I say this with the best of intentions, but I hope nobody noticed how bad my summer was. Because the narrative of a depression relapse in the middle of your vacations, camps, road trips, and lazy days is really what Alanis Morissette thinks irony is (rain on your wedding day, etc.). But I\u2019m more vulnerable to them because summer has always been the cruelest season for my family and me. Summer is when the work dries up. Summer is when child care is too expensive for me to work regular hours. Summer is when even the smallest get-away costs more than we can afford. Summer is when I almost died five years ago when we first moved to Minnesota.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t catch the relapse as quickly as I might\u2019ve because I don\u2019t just have depression, I have significant levels of anxiety. Even when you\u2019ve been okay, part of your mind as a person with depression is constantly standing on a foggy dock, straining to see through the mist for the first solid emergence of the prow of a relapse that might crush you. That\u2019s exhausting by itself. But when you\u2019ve got anxiety, things are constantly emerging from that mist\u2014it\u2019s just that most of them are giant piles of overinflated worries that cleverly take the shape of a ship, and pop like soap bubbles when they hit the dock. This time, behind the endless stream of bubbles, there was a ship.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a good patient. I noticed the pattern in my sleep and appetite, my restlessness and constant exhaustion, and told my therapist. I stay on my meds, I don\u2019t miss appointments, I don\u2019t try to hide what\u2019s going on from my medical team. But I don\u2019t talk about it much, because I feel certain that people want to know the energetic, laughing me who accomplishes things and supports others. I don\u2019t even want to know the other me.<\/p>\n
And I\u2019ve learned things this time around. I\u2019ve named two of the voices in my head who live there and tell lies. One is The Critic. He (yes, he) tells me that I should be doing more, doing better, using my time differently, spending my energy more wisely. The Critic points out mistakes and replays conversations over and over so I can see where I should\u2019ve handled it well, instead of how I did. The Critic is not interested in reason or evidence; The Critic\u2019s lens distorts everything beyond recognition.<\/p>\n
The other voice is The Stalker. The Stalker is full of patience, and never needs to raise his voice. The Stalker hangs back in the shadows, creating his own if I\u2019m trying too hard to use sunlight as disinfectant. The Stalker waits for The Critic to chip chip chip away at my memories and sense of accomplishment. The Stalker feeds kindling to the cold fire of Doubt. And then, The Stalker says, quietly and calmly, \u201cYou really shouldn\u2019t be here at all. You make work for others, you contribute nothing. No one would care if you disappeared right now. Someone better would take your place, someone with a body that worked, someone with a mind that focused, someone whose voice is needed. You cost your family more than you bring in. They could live better when your debts were erased and your insurance paid off. You\u2019re more useful dead than alive.\u201d<\/p>\n
And the problem is that neither The Critic nor The Stalker are wrong all the time. Depression registers their input as just as valid as any other outside source, more than some. And depression makes you too tired to call them liars all the time.<\/p>\n
So I hope I\u2019ve seemed okay this summer, when I found myself making bargains with myself to put off death by another hour at a time. And I am getting better, only now when there\u2019s another lost summer to mourn. I hope my kids don\u2019t inherit a sense of dread for this time of year from a mom who naps in the day because she worries all night, a mom who says no and gets irritable at them for being kids with the bad luck of having someone with depression as their parent.<\/p>\n
I hope, when you saw me this summer, you remember my laugh as I joked about my new hair color or cheerfully threw down with the revolution. But I guess I also hope that, through all that, you understand that you were also talking with someone who thought about suicide every day, and battled through the heat of summer in the cold of depression. You never know who else you talk to who might be fighting the same battle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I say this with the best of intentions, but I hope nobody noticed how bad my summer was. Because the narrative of a depression relapse in the middle of your vacations, camps, road trips, and lazy days is really what Alanis Morissette thinks irony is (rain on your wedding day, etc.). But I\u2019m more vulnerable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[553,107,297],"class_list":["post-1011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology","tag-anxiety","tag-depression","tag-mental-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1012,"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions\/1012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profbanks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}