be searching anymore