Love Letter/Horribly Severe Depression

I think the worst thing about severe depression is the way others react even though I don’t know how I want them to react. If the idea of reading about depression makes you wanna puke, I don't blame you and please stop and go do something else instead. this one isn't for you. Like the spoken word part of a 90s R&B song, I'm about to get serious up in here.

For two weeks, wife and I did the depression dance, which is a lot like a Coldplay song where it starts off quiet and sort of meekly sad, and builds and builds until it becomes a loud riot of darkness that you can’t get away from.

Wife had her medication changed after the new year, including a depression med. Shortly after, she got violently ill, which was attributed to flu season, but she was never quite the same. I commented, she noted my concern, but we were ok.

But then the song began to build. She had to fight people to get paid on time, and was told she had a tone, which is a huge trigger word from her past, then we found out she was not being considered for a job in a rather harsh way, and we decided it would be a good time to start drinking heavily every night.

So for a solid week, we spent all our waking hours at home after work her telling me what’s the point and me trying to give her reasons to keep going. She would fall asleep at 8 and I would stay up until Midnight applying to more jobs for her.

She called her Doctor on Monday, and was told the doctor wouldn’t be in until Thursday, and asked what was this concerning. Fuck if wife is going to discuss her issues with the phone jockey at the clinic. She had told her doctor previously about the concerns, but the doctor didn’t seem concerned. She sets an appointment for Thursday and I beg her to just go back on the pills she was on before which we still have a bunch of, but I’m no doctor. And we get through three more days of suicidal feelings, with me on duty to stay with her through it all when were not at work. Finally after a wretched Wednesday night, she calls in to the doctor on Thursday morning and leaves a message “I’ve been feeling suicidal since Monday, the new pills are not working, I would like your help.”

Two hours pass.

She leaves another message along those lines.

Fifteen minutes pass.

The doctor calls her and changes her medication “But not until noon because I’m very busy today and you should have gone to the emergency room if you were feeling that way.” So this doctor of medicine expects a suicidally depressed person to possess the rationality of a non-suicidally depressed person. And me? I still am not sure what an ER would do for us other than charge us several hundred dollars we don’t have to change her medication to something that takes days to kick in, and berate us because that’s what doctors do in our lives particularly when it comes to mental illnesses, berate us.

Then the crescendo. Wife decides to kick it up a notch and start blasting away at every self-esteem issue I’ve revealed to her over five years. I try to encoruage her, speak loving words, guilt her, berate her, make her laugh, and nothing was working. She kung-fu’ed every statement of mine into another way I hated her somehow. She was a jedi master in flipping my words. She choruses “you’d be better off without me,” and “What’s the point?” and “You don’t love me” and “You betrayed me and sided with the people who won’t hire me.” I promise that I am going to sit there and take the abuse and love her, and she takes that as a challenge and raises it to 11 until pretty soon she’s talking about leaving me “It will be better, you wont’ have to pay back Sallie Mae, you wont’ have to wash the clothes or do dishes for me. Really, you will be so much better off.” And I’m wondering if I stabbed my thigh would I hit the artery the first time and Shit I am in there too and death seems like a perfectly rational reaction to this progression of shit we call life and why aren’t more people doing this because this all feels so fucking bad.

I get up out of bed and scream that I can’t take this any more and if I’m the only thing keeping her alive then she’s doing a great job of hacking away at that final tie to earth. I’ve been running an emotional marathon for two weeks and I am exhausted and can't take any more and she yells at me that I am abandoning her just like she always said I would someday. And I put on my coat that’s on the floor and can’t make myself move any more because if I reach the kitchen and those knives I don’t know what will happen.

There is no rationality in severe depression. People say all sorts of shit to people who are in a bad way mentally, and if you haven’t listened to Maria Bamford discuss it, then do so.

And I write about this, both my and wife’s depression, because I hate hate hate that we have to go through so much of life hiding it from people. If we had cancer or something, it’d be fine and dandy to bring up, and people would shower us with ribbons and fun runs. But if the wiring in your brain chemistry is having a hiccup, man, you better just buck up and get over it because all our lives suck and who the fuck do you think you are to bitch about it? Maria Bamford says this better than I can in another interview from Slate:

Bamford: People get really irritated by mental illness. “Just fucking get it together! Suck it up, man!” I had a breakdown, and a spiritual friend came to visit me in the psych ward. And they said, “You need to get out of here. Because this is the story you’re telling yourself. You know, Patch Adams has this great work-group camp where you can learn how to really celebrate life.”

It’s something people are so powerless over, and so often they want to make it your fault. It’s nobody's fault. I started thinking of suicide when I was 10 years old—I can’t believe that that’s somebody’s fault. Like, “Oh, you’re just an attention getter.” Mental illness isn’t seen as an illness, it’s seen as a choice.

Slate: Or a weakness.

Bamford: Yeah. I have a joke about how people don’t talk about mental illness the way they do other regular illnesses. “Well, apparently Jeff has cancer. Uh, I have cancer. We all have cancer. You go to chemotherapy you get it taken care of, am I right? You get back to work.” Or: “I was dating this chick, and three months in, she tells me that she wears glasses, and she’s been wearing contact lenses all this time. She needs help seeing. I was like, listen, I’m not into all that Western medicine shit. If you want to see, then work at it. Figure out how not to be so myopic. You know?”

More of that interview here

So I spent 15 minutes on the floor, wife in the bed. Trying to clam the fuck down. We eventually fell asleep. Today started off horribly, with every attempt at discussing the issues while driving to work leading again to how much better off I would be without her.

By 10, we were doing better, We were joking again. Sharing things we saw. The old wife I hadn’t seen in two weeks was peeking through. She had already had therapy scheduled, so I joined her for the first time at her request. We talked it out at therapy to a degree. The therapist recommended I start seeing someone, which I agree with.

And this sickness affects so many people out there, and it isn’t something you can talk down, or rationally deal with or throw love at, like SO MANY people do. It’s a storm that you have to withstand and weather somehow, holding on to whatever you have. For wife, it’s me. And I am very glad to be that person.