It’s not a train!!!

sigh

Those of you who’ve dealt with depression and/or anxiety understand the title of this post.

It’s that feeling you get when you wake up one morning, and all of a sudden you realize the world doesn’t actually suck.  Or rather, and much more accurately, that you no longer feel a constant impending doom crushing your chest and your will.

Today is a day like that for me.

So much so, that I’m almost too far on the upswing for comfort.  I’m a bit giddy.  But hey, that’s better than crying all the time, so I won’t complain.

Today is a day when almost everything seems like a gift from God (if I believed in Him).

* I woke up and the clogged milk duct that was threatening mastitis last night had cleared.

* It started snowing in gigantic perfect flakes that can only bring smiles.

* Things at work this morning somehow look manageable again and I can think more clearly.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like everything’s totally rosy.  I’m still stressed out and worried about any number of things.  However, I don’t feel hopeless like I did yesterday.

I’m not crying every five minutes and wanting to beat my head against my desk/wall/doors/floors in anger.

If I’m feeling so much better, why am I telling you this?  Because I think it’s so very very important to help bring visibility to what it’s like to be depressed.  Because maybe you’re dealing with depression, or someone you love or know is dealing with depression.  Because it’s still something that we too often keep quiet, secret, buried (see another of my posts on it, here).

The past few days have been very scary for me as I felt myself going into a stereotypical mood slide.  One of the worst parts about depression is the fear.  It’s easy to talk about the sadness, or the ennui, or the complete lack of motivation.

But really, the FEAR is the worst.  The fear that you won’t ever be better.  The fear that there is NOTHING to be done.  The FEAR that others can’t or won’t understand.  And most especially, for those of us with remaining kernels of self-awareness, the fear that we have lost control over ourselves.

Fear can make us do terrible things.  It makes us doubt ourselves and the ones we love.  It makes us hide.  It makes us deny and it makes us lash out in anger because anger is easier than fear.  Anger makes us feel strong.  Anger gives us someone to blame.

Today, blessedly, I am not angry any more.

Here’s the other part of depression that is rather obnoxious.  It’s not logical.  It doesn’t necessarily come and go when you’d expect, or for any particular reason.

Sure, I’ve been a little extra stressed lately at work, and I’ve been dealing with an injury that’s not responding as well to treatment as hoped.  But really, my life is pretty damn good at the moment.  And even in my darkest moments yesterday when I just wanted to quit, I still knew that I didn’t have a whole lot to really complain about.  So then there’s guilt.

At this point, I’m really thinking that what got me going this time around was the narcotics messing with my brain chemistry (I’d been taking some Monday and Tuesday to deal with the pain in my shoulder).  There is so so so much we don’t understand about neurotransmitters still.

But even this is a guess, and really, a hope.   Because I’m happier thinking that I can blame those couple of scary days on the meds, instead of having nothing to blame at all.

I’m back to that word blame.  Did you notice?

Because when there’s nothing outside of us to blame, all we can do (especially in the midst of a slide) is blame ourselves.  To think less of ourselves.  To consider ourselves “broken.”  To label ourselves “less than.”

Today I know again that I am NOT “less than.”

Let’s hope I can continue to know that for quite a while. 🙂