depression

Christine is mad for the podcasts. She listens to them while she does her logic puzzles.*

Yesterday, she wandered downstairs to tell me about a science one where some cardiovascular guy was talking about how if you listen to your favourite song it will expand your blood vessels as if you've done an aerobic workout and make you very happy. But only if you don't listen to it more than once every two weeks. Any more than that, the desensitization sets in.

Today, this afternoon, after the market and the Herb and the Hartmans, I was puttering, cleaning for dinner, chopping for dinner, sifting for dinner, my iTunes providing the background. She was feeling a bit blue, with the hormones, with the grey sky and impending winter. I was trying to be entertaining. She was lying herself out on the couch.

"Is there anything I can do?" I asked.
"No, no."
"You sure? Tea? Food? Hot toddy?"
"Oh, yes maybe."

That helped somewhat, the whisky and the cloves and the lemon. I kept on with the cleaning and the chopping. She was a muddier and muddier puddle every time I look over.

"Oh chicken. I feel terrible. Are you sure there's nothing I can do?"
"No," she sighed. "There's really nothing. Exercise would help, but I'm not prepared for that here. I need to get my light box out when I get home. But thank you."

The song changed. Moved seamlessly from one angular and melodiously melancholic song to another. The light bulb above my head went on.

"If you could listen to any song in the world, what song would it be? What song would expand your blood vessels?"

In short order, Rubberband Man was coming through the speakers. She was up off the couch almost immediately. As it was ending, she hauled out her iPod and off we went. When Shelley and Steve got here for dinner, we had a dance party in the kitchen. Chris was smiling and laughing and neither puddly nor muddy at all.

The moral of this story? If your dear dear friend has the random sads alongside wicked fierce seasonal affective disorder, don't be confused as she gets more and more deflated as an album called Autumn of the Seraphs winds through a darkening mid-November afternoon. No, dear internet, at that point you should know that it is time to get out the funk.

*1) Yes, you read that right. 2) That tickles me to no end. While I can deduce that there are other people who do logic puzzles, as evidenced by the giant website she uses to get her fix I do not personally know of any others. Though maybe I know dozens, and they're all too embarrassed to admit it. Fear not! my logicians, for your kind is a kind I love.

I took Monday off to recover from Sunday. What a fucking day that was. Like my heart - the current locus of human emotion - had floated up to my skin and was rubbing itself raw, trying to get out.

Early Monday morning, I dreamt that I was at my granny and poppa's house, the house that is the place I think of when I want to feel safe.

It had been razed. Everything from the ground up was gone, just a foundation made of red brick, which is strange, since the house was grey brick. The white wrought iron furniture was there too, on the patio stones in front, the red cushions faded uneven pink. In the dream, I was happy I was able to take a brick home as a momento, but I woke up feeling lost.

I went for a run, got to see a blue heron. I finished a piece of writing that had been hanging over my head. I stood in the sun. Shelley and I shopped and ate Mexican food. Come evening, I had shaken off the sad.

If nothing else, days like that make me grateful I am 33, not 23, when days like that were good ones.

N.B. Eric! This is partially about how I'm continuing to process our break up. I don't say anything bad about you at all, but it might make you uncomfortable to know the painful details.

For many years, I didn't keep acetaminophen in the house. I didn't trust myself to have them around.

Yesterday was the 12th anniversary of the day I tried to kill myself by taking an overdose. I've written about this before, so I'll spare you those details.

I'm not sure if it's the fact that I made an attempt that shook me so much.

I'd been deeply depressed for months: I weighed 103 pounds, I wasn't eating enough to keep that up, I was sleeping 15 hours a day to avoid being awake, I was on anti-depressants, I was seeing two therapists, I was crying all the time, I'd already been to the hospital because I'd stabbed myself in the leg, I'd been having suicidal ideations for weeks. That I might try was certainly no surprise to me. That I did try?

My ex and I were having one of our huge knock-down fights that he wouldn't remember the next day. We were in our office, what had once been a dining room. I screamed something, I can't remember what, and ran out of the room, down the hall, to the bathroom, shut the door and locked it behind me.

I must have made the decision in the 4 steps between the office and the kitchen, because I grabbed a glass along the way.

