Rest is difficult when you are single and self-employed.  There are no sick days and there is no one to pick up the slack.  Several people have said something along the lines of “You’re so brave/committed/crazy to keep working while you’re sick.”  I think they meant it as admiration.  However, I don’t have a choice.  If I don’t keep working, I can’t pay my rent/health insurance/grocery bill/dog food bill.  Not really an option.  So the admiration made me feel a little resentful – not because the other person did anything wrong but because it feeds into my deepest fears and anger.

However.  In the past when I’ve been sick – even for a week – I have gotten really really depressed.  The solitude gets to me and makes me feel sorry for myself to the point where my internal monologue starts sounding like an angst-ridden teenager.  Poor me.  Nobody loves me.  If I was worth anything, I’d have a partner.  I should just die because clearly nobody loves me because they haven’t called to see how I am. nothing will ever get better.  Ever.  Until I die.  So I might as well.

Anyone else do this?

This time I’m not there!  I’m miserable.  I’ve been coughing so much that I”m actually developing my upper abdominal muscles from COUGHING.  (seriously. I can see it).  I’ve produced more mucus than I thought the human body was capable of.  I can barely sit up in bed because my side hurts so much.  But hey, I don’t wish I was dead.  I just wish I was well.

That’s progress, right?  I mean, I’d like to be overwhelmingly filled with joy at all time and be completely sure of myself and have self-esteem coming out my ears.  But sometimes you settle for being grumpily OK with being alive, even when you hurt.

And then let me know if you’re a survivor and how we can support each other.

I was a kid who thought Christmas was magical.  I wanted to sleep in the living room because I loved the Christmas tree and the Christmas lights so much.  I liked presents, of course, but I was more excited about the spirit of the season.  (I was much less cynical then).

This Christmas was fine.  I went to see family yesterday and I survived – it was actually pretty pleasant.  I had dinner with friends and went to a beautiful candlelight church service.  Today I had dinner with more friends.  But nothing about the weekend has felt special.

I miss the special feeling and I think that it’s likely this way not only because I’m an adult, because I’m single and I’m alone.  I mean, I was with friends, but they were all coupled up and were all going home to exchange presents with their spouses.  I went home and read a book.  Which is, again, fine.  But not special.

However, I’m not crying.  I’m not sad this Christmas, and I don’t feel hopeless.  I have no despair.  So I guess I’ll take the so-so ordinary feeling as an improvement.

My depression has always been a part of me – and I really do think I mean always. For reasons that I’ll get into in another post, I began feeling worthless and completely hopeless – really from the time of my first memories. In kindergarten I would think to myself that I wished I were dead but since I wasn’t I had to keep going.

I didn’t have a name for the depression, however, until I was about 20. In hindsight, this strikes me as a little odd, since I knew the term and I knew the symptoms, beginning when I was a teenager and my mother was hospitalized. I don’t know if I just didn’t think my symptoms were as severe as hers or why I didn’t clue in earlier.

The part of my journal I’m reading right now is from the summer and early fall of 1995, when I had just turned 20 years old.  I had experienced, like I said, many many symptoms of clinical depression before this but I never named it.  Sometimes I blamed it on not having good friends (I had a lot of good friends) and sometimes on not trusting God (I sort of want to go back and shake my younger self – to think that it was all my fault for not trusting God!).  At other times I just wasn’t sure.

In my sophomore year of college, I started really dealing with family patterns and trauma (again, another post), and I was just blindsided by how much it hurt to deal with these things.  I worked at a camp that summer, and had 6 weeks between camp ending and school starting.  I was definitely afraid of having too much time to myself and did my best to fill the time.  I spent several weeks visiting friends from college (friends who spent summers with their families without going crazy) and worked at a couple of short-term jobs.  Then I went back to my college town.

At this point in my life, it sounds wonderful: two weeks with nothing to do but read, exercise, and relax.  At that point, it was torture.  I remember rollerblading a lot to kind of try to keep my feelings at bay, and writing obsessively in my journal because I didn’t know what to do.  I was waiting for my friends to come back to town and thought that when they did, my loneliness would end.  At one point, I woke up at 4:30 am sobbing, just so sad and so lonely and with absolutely no idea what to do except to cry and write and cry and wish I didn’t exist.

