A post on depression has been fermenting in the back of my mind for quite awhile, but I’ve mostly been ignoring it, because, at some point, I feel like there’s not a damned thing I can say that I haven’t said many times before, so what’s the point?<\/p>\n
But then I feel depression creeping in from the side, sinking its claws in, coming in under the cover of stress or grief or anxiety.<\/p>\n
But that’s the thing, you see. How do I tease out depression from all these other things? How do I determine what is an acceptable reaction to events and what is depression being a big fat fucking liar?<\/p>\n
As with Grandmom, I am going through periods of intense sadness. Stupid things will make me burst into tears. That, I am pretty certain, is grief.<\/p>\n
But in between, I think, are the sneaky tendrils of depression.<\/p>\n
I don’t just feel sad, but I also feel utterly alone. I feel as if it’s wrong for me to want to talk about my sadness and grief, that people just don’t want to hear it.<\/p>\n
Or even worse, that I’m not eligible for my grief, that I’m not justified to feel so sad.<\/p>\n
Part of that comes, of course, from the fact that I feel mortified by my own reactions. When we buried Grandmom, I knelt down to touch her coffin one last time and burst into uncontrollable sobbing. I could not stop myself from what felt like hysterical crying, not matter how hard I tried.<\/p>\n
I felt like I was making a huge scene and hated every moment of that lost control just as much as I hated saying goodbye to her.<\/p>\n
That’s just weakness, the darkness whispered. <\/p>\n
So now, I struggle again, trying to understand why I feel this way.<\/p>\n
Why do I not accept my own feelings as valid? Why does this sorrow make me feel like an imposter in my own mind?<\/p>\n
Intellectually, I recognize this as my depression speaking. That my feelings are valid and my own reaction and no one–NO ONE–has the right to tell me I’m doing it wrong.<\/p>\n
But I can’t stop myself from telling myself that.<\/p>\n
Which really fucking SUCKS, let me tell you.<\/p>\n
So I’m letting myself feel. And I’m being really damned careful about how much I rely upon pharmaceuticals–but that in and of it self is a Catch-22. Short sleep will kick-start a bout of depression, so I’ve been taking half doses of Tylenol-PM so I sleep, but then I worry that I shouldn’t be relying upon drugs to sleep, that it’s bad to take them, so I berate myself for my “weakness,” which of course makes me depressed.<\/p>\n
That’s a fun game that can be played endlessly, let me tell you. (You may remember a similar game I played two years ago when I broke my ankle, over whether it was OK to take pain meds when I was hurting.)<\/p>\n
So, we come back to the fact that I know depression is a fucking liar, but it’s like a horrible take on those gawd-awful horror movies–the lies are coming FROM INSIDE YOUR HEAD! If only I could run out of my head to get away. Or even grab a ball bat and beat the living hell out of the vicious invader.<\/p>\n
But what I can do is try to keep myself honest. I’m allowed to have these feelings. And if I need to cry, I’m allowed to.<\/p>\n
But I also have to remember to search out the joys that exist, and seek out the things that make me laugh. Because just as I am allowed to be sad, I am also allowed to laugh. And it’s my job to share light where I find it, to remind myself and others that we don’t live in the darkness, and even if I visit there, it’s not my home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A post on depression has been fermenting in the back of my mind for quite awhile, but I’ve mostly been ignoring it, because, at some point, I feel like there’s not a damned thing I can say that I haven’t said many times before, so what’s the point? But then I feel depression creeping in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-depression"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pefxA-2vU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9666\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}