This post is a long time in coming. This is scatterbrained and not well-researched or annotated and totally anecdotal, but is totally, completely truthful. I know a few of you are wondering how I fared against the dragon of depression, and I am happy to say that I’m like Beowulf in this scenario. I totally beat up Grendel AND his mother too!

What’s that? Beowulf is mortally wounded by a dragon?….Oh.

That’s actually a pretty accurate summary of my depression. Just when I think I’m done with it, WHAM! George Michael comes into the room. And he’s carrying my depression with him.

So, depression is ongoing, and for the first time in my life, I admit that I am not suffering from depression because I am a bad person, or because I am weak, or because I am making it all up in my head, or because depression doesn’t exist in other countries, culturally, and so clearly I’m a big baby about it.

What happened first was a Big Event. I know it makes terrible reading to tell you about Big Event, but trust me when I tell you that I am not at liberty to talk about it, and that it is the kind of stuff that makes people want to renounce all their material goods and move to Alaska and live in an abandoned school bus until accidentally poisoning themselves. That’s a generalization, but you get the gist. There was the Big Event, and that cascaded and caused me to unearth all of the other events in my life, which caused me to totally and utterly be debilitated.

This is what I did: I sat in bed. Sometimes I went to the bathroom.

That’s it.

I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t read. When I ate, I was violently ill. I couldn’t take care of my family. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t talk on the phone or to anyone in person. I couldn’t stand up in the shower without getting tired. I couldn’t concentrate on TV or movies. My brain was broken. I understand completely the term, “out of my mind,” now.  I was out of my mind.

Please keep in mind that during this time, I was on medication and in therapy, and regularly talking to loved ones. It barely made a dent. Until I finally told my Person what was going on: I was a horrible human being with the blackest of souls, and existence was my punishment. There was some  talk of dying. (A lot of talk.)

And then my Person told me that I was not a bad person with the blackest of souls. I told him he was wrong, and so I did the bravest thing I could think of: I told him the truth. I told him every ugly thought in my head, every awful thing I’d done. This took weeks. I did a lot of horrible things. And I figured at the end of unloading all of this, my Person would understand my black soul, and let me be. That’s all I really wanted from this unleashing. I wanted to show him that I was bad for my family, and bad for the world, and a mistake in general. I was in horrible pain every second of the day, and I knew my family was suffering because I was a burden, and I just wanted to die. To put everyone out of their misery. Like euthanasia. Exactly like that, in fact.

Of course my Person is a good person, and every time I came back with something horrible to say, he would say, “That’s all you got? That’s not even bad.”

Every time. It helped that what I was telling him were ways I was told I was bad. (For instance, one of my favorites was how I believed I had poor eyesight because I didn’t work hard enough in life. I was actually told this when I was little, so I’d never really logicked out the math of that particular crazy.) (And there’s SO. MUCH. MORE.)  There were other ways I believed in my own rottenness. I tried to overcome all of my faults, but, you know, I just had too many.

Of course, after the weeks of unloading, I started crying. I started seeing my life for what it was. I used to cry a lot, but at books, or movies, or tissue commercials. I rarely cried when something happened to me. Because I was an awful, terrible, no good person.

After all the crying (months of it), I got angry. There was raging. There was ranting.  There was more crying.

And then there was fiddling with my medications. There were new tactics, new therapies, new exercises. There were new boundaries, too.

And then, after ALL of that, I started to see that depression is not something I have because I am a terrible person, or because I’m making it up. I have depression because of an abusive past, because of genetics, because of family dynamics, because of a whole host of factors. I knew this whole time that my Tom Cruise vitamins were helping me stay alive,  but I didn’t really believe it about myself until recently. I thought I was an exception. I thought I was a big baby, and my medications worked because of the placebo effect. I believe it about everyone else, but I’m the exception. It has taken so much work to get me to see depression as a legitimate medical problem, and a very serious one at that.

I suffer from severe depression, and I likely always will. It is a serious disease. It is a big deal. I am not making it up. I have almost died from it several times.

If it weren’t for my Person telling me this over and over, I would not believe it. If it weren’t for my Person, I am absolutely sure I would be dead. If it weren’t for my own tenacity in trying new drugs, I would be dead. Suicide is the third leading cause of death in the US. It is real, and it is hard to treat because it is easy to hide, it doesn’t look real, and one of the major signs of severe depression is believing you don’t have severe depression. There’s also a strong correlation in a poor family life (understatement? ha!) and depression, and that means that kids everywhere don’t have a Person, and that they’re going to die from this.

It’s like having a heart attack and then refusing any kind of medical help. And then having another heart attack. And another. And refusing help. And having caretakers who refuse to help. Or who actively hurt you. Over and over and over again.

So, I have a severe medical condition. I have to monitor it hourly. I might die from it some day. There are a lot of reasons I have it, none of which have to do with the blackness of my soul. My soul is black all on its own, from the marathon episodes of Gilmore Girls and gummy-bear-hoarding.

I discovered some other fun facts about myself when my brain clicked and I saw my disease as a disease: I also suffer from anxiety and OCD, and I have a horrible habit of twisting my hair and picking at my lips (it’s super gross, sorry) that is AN ACTUAL MEDICAL CONDITION. I don’t pick at my lips or twist my hair now because I have AN ACTUAL MEDICATION that works on my ACTUAL MEDICAL CONDITION. HALLELUJAH! Okay, sometimes I still do, under severe anxiety, but this was a revelation to me. I don’t just freak out because there are too many things on the table. I freak out because of AN ACTUAL MEDICAL CONDITION!

There have been a lot of revelations about the wonders of psychiatry.

If you have a mental illness, or if your Person does, please tell them every single day that they didn’t cause it, and that you need them here, and you will take all the time you have to take them to the doctor or the therapist or the acupuncturist or gynecologist or reeferologist or whomeverologist to just lie in bed and hold them until they feel like they can go to a medical professional and tell about how they are dying. Tell them over and over and over, because one time, or twenty, probably won’t be enough. It will be awful and slow and take a lot of attempts, and it will be completely worth it to know you’ve saved someone’s life.