When I was mowing the lawn yesterday, I thought, “Everyone should be outside right now!”
I went out to dinner last night with friends and wasn’t scared to come home to just myself.
I sat on the deck in the sunshine today and read the super-creepy Room by Emma Donoghue for book club and did not feel nihilistic.
As I walked the dogs just now, a monarch butterfly flitted across the azure sky, and I couldn’t get over how beautiful it was.
Two days, no episodes. Keep your fingers crossed.
I can see how people who’ve never been depressed dismiss it as a figment, because when I’m not depressed, I can actually talk myself out of the idea that I ever was. You just needed to buck up. You were being dramatic. You should’ve gotten more exercise.
But depression is real. It’s real, and it’s not sadness or histrionics or lethargy. It’s an uncontrollable, unrelenting all-of-that, mixed with something else. The only term that comes close is bleakness. A sense that nothing’s working out, nothing will ever work out, why even try?
Events can aggravate it: an internet troll trashes your work; your 92-year-old uncle’s cat gets killed by a coyote, and you realize he can’t get another cat, he was hoping to die before that cat; the touch-screen on the grocery store credit card keypad won’t register your finger’s warmth. You watch the movie About a Boy and, as Toni Collette’s character bursts into tears when she can’t quite reach to put a bowl on a high shelf, you think,
Yes.
Exactly.
But there need not be an event. Circumstances can be perfect. You can be on vacation, walking the dogs on a sunny-but-cool day after eating your home-cooked breakfast at the picnic table on the deck, and it comes. The bleakness. Your cheeks and temples tighten. You have thoughts like, “I’ll never [do X] again because I’ll never be really good at it, so why bother?” Then you beat yourself up for feeling this way on such a perfect sunny-but-cool day. Which makes things worse.
And you can be Sunny Smiles-a-Lot in public. So people never have to know. Which makes things worse because alone? Alone, it’s bad, so you kind of feel like you’re lying all the time.
Three weeks ago, I stopped taking the amino acid supplements I started a year ago. Why? Because I talked myself into thinking maybe I could. Because they cost over two hundred dollars a month. Because I wanted to use that money to get a different car. Within days, I started having depressive episodes.
I had asked my osteopath a long time ago if there were a cheaper brand. He said the ones he sold were the ones he’d found to be of highest quality. But last week, I thought, I’ll try some others. I looked at labels and did some math and got on the internet. I ordered L-tyrosine, L-lysine, 5-HTP, all of them—plus calcium, selenium, all the -iums—for about half of the cost. Still expensive but better. I filled up my
I’m on day 5, and so far I feel no change. I know I need to give it some time, and I’ll go back on the super-expensive ones if the others don’t work. But right now it’s bad, and all I can do is worry it’ll get worse. Which makes things worse.
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Interesting things happen when it’s nighttime. To wit: my friends and I threw a prom of sorts on Saturday night. It was nominally a birthday party for me (36) and Anna (three-oh!) but, as I said in the invitation, mostly an excuse for us to get dressed up in fancy clothes and sway to the musical stylings of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Of course, we also told people they could wear pajama pants if they wanted to.
In the planning phase, we tried to come up with a suitable venue. We weren’t sure how many people would show up. I didn’t trust my mansion to hold the crowd so we asked the owner of CrossFit Durham if we could have it there and, being the coolest ever, he said yes.
Do you remember going to your elementary school at night, like when your mom had a PTA meeting or something? Remember how weird it seemed? The light was different, no lines of second-graders waiting to put their germy cheeks against the water fountain spigot. You’d pick up a pencil, and it just wouldn’t seem like the same implement as it did between 8:00 and 2:30. That’s a little how it was being at CFD without the overheads on, without the grunting.
Four of us had spent an hour hanging up glittery stars and white Christmas lights on the pull-up bars. Anna had had the presence of mind to bring floor lamps, so we could turn off the fluorescents, thank god. Lindsay made an awesome polaroid frame (see pic below). And that was it! We were ready for prom.
Now only 20 people came—I don’t know if folks were scared off by the prom theme or what—but those of us who were there had a ridiculously fun time. The equipment we use for WODs? Suddenly it all became props in our prom farce.
That big open space we use to do burpees? Well, that was the dancefloor.
Anyway, IT WAS SO FUN.
All because it was nighttime in the gym.
Of course, last night, I woke up because my foot was all sting-y. I got out of bed and went into the bathroom to look at the sore spot. The underside of my ring toe was cut, right where the toe meets the foot. I washed it, slathered it in Neosporin, stuck a band-aid on it, and crawled back in bed.
But just as the elementary school library looks like a labyrinth after 7:00pm, ideas take different shape in the nighttime. I started spinning tales in my head. See, my friend M had a blister about this time last year, and maybe it was the State Fair and maybe it was the gym, but somehow that tiny foot wound sent her to the hospital with a staph infection. In the nighttime, with me in my bed, it seemed not only plausible that that would happen to me but an absolute done deal.
But nighttime doesn’t stop there. In the few months after her hospital stay, M’s house got robbed, and she got breast cancer. (Talk about all-time worst years, right?) So there I am last night, in the fetal position, certain that I’m going to lose everything I own and need a double mastectomy. Stupid nighttime.
This morning, after my coffee, I soaked my foot in salty water and applied more antiseptic cream, and I sit here pretty sure that I won’t be coming home to a pillaged house after my chemo treatment in a few months.
But I’m still worried I’m headed for the ER in a day or two.
Daytime. Bah!