That was the extent of my planning. A cup off the counter on the way to the pills.

That I hadn't planned it was a good thing to most of the doctor-types I ended up talking to. I suppose it meant I was less serious about it, that suicide as a real solution hadn't yet taken deep root.

Maybe that was good. But it left me with yet another reason not to trust myself.

Eventually, maybe 8 years later, I bought my first bottle of tylenol. But only a little one, only with about 20 pills in it. Nothing untoward ever happened. 12 years later, I fully trust myself with any kind of pills. Never occurs to me to take one, maybe two, other than when I'm in serious discomfort.

Reading this over, I'm realizing that you're probably waiting for me to make an explicit link about being dumped by Eric and suicidal ideation. Happily, the tangent is much more obtuse than that.

What that break up left me with is an inability to trust love in a way that feels very similar to how I was unable to trust my desire to be alive.

I know Eric loved me very much, to start. I believe, to end, that he wanted to love me as much as he had for those first few months. But he couldn't.

It was there, and then it was gone.

And that was that.

Even at the start, I knew our deal might be too good to be true. But I let myself go, really let myself fall into him, into us, thinking that I was strong and could handle whatever came.

I could, I did, I have; but the price was really more than I could afford.

Now, when someone acts like they like me, I feel myself curling my arms around the small hoard of coins I have left. This person can think I'm hot, funny, smart, blah blah blah. That's great. I love that. Who doesn't love that? But the moment I get even a hint of someone having actual romantic feelings for me, something inside seizes up, twisting around fast enough that it folds over on itself into an impenetrable knot.

Who knows, maybe in 8 years I'll be able to trust romance enough to keep it in the house.

In the summer of 2006, a few weeks before I told my ex I didn't want to live with him any more, I developed a cyst on my left wrist. It wasn't huge, but it was noticeable: I've a clear memory of being in Grace and Greg's living room on a yellowed August afternoon. I'm sitting on a chair, leaning forward, my elbows on my knees and my hands hanging loose between them. Grace is several feet across the room.

"What's that on your wrist?" she asks.
"That," I say, "is what I'm not saying."

A week or so later, he and I were walking beside the empty lot on Preston Street, cooling off after another screaming match. Sand and milkweed desert colours beside us, smelling like straw in the heat. I told him I thought it best we not live together. Or rather, I agreed with him when he said it, and then didn't take it back when he balked.

Within two days, the cyst was gone.

You know, I've never really doubted the mind-body connection, but that's the first experience that gave me proof. As soon as I saw that cyst, I knew exactly what it was. Why it was there? No. Though the cyst part is obvious, I should hope, I'm not exactly sure what correlation there was between my left wrist and not moving out. But there was never a shred of doubt in my mind that that bump was my words. It was an unassailable internal truth.

++

I have been not crying for weeks. Since I found out about my grandmother being sick, actually. As soon as I heard that, through email, I got down to the business of making plans, not crying - what was there to cry about? She was okay, wasn't she? She'd lived a good long life, hadn't she? The only time I came close to crying was after saying goodbye to her, standing in the parking lot with my sister and father. And I sucked the tears up, because it felt like they would have been a burden, unseemly, and I didn't want Amy and Dad to have to take care of me, since they didn't seem all that fazed.*

There have been other things over the past few weeks that have added to my store of sadness, but every time I've had that lump in my throat, I would think - no, not now - and my throat would tighten and release, this time tear free.

Then two Sundays ago, I was getting fucked, hard. And I came. Hard.

You know how some people laugh when they come? I'm a crier - doesn't happen all the time, but it's happened before and it feels good, like it's part of the come and the tail end of letting go.

So I started crying. But it wasn't the usual crying, a few tears, a couple sobs, some hiccups. I disappeared into it. A vivid image of being on the edge of grassy shore, at the edge of a forest, the moon coming up straight ahead, dark water from one side of the horizon to the other. Not rising, not rocking, not wild; smooth and pervasive, hiding god knows what monsters.

Felt like I was falling headlong into it. I stopped crying.

For the first time in a long long time, I had the feeling that if I really started, let go, I might not ever stop, because that water was fucking everywhere and deathly still.

