So, we’ve pretty much all heard people say that there are so many “holidays” made up to benefit Hallmark, right? Well, there are just about as many “awareness” days/weeks/months every year, but in contrast to the various questionable holidays, these are to bring awareness to people of the many different health issues, mental health conditions, etc. that a great deal of people are challenged with. The more we know, the more we can be aware of signs and symptoms. The more we know, the better we are able to reach out to those affected.
October has been listed by some sources as Depression Awareness Month, and October 10th as not only World Mental Health Day, but also National Depression Screening Day. With the recent death of actor and comedian Robin Williams and focus on clinical depression, I’ve really felt my heart burdened to speak out.
The day Robin Williams died, just about everyone on Facebook was talking about it and posting photos. I read a lot of my friends’ posts and the comments underneath, and while many were very encouraging as far as how people viewed depression and the people who suffer from it, there were still people who obviously have misconceptions and stereotypical thinking about it. There is still a stigma surrounding mental health disorders, and it shouldn’t be that way.
There is no shame in having depression. No one hopes as a child to one day have it. No one wakes up in the morning thinking, “Oh boy, maybe I’ll be clinically depressed today!” No one would want to have it, or wish it on anyone else if they’ve been through it.
One friend of mine, Shen, posted a wonderful short piece on depression and her experience with it, and one thing that struck home with me is that she said another friend of hers said to her that she seemed so “normal.” My friend went on to expound so succinctly on how people with depression aren’t identifiable by some mark or whatever; they’re average people just like anyone else. There is no specific face of depression. You can’t tell by looking at someone. This is so very true.
“When I posted about Robin Williams suicide, I made mention, somewhat vaguely, of my own issues with depression. I received a message from someone who seemed surprised I had dealt with this issue, and in fact continue to deal with it daily. The quote that stood out in the message was that I seemed so “normal”. While I don’t claim to be “normal” in many ways, I wanted to make a point here. People struggling with depression/mental illness are normal. We are just like everyone else, just like you. We don’t walk around drooling, we don’t have a scarlet letter, we love, work, and do all the things “normal” people do. Some of those things are harder some days but we are like everyone else. I have kids I adore, parents I appreciate and friends I am grateful for. I shop at the same stores and walk the same streets. Whatever you imagine mental illness looks like, and perhaps you feel less vulnerable if you have a vision of what it looks like, the actual face of depression…well, it looks just like you, just like me, just like Robin Williams and so many others. It isn’t stamped on our faces, the battle scars don’t show because they are on our hearts and souls, in our minds and thoughts. So yes, I appear normal, I am normal, I just battle a different demon than you do.”
And this is why I want to share my story.
Growing up, from a very early age (about 6 years old) on, I experienced times of unease, my stomach feeling sick like when you know you‘re in trouble, the feeling that something is wrong but you don’t know what, and I didn’t learn until I was an adult that what I was experiencing were anxiety attacks. I never told anyone; I didn’t understand what was happening to me, I didn’t know until adulthood that these disorders ran in my family, and because they did eventually pass, I just went on with life.
When I was a teen, I started experiencing times of depression, but I suppose at the time, it seemed like it was a normal teenage thing; you know, they get so “moody” and they have all those hormones running through them. I can’t say for sure that it wasn’t that, but those are my earliest memories of having feelings of depression.
As I became an adult, the “down” days were still with me, and after I had children, it just increased, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I’m a Christian, and I heard some Christians saying that it’s due to not being as committed as one should be to God, or having some unconfessed sin in one’s life, or not having enough faith…how people come to these absurd conclusions, and it’s always people who have never experienced clinical depression, is beyond me.
Have they never read of Paul’s affliction in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10? Would they decide that the apostle Paul wasn’t committed enough to the Lord, or that he had some sin he hadn’t confessed, or that he didn’t have enough faith? Maybe we should let God work all that out anyway. It’s not really our job.
But all the accusations and judgments against people who were experiencing depression made me, already shy and somewhat lacking in confidence, fear speaking of what I was going through. I also had this very big fear that if I told my doctor about it, my children would be taken from me because I was “crazy.” That was a very real fear for me. I felt like people would equate clinical depression with someone not stable, or off in the head. And so my fears kept me silent.
But they also kept me a prisoner.
And so as the years went by, when my girls were little, I suffered in silence. I felt myself slipping further and further under a cloak of undefined blackness, and terrified to speak out, to reach out for help. I distinctly remember a woman I knew who was a little younger than me sending me a note and reaching out to me in love and friendship, but I couldn’t seem to accept it, and the opportunity slipped away. I regretted that for years and years.
Each day it became harder to ignore. I felt dead inside…it was like I couldn’t feel anything. I would try and try, but the only thing I could really feel was my love for my two girls. I remember morning after morning, for years, waking and lying in bed and feeling so dead and blank inside, praying to God, “Please God! Help me! Fix me! Make me FEEL!”
I cried so many tears, rivers and oceans of them, really. It felt so bad inside, and there wasn’t any reason why. I had a wonderful life; I had a husband who worked to provide for his family, I had two beautiful children who I loved more than life itself, I was home schooling, which I loved, we were involved in home school group, music, drama, bowling leagues, and active in our church.
So I would lay there thinking, why can’t I feel?? Why am I like this? There is nothing at all in my life to “make” me feel down, so why is this happening to me?? There was no trauma happening in my life, no crises going on, not many stresses at all….so where did this come from and why was I like this?
I did talk about it a little to my mother and one of my sisters, and both of them, who had been diagnosed with clinical depression and were on medications for it, told me over and over that it was clinical depression, and I should go see my doctor.
