I lay in bed for two hours this morning - not by choice, not really. I just couldn't summon the energy it would've taken to pull myself out. I looked aimlessly at the same pages and apps on my phone over and over again, not really wanting to, but I just couldn't break the cycle.
I got engaged this past weekend - one would think it would be impossible to be unhappy on such a week. And yet, with no clear trigger, I woke up depressed. I woke up grey - I cringed when my fiancee's name popped up on the phone screen for our daily morning phone call, I dreaded answering. I picked up anyways - she knew something was wrong, but I couldn't bring myself to tell her then. Instead, she gets a text an hour later -
"I'm depressed. Send puppy pics pls".
Being the most beautifully grace-filled woman alive, she doesn't even hesitate or question - pictures of her dog, one of my favorite living things on the planet, start to flood my screen. Doesn't lift the malaise, doesn't get rid of the stormclouds, the weights that seem to be permanently affixed to every limb and every motion, the vacuum that seems to be attached to my brain, sucking out everything that looks like an emotion. The blue streaks of joy, the red rivers of anger, even the gentle violet of sadness. Until nothing is left but a grey landscape - a barren moonscape, pockmarked with craters and home only to death and quiet.
But it's a start. Because sometimes it is about breaking the cycle, powering through with sheer force of will and letting your momentum carry you into a new state of mind. And sometimes, like today, it's just about letting someone know you're stuck. Sitting in the mud with the rain pouring down on you, and you can't get up, and you can't stop crying - and giving them a chance to sit down next to you and give you the hug you need. Sometimes you just need someone to let you know that it's not okay right now - but it will be, and they're not letting go until it is.
My fiancee doesn't quite understand, yet, what my particular kind of depression looks like.
The shattering-reforming-shattering-reforming fractal patterns and air raid alarm bells of anxiety - she gets that.
The depression that accompanies losing a loved one? Sometimes sadness, sometimes rage, sometimes guilt, sometimes a kaleidoscope of color so brilliant it burns your soul - sometimes the moonscape, maybe because it's what feels right, maybe because you need a break from the colors and emotions, maybe because the spotlights are out of battery and the moonscape is all they can show until you have the energy for the next round of Joseph and the Technicolor Mourning Process. She gets that, far more than I do at this stage in life.
She doesn't get mine, not just because everyone's mind is unique - but because there's something particularly hurtful to the kind of depression that creeps up on you without reason. It's betrayal, that jet-black knife sliding into your back - only the betrayer is you and you are the betrayer and victim all in one, your mind turning on you and deciding without cause to plunge you into the abyss. You feel guilt, and shame - because even as your mind shoves you down, it tells you in the same breath that there are so many people out there who have it worse than you, that you need to just take that beating without question, without complaint, because to complain is to equate yourself with them, because you don't deserve to complain, you haven't earned the right to complain, you dishonor all those who take their true pain and suffering without complaint.
You're weak, you tell yourself. You've failed the test of life - you have everything others want and yet here you sit in bed, unhappy. You don't deserve the life you have, you tell yourself.
And we all know (or can suspect and imagine, at least) where that train of thought starts to lead.
I love my fiancee for many reasons, and I can't wait to discover more with each and every day. But one of, if not the most important ones? She won't let me suffer alone - and even as good as I've gotten at hiding it over the years, sometimes there'll be days where she'll just grab on, without even knowing, and won't let me go until things are okay again, until the first rays of sunlight are poking through the stormclouds.
I don't know who you are, reading this - if you don't have a fiancee, don't worry. I can guarantee there's someone in your life, even if you don't realize it, who won't let you go - mother, father, brother, cousin, friend - everyone's got someone.
Depression sucks enough as it is - give someone else a chance to help you. Reach out, even if it's just to say... "I'm feeling down today. Can you send me something to cheer me up?"
Find that person who won't let you go. Don't suffer alone.