++

My massage last night has to go down as one of my top five most intense physical experiences. Perhaps more intense than the Sunday fucking, if only because there was no orgasm to stop it.

Rob, my massage therapist, is great. He comes to my house, which I love. His massages are not of the happy-relaxy variety, but Kerri warned me about that. I've had a few now, and they really work for me. He finds your shit and he works it. And he can tell a lot about your shit by where and how you're storing it.

I was on my stomach last night, describing the aches and pains left over from spending a bazillion hours in a car: my sacrum, my hamstrings, my calves. He poked and rubbed and prodded and pressed. "A little stressed about being at home, too, maybe?"

Yeah, you could say.

He kept on. I started yelping occasionally as he dug into my calves and the sides of my heels.

"How old are your orthotics? Ten years? You could probably just throw those out."

I flipped over, gingerly. He worked his way up, quick presses here and there, along my sides, up my face, the base of the skull, cracking my ears, feeling along the edges of my chin. And there, under the left side of my jaw, he found a knot, a nut of tension, and he took his fingers from both hands and he pressed in, up.

My first thought: "Those are my tears."

Indeed, within a few seconds a salty fluid was leaking from where he was pressing and down my throat. Not literally tears. I'm sure it that biologically it was something else, but my fuck, metaphorically, that's what they tasted like.

My breathing became erratic, my fingers clenched into the table and my chest heaving in quick bursts. He eased off, but only slightly.

"You just do what you need to do. Take it as far as you can, as far as you feel safe."

And I started bawling. He kept at it, put his finger in my mouth and massaging my jaw from the inside. I cried harder. He made soothing sounds, took one of my hands and moved it so I was gently touching the hand that was breaking down the tears, then was touching my own lips.

I kept crying.

Eventually, he took his hands off my jaw and laid his arms on mine, holding my elbows, holding me together, breathing in what I was breathing out. My lungs calmed, I stopped actively crying, though my eyes were still puffy with the need.

I was a fucking mess.

The last moment before he left, half-way out the door, he put his table back down and turned to me. "I'm going to give you a hug," he said. And did. Held me tight. He breathed quickly: in, push out, in, push out. I could feel that he was trying to absorb and disperse whatever sadness was lingering around me. I held on and let him.

Today hasn't been much better. I feel raw. The fibrous membrane around the cyst is gone, but what's left is the sharpest eye tooth, a snag of tangled hair, and a bloodied mess of ragged nerves.

* They probably were, we probably could have taken care of each other.

Time is running out for the crafting of presents, and somehow I went from 19 stitches to 18 and had to rip out a couple hours work. How the bookmark unravels, I suppose.

As I've mentioned, this week and next are all about the making and baking. I'm not going to divulge all of what I have my hands on and in* because some of the people who are getting that stuff are also reading these words.

I'm really enjoying it, I have to say, though there is some stress involved. Mostly deadline related. I'm not sure I'm going to be ready for Espig Xmas this weekend. It may involve a very late night on Saturday or a very early Sunday morning.

In other news, I concur with Jennifer and cannot wait for my holidays. I've got 10 or 11 days off and it cannot come fast enough.

It's no secret I've had a difficult fall. Problem is, it just seems to be getting worse. I talked to Shelley tonight and she said "Sweetie, you just sound beat down." At least my outside matches my inside, I suppose.

I always think of my ups and downs in terms of light, which is stupidly hokey to write, but feels true. When I'm happy and everything is going well, it feels like I emit streaks of bright light, somewhere on the yellow spectrum. When I'm normal, there's a little glow around me. Right now, I would say that there's a candle in there somewhere, sheltered under a perforated box.

People respond in kind, interestingly. When I'm at my brightest, people smile at me on the street. Probably because I'm smiling at then. When I'm at about where I am now, it's like I'm invisible. People bump into me more, notice me less.

I've read the women's rag self-help blah blah, and know that I should just paste a smile on my face and then my currently fragile ego will be boosted by the goodness that comes back.

But you know, there's not much creepier than a death's head smile backlit by a dull flicker.