But I was so afraid; I somehow had this irrational fear that if I was diagnosed with it, my children would be taken from me. That was the only reason I didn’t go forward and talk to my doctor. Never mind that my girls were never neglected; the fact was that if I could only do so much each day due to the depression making me very unmotivated, what I did was take care of them. Everything else was what got undone or shoved to the sidelines. But my daughters were always taken care of.
By the time 2000 rolled around, my mother and sister had been telling me for two years that they were sure I had clinical depression and that I really needed to go to my doctor. I never told them of my fears about having my children removed from my home if I was diagnosed with it.
But by that time, the clinical depression was so bad and had such a stranglehold on my life, that instead of having a few “down” days, as I called them, I was having every day in a month “down” and only one day a month when I felt like myself, my old self. On that day I felt like me inside, and could “feel” things, and had no problem getting myself to do things that I needed to do or enjoyed doing.
See, that’s the thing: in the clutches of clinical depression, you lose all joy, you don’t have joy in things you like to do, you don’t even have any desire to do the things you always loved doing. I mean, besides having to fight to get myself to do the necessary things like cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc, I couldn’t get myself to do the things that had previously given me great pleasure and enjoyment.
And inside of me, very deep inside…every day that passed and I couldn’t do my crafts, copped out of bowling league, gave an excuse for not being able to show up for home school group, backed out of a church activity…I felt a little piece of me slip away. And that made me so sad. What if it went on and on? What if, after a few more years…there was nothing of me left? What then?
If you’ve never experienced this, then maybe you just can’t understand the fears, the utter sadness at not even understanding what is happening to you, the desperation you feel. It’s almost like you’re looking at yourself from the sidelines and seeing what’s going on, but you feel powerless to stop it, to make it go away or to make it better.
And the sheer terror of laying in bed thinking on all of this, thinking of what your life has become and who you’ve become…and not recognizing yourself. It’s like living with a stranger inside your own body. I knew this wasn’t the real me; it just wasn’t.
I’ve always been a joyful person, someone who wakes up in the morning fairly leaping out of bed, with a happy song going on in my head, and I always went right to the bathroom to use the toilet, brush teeth, comb hair, etc. and them literally just started right in on my day, no “warm up” time needed. I am not exaggerating when I say I usually woke up almost laughing, with a smile on my face and usually singing.
So as the years wore on and the depression went untreated and became worse and worse…it really was like having some stranger living inside of me, someone I didn’t recognize or know. And I used to think, “This isn’t me, that’s not how I am, I don’t know this person!”
When I finally went through so many months of having 29 days out of 30 feeling like this, I knew there was no way I could go on like that, as much for my daughters’ sakes as my own. I could not bear living any longer with such deep, black deadness inside me, unable to feel the joy of life that I had always felt. I didn’t want that stranger living inside me anymore.
As scared as I still was about having my children taken away if I was diagnosed with depression, I made my appointment and went to it. I was more afraid of waking up one day to find that there was no more of the real me inside, and that the stranger inside me had become…me.
And my fears dissipated as soon as my doctor talked to me and prescribed medication and told me to come back in a month, but to call after 3 weeks if I didn’t find anything different. No, he didn’t think I was “crazy,” and he wasn’t going to call anyone and have my kids removed from my home.
I went home with hope in my heart, and I took that medication faithfully. It happened to be Prozac, one of the most common medications recommended for clinical depression. In exactly 21 days, after not noticing anything different, I called my doctor and informed him of this. I had been on the lowest dose, so he called in to my pharmacy and increased it to twice that amount. Within 4 days…FOUR DAYS…I woke up and was me again!
I recognized it immediately! I’m telling you, this is something like nothing else, when you have gone through years of losing your joy of life, slowly losing yourself in the process, to wake up and feel familiar inside. It wasn’t that stranger I didn’t recognize, it was ME!
I felt it right away, and I knew it was me.
As I went through that day, I was almost afraid to hope it would last. It happened to be on a Wednesday, our usual home school group’s day for music or drama class. I remember getting my daughters settled in at it, and sitting down near a friend with my foster baby, and I felt so good, so good, and so ME, that I confided in her what I had been going through and that I thought the medication was working. I couldn’t stop smiling, that’s how happy I was.
Well, I didn’t have to be afraid it was just too good to be true, or it was just the one good day out of the month…it truly was a turning point for me. The medication had kicked in and conquered my clinical depression. As each day dawned from that day on, I woke up like I always had before clinical depression took over my life. I was me again, and so, SO happy to be that way!
My life changed from that day on. I’ll quickly give you a synopsis on the time since then: I was on Prozac for two years, when it “broke through” the depression, and then I went on Celexa, which, after a month and an increased dose, worked for me and once again I was myself inside. I was on meds for a total of 6 years, and then didn’t need them anymore. I’ve been off meds for 8 years.
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of talking to someone, especially your health care provider, if you’ve been experiencing depression, especially if it’s been so bad that you’ve had suicidal thoughts. I never really had those; only a couple times in my life as reactions to circumstances.
I know how hard it is, even as badly as you’re feeling, to reach out for help. I’ve been there, and I’m actually there again today, and I have an appointment to talk to my doctor and get back on meds. I recognize the symptoms, and I’m not willing to let myself slip that far under as I had all those years ago.
I’m reaching out for help, and even if my former doctor of a year (he just retired) brushed me off when I brought this up to him, I still kept at it and reached out again to the new doctor I found, and I’m going to get the help I need, not only for my children, but for me. I understand now that I’m worth it. I deserve to be all I can be, and if that means I need depression meds in order to straighten things out, then so be it. I’ll do whatever it takes to not risk that slippery slope that leads to deadness inside, joylessness, and that stranger I do not know.
Never discount yourself. You’re worth it too.
And PS: I am the face of depression. Me.
