Depression Impression

I never liked the word “depression” always seemed so, I don’t know – overused? Fake perhaps?

It’s the new black. Everyone has it.

So many people I know go around saying how terribly depressed they are/were and that now they are on anti-depressants and life is a fucking fairy tale again. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the diagnostic criteria for depression is only low mood for two weeks – so I am sure that all of these people have been “depressed” but I had always personally viewed depression as something that stayed with you for months generally brought on by something bad happening.

 I on the other hand have always kept quiet and generally refused to admit to myself that these recurrent low moods I experience were ever actually as severe “depression” after all, nothing traumatic had ever happened to me. Sure I had done rather a lot of things for my age but nobody had died, I had a happy relationship, job I liked and a healthy baby – for me to feel this way, was just akin to the stupid selfish bitch I was always told I was by that inner voice that never ceased. I wanted to die so badly, in many ways with no proper “reason” it was just because I knew that my husband and child would be so much better off without a fuckwit like me around.

I couldn’t tell you how many of those little survey things the doc gives you after you have a child that I lied on – its rather obvious which boxes you are supposed to tick to say that you are happy as fucking Larry and the thought of coming across as anything but happy was not ok.

Sure I felt like killing myself, off and on since I was about 8 and more seriously starting to plan the when’s and where’s at around 14.  But everyone feels like that surely, its not like I had actually killed myself yet. I was a teenage mother and had to prove to the world I was capable.

My psychologists now ask me why didn’t I ask for help? Help for what? I didn’t have a problem, I sure as shit didn’t have a mental health problem and if I want to kill myself then that’s my body and my business. I was clued on enough to the fact that I thought a touch more intensely than the other teenagers I hung around and that telling anyone that I felt that way would have given me a one way ticket to the loony bin – a place that I was hell scared of at that time in my life.

My biggest fear about an enforced stay on the psych ward as a teenager was that it would most likely be due to the slightly psychotic anorexia I was experiencing and in vicious denial about. I knew that although to myself I felt the size of a house, that all they would do is make me fat –although I thought everyone was trying to make me fat. I honestly believed that my mum was trying to poison me by adding fats to my foods and I refused to let her prepare or even walk past any meals I was making… just in case. How I managed to avoid incarceration at that point I still don’t know.

Depression was the place I fell into with a thud time and time again, usually after an intensely chaotic part of my life had started off wonderful and then brewed and brewed until it got out of control and I burnt out into a depressive oblivion.  The job I was excelling at suddenly became an impossible task, I would want to quit before I got fired because I was so fucking hopeless and the constant suicidal ideation that had subdued for months would come back with force, a voice for every action giving an equal or greater reason why my death was a better option, for me, for my family and colleagues.

I am wallowing once again in the pit of what’s the fucking point? I’ve been back here for a while now months in fact but its hitting rock bottom again, not coping with life at all - I walked out of work on Thursday after pressing send on an e-mail that involved a multitude of swear words and a “you want to know why I didn’t do XYZ in the allotted time frame? Well frankly it’s because I am a fucking loser who sucks at her job.” Not sure quite what the repercussions of this are but it’s likely to involve a meeting on Monday. I might just quit, I can’t hack the pressure. I ran out of work a few weeks back after a panic attack of sorts and ended up sitting on a cliff edge with a bottle of pills in my hand ipod playing the current list of songs I want to go out to, just ready to lie down and go to sleep forever, knowing that once I passed out I would fall off that cliff I couldn’t jump from just to make sure.

Before I got a chance to enact my plan some random guy turned up walking towards the lookout area where I had jumped over the safety fence and I had to do a quick scarper away as being caught on a cliff edge with a bottle of pills generally results in police, a psych stay and if you are unlucky a spiel on the evening news.

I drove home slowly, bumped into my parents very randomly in a supermarket nowhere near their house and arrived home that evening to find friends were visiting. I thought how different everyone’s afternoon would have been if I had been successful. I wish I could say that these thoughts deter me, that I am glad that man walked down, that I am glad my liver is apparently made of steel and no amount of drugs can kill me- but I am not.

I have never once regretted taking that overdose last year. Though I was high as a manic kite at the time and stuck rather firmly on the “flight” response, my only regrets have been that it didn’t work. While I know that the depression will eventually be replaced with a productive hypomania where I will accomplish much, solve the world’s problems and sing happily again when I’m walking around the house blissfully non suicidal. Even if that doesn’t escalate to the dizzying scary heights of Mania again where I will likely try to fly from the roof top, it will still as always be followed by a crash and continued suicidal ideation, but this time I don’t think I can handle anymore crashes.