When I started yoga nearly a couple of years ago, I didn't expect it to be life-altering. I expected to be able to touch my toes. But I definitely became one of those annoying people newly converted to something and extolling that something's benefits whenever they can.

Jamine was my yoga teacher for a long time and I think she's great. She engages enthusiastically with yoga in all areas of her life, in practical and realistic ways that manage to encompass the spiritual and the humourous at the same time.

She wrote a couple of posts last week that hit me in some kind of right spot. Practice, Practice, Practice struck a particularly loud chord, all notes ringing in the last paragraph:

So don't be attached to your practice but stay committed! There's a difference. Committing will keep you going deeper, allowing you to notice and respect other practices and keep you out of suffering and being attached will, well it may in time lead to misunderstandings and suffering...

I've been muddling through something similar in my head for several weeks now, but couldn't figure out how to phrase it neatly in a digestible form.

As you can probably tell from my blogs lately, I've been in a not-so-happy place. I am finally trying to be just sad - not protective, not defensive - about a sadness I have been carrying with me for many years.

It's fucking hard. I feel breathless and panicked on occasion. It makes me alternate between holding on tight to all the good things I have and wanting to jettison them; both moves poor attempts to stave off loss.

What Jamine expresses up there, the idea of commitment without attachment, is the balance I am looking for, am hopefully passing through mourning towards.

Things are not so hot here, Chez Butch. I wish I meant inside my apartment.* Sadly, I mean inside my skin.

My mind is a bit off, reverting to old patterns I don't much like. Consciously anyway. It's startling to find that a decade after I really stopped hating myself, those neural pathways are not only still there, but feel entirely comfortable and strangely comforting.

Those pathways snake out into the rest of my body, old patterns like veins. Physical manifestations. That feeling like I want to shake myself loose. Like I have ghost fingers itching to claw myself out through my eyes just to breathe outside air a little while. That tense spinning feeling under my breastbone that gears up after I do anything, that throws off crazy-stupid meteorite sentences like Oh I shouldn't have written that, oh, why did I say that, oh, people are gonna be mad at me. That galaxy of anxiety in my sternum whirling just a little faster and my breathing just a little harder.

It makes me full of tears even though I don't feel sad. It makes me think I don't want to eat even though I know I need to. It makes me bone tired.

Luckily, I know how to distract myself pretty well by now. Luckily, I know the nicest people ever, and my friends and paramour have been saying and doing no end of nice and supportive things to and for me.

Also luckily, a few weeks ago I booked an appointment with my wonder-wonderful therapist. At that time, I was feeling mostly fine, but was starting to notice an aura of needless anxiety around my edges. Consciously, I'm surprised the bad feelings have shot into the centre so fast, but you know, I think my fingers knew when they tapped her numbers into the phone.

*Where I have a brand new giant bat poster to hang up, to make up for my lack of flying mammals this summer. Thank you, mysterious present-giver!

My memories of those couple days are, in the main, blurry or non-existent. Only a few images glint their jagged edges out of the murk. When I write them, of course, the details come, but at this point, after the punch drunk feeling of the overdose, after a decade, I’m not sure what is real memory and what my brain has concocted to make a good story.

Curled up in the corner of the hall, the lines and whorls of the hardwood stretched out down the dark hall and the blurry shape of my ex looming out of the shadow as he yelled. What he was yelling is not part of the memory, his voice worn down over the years into a bloated muted trumpet blare.

Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, the door shut tight and locked, a towel jammed into the crack to keep the rattle of the pills in the room. Another three or four pills spilled into my palm, the small plastic cup of water I had to keep filling gripped in my right hand. Everything in that bathroom was white. The bulb was high wattage.

The moment I started throwing up. The thick feeling of half-digested pills scraping my esophagus the wrong way. I would continue to puke every half hour for 12 hours. At 12 hours I was dry heaving and knew it wouldn't stop. I took the streetcar down Bathurst St. to Toronto Western Hospital. I took a big white plastic bowl, held carefully in my lap in case I needed to actually throw up. People looked at me very strangely. I had never taken a cab before. I was not thinking clearly.

My ex sitting on the side of the bed, where I was lying with the lights out a few hours after the puking started. Asking me what I'd been doing in the bathroom. Telling me I needed to go to the hospital. Leaving the room when I said no.

