Melancholia

I’ve accidentally fallen back into an old, toxic relationship. Same old story really – as much as I try to move on and become like one of those healthy people, it keeps sucking me back in until I can’t remember life without it.

I’m talking about depression – that strange, overused word that almost everyone has experienced these days. Depression is my abusive husband who I can seemingly never escape from.

Some people seem to be predisposed to certain conditions, and I suspect it is so with me and depression, as it’s been present in my existence, on and off, since late single digits of age. I’m under no false illusions, though, that what I experience is anything other than a mild manifestation of what, for some, can be the dominating, debilitating monster that consumes their lives.

I’ve never attempted to end my life. I’ve never even thought about ending my life (other than dramatic entries in my fourteen year old self’s diary: “I love _____ so MUCH and he doesn’t even know that I EXIST!!! There’s nothing else for it, I’m going to HAVE to kill myself!” I was over it and onto someone else within a week).

I’ve never been fired from a job, or sectioned. I’ve never been so blue that I can’t get showered and dressed . . . eventually.

Mostly it manifests itself in an exhausting inertia.

The alarm goes off, a good night’s sleep has been had, yet the thought of getting up seems so pointless that I can barely find the energy to raise my arms. All I can think is that all over the city people are going about their morning routines like hamsters in wheels, performing the same old choreography as every other day. If I get up, what will happen? I will sleepwalk through my day, but what then?

What has changed? What is all this for?

Why are people so interested in the trivial minutiae that make up their lives? I envy them, yet all I can feel is the absurdity of caring so much about work promotions, dinner parties, which shoes to buy – how little these things that make up our day to day lives actually matter in the grand scheme of things. I just want to sleep. To take a break from this troubling consciousness and stop fighting myself.

But I don’t have that option. I need to work to live. I get through this phase by ‘bribing’ myself to get up: ‘Just get up and read your book, you don’t have to get dressed’ . . .  ‘Just get showered and get dressed, you don’t have to leave the house’ . . . . ‘If you go to the train station, you can buy yourself a coffee and some chocolate, you don’t need to go into work’. . . . . ‘Just go into the office and get through the morning . . . . Just do one task then you can stop . . . . Just go straight home, you don’t need to socialise after work . . . . . Just make some dinner, then you can go to sleep’. Every day chopped up into tiny sections, the concept of getting through a whole twelve hours utterly incomprehensible.

Depression isolates you. Moreover, it makes isolation appealing. To be amongst people is to summon a monumental willpower in disguising your true state of mind. To arrange your face in the correct approximation of ‘happy’ or ‘excited’ and engage in conversation, when really you feel like an ice sculpture slowly melting away, your sharp features eroding into a pool of water on the floor.

Attempt to climb inside the home movie of friends gathered together that’s playing before you, but instead find yourself stuck watching it from a distance. Laugh a little too loudly. React a little too slowly.

Self admonishments to ‘snap out of it’ ‘pull yourself together’ and ‘count your blessings’ don’t change anything. You know how lucky you are. How blessed you are compared to people with real problems. Yet nothing seems to touch you.

Certain activities help soothe your fractured self – baking, drawing, walking, praying. Quiet repetitive activities that restore order to the bat cave of your head. But, ironically, depression zaps the motivation to do the very things that will help you.

Praying . . . God . . .  Jesus. Shouldn’t belief in Jesus banish the blues? Shouldn’t his perfect love cast out all fear?

One day it will. I know that one day, at the end of my life, however long or short that may be, His love will be all encompassing, and these phases of melancholia nothing more than a dim half memory. Through Jesus I know that the markers of success the world values are not really important overall, which helps heal the frustration at this thing interrupting my life without respect for my schedule or plans.

But until then, I carry on.

I treat myself kindly.

I draw.

I walk.

I write.

I heal.