fifty-two-notes-blog

[fifty-two-notes-blog]

When It Doesn’t Get Better

This thing that no one will ever see, I don't know what I hope will come of it. I tell myself that I want to use it to somehow cope with and understand this sorry state called depression, but I know that isn't what will happen. For some people, it doesn't get better, or at least, it doesn't get better for any substantial amount of time.

I think most people understand depression. It's the most commonly experienced mental illness. More and more people are diagnosed with it everyday. There's so much that goes into it that I may or may not address at some point because I am a flighty person. I don't commit to things very well. I'll commit to them and then a few minutes or days or weeks later, I will change my mind because I am awful. It's one of my least favorite things about myself, and it's something I've been trying to change for ten years, and it hasn't changed because nothing about me ever changes, and nothing about me ever will change, except that I will get older and die eventually or maybe less eventually depending on whether I get brave enough to do something about it.

I don't know the numbers on any of this. I know articles on the matter – not actual scientific studies - use vague words about how most or many people do or are so-and-so. They don't use exact terms. So I don't know the numbers on how many people experience depression the way that I do. I know that most people have periods in their lives when they are depressed.

At this point, most people know that depression isn't being sad; it's being hopeless. I can't even – and this is embarrassing because I've experienced it for so long – but I can't even adequately put it into words without a struggle. At it's worst, it's all motivation stripped away; all hope for anything stripped away; anything that resembles self-confidence is gone, and I'm not talking about being confident – I'm talking about being at a basic level of functioning. You have to have a certain level of faith in yourself, a certain level of confidence to even function, and I don't have that most of the time. Everyone goes through periods when they don't, but from what I understand, for most people it passes. For most, it's a circumstantial thing, it's created by the environment. When things are hard for a while, you might get beaten down, and then hopefully with some hard work or a change in circumstances, it passes. But then there are people like me for whom - and by the way, I hate talking about it like this, which is part of it; I hate using it as an excuse because people like me don't deserve excuses – it doesn't pass.

I'm not going to get into how old I am or when exactly I was diagnosed, but I will put it like this: If my depression were a person, from the time that it was officially diagnosed and medicated – not from the time I started experiencing symptoms – it would be able to legally vote in the United States at this point. And I've regularly kept journals since shortly after I was diagnosed, and it's a little eerie looking back and seeing that with the exception of three months, four years ago, I have expressed at least once a month the desire to kill myself. I have been, at best – outside of three months that I remember vividly – at best passively suicidal. Passive suicidal ideation is a whole other topic I could get into. That has been the peak of my happiness – wanting to die but not being motivated enough to do it.

It's a pretty constant thing. That's the common refrain: it gets better. But then there are people for whom that is a lie. It doesn't get better because it doesn't matter what the circumstances are because there is something broken in their brains, and it doesn't get better. Or it will get better for a few days at a time. Thinking about the past few months, when I've been working so hard to make it manageable, the longest I've gone without thinking about how I'd prefer not to be dead – and I know this because I keep detailed journals – is two days. I had two days in a row.

That was the highlight, and I thought I was getting better, and then it wasn't even that something went wrong. I just didn't feel well anymore. And physically, it wasn't from lack of trying. I'll get into that at some point – the “fixes” I have. There is a combination of two things that I say makes it “manageable,” but keep in mind that “manageable” is still me, in my head, thinking I'm so tired of this; I wish someone would hit me with a car. My greatest desire – the thing want more than anything – is to go to the hospital for a routine operation, and for the anaesthetist to fuck up and kill me. My greatest hope for myself is to die soon and not have to take ownership of it, not have to make my family feel like I did something that indicates that I value them less than I do because I obviously value them more than I value myself. That's a topic for another day.

So that's what this kind of depression is. Sometimes, and these are good times, you feel nothing. At all. Just completely disconnected. And you have those dissociative episodes, where this isn't your body, you're not in this. Those are probably the best times, even though I think mental health professionals would argue otherwise. Those have been my favorite.

It's this constant negative voice. And I think everyone has that negative voice. It's just that in depression, you don't really have the positive voice, or if you do it's so quiet, and it's attacked by the negative voice. It's having panic and anxiety attacks over nothing. It's feeling bad about feeling bad. And then feeling worse because you feel bad about feeling bad about feeling bad. And not knowing how to proceed, just hoping that something will change.

I don't even want my life to improve at this point. It's been so long that I don't want it to be better; I just want it to be over. But even that gets into difficult areas where I'm afraid. I'm miserable and afraid. And there is no light at the end of the tunnel for any of this. I think when I was younger, it was easier to believe that things would eventually get better because I hadn't had the experience of trying so hard and always failing. I don't even know what there is to hope for because either it gets better or it doesn't, and if I do kill myself, then I don't have to experience it not getting better; and if I do kill myself and it would have gotten better, it won't matter because I'll be gone, and I won't be able to mourn that lost opportunity. It won't be painful for me either way. I won't have the capacity to care. So I guess that means, when I do it, I just have to do it right. Leave no doubt. Don't mess it up, so I'm in the hospital incurring massive debt instead. It's just finding a surefire way of fulfilling my destiny and not hurting anyone else in the long term.