A look in the mirror. The face of a beaten boxer looking back. My face randomly swollen: eyes nearly closed, cheeks misshapen, lips puffy.

Over a bedpan at the hospital, on a gurney in emerge, shaking and crying and asking the one kind doctor if it would ever stop. She rubbed my back and told me it would. I kept retching and finally threw something up. We both stopped still, the micro-movements every body makes momentarily arrested. "What is that?" I gesticulated with my head. "My stomach?" She nodded.

My mother sitting on the chair by the bed, my first night in the hospital. Scared but acting calm. Holding my hand hard.

Eleven years ago today, I tried to kill myself. I swallowed a good portion of a bulk bottle of tylenol and spent 5 days in the hospital. They kept me in to ensure that my liver hadn't been permanently damaged and to keep an eye on me in case I tried again. It was a horrible and pivotal experience that has shaped my life in ways I still don't understand.

The next couple July 4ths were brutal. When I wasn't getting bits of metal shot through my tender bits, I was in bed and/or crying. The piercings, none of which I have any more, were to commemorate the fact I was still alive, a fact that I was celebrating. More or less, depending on the day.

Even after those first couple years, the Anniversary Affective Disorder persisted. I would usually start feeling kind of down and twitchy around mid-June, with some of the old hateful thoughts coming senselessly back and the for-no-reason tears pushing swollen and uncried in my ducts. I'd get totally freaked out and worried that It was happening all over again, which was like fertilizer to the thorn voice twisting panic around my brain. Then I'd catch a look at a calendar and the date would register. The down and twitchy would stay, but the panic would dissipate.

Last year was the first year that I haven't spent at least a few days feeling low. I didn't even think about it till a day or two after. At the time, I thought it was because Hey! After Only One Decade I Am Finally Over It. Looking back, I think the new sad of my breakup was so fresh there was no room for old sad.

A suicide attempt is an odd thing to have gone through. Half of me thinks that it was really no big deal, that lots of people go through much more difficult things, that it was a long time ago and so enough with the moping already. Comes from the same part that thinks I maybe use the experience to make myself feel special in a completely ridiculous and possibly dangerous way.

But then that's the brain of the depressive, right? I mean, what makes me so special that I should be happy? Because obviously I'm not special: not especially interesting or especially nice or especially funny or especially cute or or or or. And who am I to even think that I could be especially any of those things?

I am, however, or at least have been, fucked up. Though not as fucked up as other people, who are much more especial than I am.

And then there I am, right back at the start of the spiral, but a little lower down, a little more tired after each go round. It's exhausting.

Depression is also addictive. It was easier to get over being depressed than it has been to get over seeing "depressive" as such an integral part of my identity I felt the need to hold on to it. Once established, your body feels comfortable bathed in whatever chemical wash takes the place of serotonin and norepinephrin. The neural pathways to sad become well worn and much easier to traverse than those leading to contentment. Happiness is a rocky, impossible trail high above the clouds.

It was incredibly difficult to build those happy pathways as I trudged my way out of the fog. I managed only through the glory of pharmaceuticals and by dint of hard work. Anyone who tells you that anti-depressants are a cure-all is full of bunk.

At the same time that I think it's really no big deal, just a small part of what will hopefully be a long life, it also seems like a really really big deal. I have a hard time talking about it, and with even some of my close friends, it took me years to even mention it. When I do talk about it now, I often say "When I was hospitalized..." because the phrase "When I tried to kill myself..." sounds jarring and too loud outside my head.

So writing this here - for strangers and acquaintances and friends alike to read - it's an odd sensation. I've never shied away from writing about being depressed or the attempt itself, but in poetry or obtuse prose. So I feel a little exposed.

But you know why I feel exposed? Because no one talks much about depression or suicide. Not like it’s real.

There's jokes and odd remarks and the occasional slightly disgusted wonderment. There's the snide "oh, it was just a cry for help" comments. But when you make it real, when you say "Well, yeah, I totally understand what would drive someone to do that," people most often flinch like you've thrown cold water in their faces.

So here I am, talking about it, with more to come tomorrow. Here I am, making it real.