Of course, when my friends came back, my feelings didn’t go away.  The last page I read was from a day that is still painful to think about (over 16 years later!) but was probably the day I figured out I needed help.  I went on a hike with a couple of friends, not feeling very good but trying to put on a good face.  We got back from the hike around noon and my two friends needed to go to the hardware store.  I was going to change and go with them.  I got through the living room and halfway up the stairs of my apartment and couldn’t go any further.  I fell down on the stairs and cried and cried.  One of my friends came to get me for the store and found me there.  He asked if I was OK and I said I was. He was pretty freaked out but didn’t know what to do and left because I had said I was OK (and he was an 18-year old boy who wanted to help but didn’t know how).  I think I stayed on those stairs for at least two hours, crying.  I spent the rest of the day in my bed crying and not answering the phone or the door.  I think it was the first time I had been absolutely completely paralyzed by my depression.  Up until then, I had always been able to keep going somehow, even if I was miserable.  This day I literally couldn’t make it up the last four stairs before falling apart.  And then couldn’t make it out of my bed at all for the rest of of the day.

Besides remembering my own despair, I wonder about the friends who kept trying to check on me that day.  There’s part of me that wants to apologize to them for terrifying them (and this was only the beginning).  There’s another part of me that wants to thank them.  And still another part that wants to never ever ever speak to any of them again so I don’t have to remember that time.

I started thinking about what it would be like to have my life drawn out like a graph – I definitely had a lot of high points but they didn’t last and they were followed by such lows.  My journal is full of me trying to figure out if I’m not trusting God, if I’m doing something wrong, if everything is from my childhood… Now, 17 or 18 years later, I can see really clearly that it was DEPRESSION but then, I just didn’t know.  And the only experience I had had with depression was my mother being suicidal so I for sure didn’t want to entertain that possibility.  Anyway, the graph of my life now is still up and down, obviously, and I expect it to be like that forever.  Only the baseline is so much higher.

After I thought of graphing my life, I realized how inadequate it would be.  The problem is that a graph simply wouldn’t be dramatic enough.  There is simply no way to show on a graph that the bottom has fallen out of your life – that the floor underneath me has turned into a gaping hole that is threatening to swallow me and drown me in its blackness.  That is not graphable, and not definable.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I’m angry that it took so long to feel better.  I am 36 years old and I’ve been not depressed for almost two years.  ALMOST TWO YEARS.  And depressed for the rest of my life.  Really severely depressed from the time I was very very young.  That is too long – far, far too long.

In a lot of ways, I feel like God rescued me but it was too much for too long.  I don’t understand.

Today it was my housemate telling me she needs to move out.  There are some legitimate concerns I have – I have to figure out if I can afford to stay here and how to get another roommate, which I hate doing.  But it was more than that.  The first thing I thought of was that if I were married, I wouldn’t have to deal with roommates any more.  Then the next thought – very automatic – was that if I weren’t such a loser, I’d be married.  That there’s something horribly, deeply wrong with me because I’m still alone and that nothing good will ever happen and I’ll always be alone.

To be clear, I’m not alone.  I have many, many friends.   But I’m single and I feel like that makes me alone forever.  And I know that I’m not a loser because I’m single but I really, really feel like it.  It was such a deep feeling that it ambushed me and I felt right back to where I used to be.  A big pit of despair and worthlessness.  I don’t want to be in that pit any more; it just feels so bad and so hopeless, and so… forever.

For example, I was talking to a friend about pit bulls – my dog is a pit mix – and she was telling me how tough it was for another friend to find housing with a pit bull.  I am fortunate enough to have a great place to live with a landlord who didn’t even charge me a pet deposit.  Instead of thinking how God has taken care of me, I started worrying about what I’m going to do for my next housing situation.  Keep in mind that I have no plans to leave this one any time soon, so there’s really no need to worry.  In addition, if God gave me this great living situation, there’s no reason to believe that he’s not going to take care of me in the future.

I do the same thing with work, with finances, with all sorts of things.  I’m not expressing it very eloquently, but there’s a pattern.  I have a wonderful opportunity, or a wonderful answer to prayer and my immediate response is But, what will I do when this runs out?”  What will I do when God’s grace runs out?  What will I do when God stops caring for me?  Yes, I know God keeps taking care of me, but it’s going to run out soon.

Here’s the thing: if I believe God cares about us and answers prayers, why am I assuming that this will run out?  Why am I limiting God?  And why am I so stubborn that God can’t possibly give me enough evidence to show me that he loves me?

I don’t want to be that stubborn

I think these people meant well but they obviously had no idea what bad condition I was in.  I was desperately trying to keep myself going, while I wanted to die, I wanted be erased, I wanted to never have existed.  I was considering electroshock therapy.  A bath just wasn’t going to do it.

I know it’s hard to understand if you haven’t been there.  It’s even hard for me to understand now when I’m not in that place – it’s hard to remember.  But it’s a bit like asking someone to fight AIDS with an aspirin.

I don’t know how long this will last, so I just wanted to capture the moment.