descent into depression
unknown author
“I am bent, but not broken. I am scarred, but not disfigured. I am sad, but not hopeless. I am tired, but not powerless. I am angry, but not bitter. I am depressed, but not giving up.”
The descent into the bleakness of depression can happen both gradually and suddenly. For me, the entirety of December becomes a month long test of my fortitude and strength as well as a great opportunity to exercise the tools I’ve learned over my thirty-plus years in therapy. I’ve yet to encounter a December that hasn’t kicked my ass despite all my tools, medications and training.
I live with treatment resistant ultra-rapid cycling bipolar I disorder with mixed features. I also live with CPTSD, Panic Disorder, Severe Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and acute OCD and agoraphobia on my particularly bad days. I’ve survived more suicide attempts than I can count, three of which landed me in ICU for chunks of time, while a handful of the others simply gave me a first class ticket to psych-wards. The rest of my attempts were simply overlooked by my family, and I guess I just slept off the drugs and muddled my way through while everyone turned an uncomfortable blind eye to the mess that I was.
It has been explained to me that my “addictive personality,” which through the years has manifested in behaviors including alcoholism, disordered eating and cutting are really just maladaptive coping mechanisms created by my “reptilian brain” to protect myself against the world around me. I suppose that describing these behaviors as “trauma responses” is supposed to make me feel better about being such a self-destructive human.
It doesn’t help.
Despite arming myself with research and knowledge on my disorders and complex diagnoses; despite studying the complicated nuances that exist within dysfunctional families riddled with trauma, addiction and abuse; despite seeing specialists, talking to experts, and doing the work…I still find myself in the muck.
My depressions are not just me laying in my bed frozen in a catatonic state of emotional suffering-although they are that. My depressions are also my physical body suffering in agonizing pain: muscle spasms, electrical shocks running down my spine, tremors that shake me to the core of my being, feverish hot and cold sweats, migraines, grinding teeth, locked jaw, blurry vision and existing for hours in an utter state of indescribable terror. My depressions are the absence of light. The absence of love. The absence of a life worth living. My depressions are my mind on fire. Ablaze and aware of every fear, spinning at the rapid speed that is only present in the rare patients who experience true “clinical black mania.” Cursed with this unique blend of bipolar, where every negative thought that looms in the back of my mind, every cruel thing that has ever been said to me or about me, every fear I have and everything I feel shame over comes bubbling to the surface with such velocity I find myself drowning in such unfathomable agony that death really does seem like the only reprieve from the madness.
This is what depression looks like for me.
John Keats
“I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.”
