Tag Archives: recovery

Depression recovery is not a linear process.

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Here’s the trick about recovering from depression: It’s not a linear process. It’s not math; it’s not simple addition and subtraction, where you work your way down a numberline, taking away bits of your depression until you’ve reached a value of Zero. Oh, but if it were only so simple.

photo by glacier tim

This road does not accurately depict my recovery from depression.

But it isn’t. Instead, there are times when I think that I’m doing better. Times when I go for a couple of days or a week without going to this place in my head where everything is slow and cloudy and wrong. In those times, I don’t even think about how I’m getting better because I don’t even think about depression at all. I mindlessly take my antidepressant every day and I give no space in my brain to active thoughts of depression or depression recovery or anything of the sort, and it’s wonderful.

I still haven’t learned to see the changes coming. I’ll just be going about my day doing normal things when it rolls in. And then I’ll feel tired. I’ll lose my appetite. I’ll want to go take a nap. I’ll want to be by myself, which, as you all know, is rather strange for me. Sometimes I don’t even recognize it in this stage. It’s still subtle enough that I can block it all out. I blame it on extenuating circumstances and refuse to assign my feelings the weight and validity that they deserve.

Other people do notice, though. People who know me well will remark about how quiet I’m being. Family and friends start to ask me questions about my eating, concerned because they can see I’m losing weight. They see me canceling plans, leaving parties early. I guess from the outside it’s easier to notice as I close myself off from the people around me. By the time everyone starts talking to me about these things, I am forced to face up to the truth: it’s getting bad again.

Zack deals with the ebbs and flows of depression pretty well, but when I get to the point where I stay in bed until 1 or 2 in the afternoon, he starts to worry about me. He hasn’t said it in those words exactly, but I know he worries about me. I know he worries that I’m going to go back to the place where I was last year. Hell, I’m worried that I’m going to go back to the place where I was last year. I think everyone is.

That’s about where I am right now. Isolating, in bed for 12-14 hours at a time, not eating much, obsessively cleaning–you know, the usual. Part of me isn’t scared because I’ve been here before and things that you’ve done before aren’t usually as scary as things you haven’t done before. The other part of me is terrified because I feel out of control. Now that I’m sliding towards the wrong end of the (over-simplified) depression-numberline, I want to do something to stop it, but I feel helpless. I mean, I’m already taking the little magic happy pill every day. What more does my depression want of me?!

It probably wants me to be more purposeful. It wants me to eat, and it would be happy if I would do some yoga, or really, any kind of exercise on a regular basis. It wants me to take Scout on more walks, get out of the house more often, and make more dinner dates with friends. Those are the things that helped last time, so I won’t try to reinvent the wheel this time. I’ll just do the things that I know to be helpful, and I’ll hope for the best.

Hope with me.

On Strawberries and Women’s Thighs

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Zack and I celebrated Christmas today at my parent’s house in a fashion that was very much in keeping with my family’s longstanding tradition of never doing anything the same way twice.  Holidays are very exciting around my brood.

After Zack and I returned to our home this afternoon, I hit a ferocious energy streak (good sign!) and simultaneously started about 38 projects.  One of the many clean-out and re-organize projects that I started (and dang near finished!) was to pare down our book collection by only keeping the books that we a.) loved, b.) would read again or c.) couldn’t live without.  We removed three sizable boxes from the bookcases (progress!) and in the process of doing so, I ran across a stack of journals from years past.  Knowing that some of those were from the time in my life when I was in Counseling: Round One, I cracked them open to see what they contained.

All of that has been to tell you this: even though I would have never described myself as being ‘depressed’ back then (2005 – 2006), I can retrospectively see that I was dealing with the same problems then that I am now.  Because, buried deep within the pages of one of my old journals was a quote that struck my core the first time I read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.  All alone, centered on a page was written:

“Oh, strawberries don’t taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!”

Then, I appreciated the quote for its literary value–the succinct way in which it described the character’s entire life perspective in only one sentence.  Now, the quote stopped my page-flipping because I saw it in a whole new light.  I saw one sentence that aptly described the experience of my depression.  There are still strawberries and thighs of women, sure; but somehow, they just aren’t measuring up anymore.

Some days, it’s good to purposefully remember what you’re fighting for.  Today, I feel better than yesterday.  Today I feel good enough that I thought to myself that if I feel like this forever, that would be okay.  I would take this forever over ever feeling again like I did on Day Four.  But no matter how much ‘better’ I am than I was yesterday, I can’t stop here. I can’t be complacent.  Because, Oh, man.  I can remember what the strawberries used to taste like, and I so badly want to taste them again.