Depression and anxiety disorders affect almost 25% of the over 18 American population each year. You may not know it, but several people you know well are suffering from some version of depression or anxiety at any given time. Guaranteed.
Some people are anxious or depressed for an obvious reason. Divorce, death of a loved one, a child on the path to ruin, financial pressures - all are common causes of the situation anxiety and depression that almost everyone has experienced at some point or another in their adult lives, if they have lived more than a few years in the real world. That is called situational anxiety or depression, and when the source of the problem either disappears or you learn to cope with it, the depression and anxiety improve as well.
For some of us out here, however, severe chronic depression is am ongoing battle, a lifelong condition, that can sneak up on us and lay us low without warning, for no reason or any reason. We may not even see it coming. Life, in all it's forms, just overwhelms us, and suddenly, we are ready to give up and run away from ourselves for a little while.
I have been informed, on a variety of occasions, that depression is something to hide, like a criminal past, or wrongdoing. Apparently, in the view of some, the mental illness that is depression, is something to be ashamed of, like a moral failure to be insufficiently tough or something. This is, I think, not peculiar to Americans, but more profound to us. There is a hard core in most Americans of severe moral rigidity, and any crack in the facade is seen as failure of virtue, rather than mental mushiness.
I would postulate that without depression in the population, we would be without much of the greatest art, music, and literature of history. Creative geniuses are notorious for their emotional fragility, and their most creative periods frequently coincide with their deepest and darkest life phases.
Severe chronic depression is a battle I have fought for virtually my entire life. It is a deep, dark pit in my life journey that I often stumble into, sometimes without even seeing it lying in wait for me. It is often, for me, not the large incidents that will shove me in the back and suddenly, I am without my footing. Often, if not usually, in fact, it is an accumulation of many small things, all adding up to a Chinese water torture of sorts, the drip, drip, drip finally sending my emotional stability on a quickie vacation to another dimension, while the physical me remains grounded in my own life.
Depression is, like many mental-based conditions, unpredictable, but one thing I do know. You are never really clear of it. It waxes and wanes, and it can certainly get better, but the reality is that you will never be fully free of it. Like an alcoholic or a gambler, my particular vice is always lying in wait for me, biding its time until that final straw turns my own mind on myself.
But there is a hopefulness for me, too, because I have beaten it back many times. Each time I am able to fight it down, it gives me more ammunition for the next round, because I know it is possible to be in a better place, and if I don't give in, it will get better sooner rather than later.
There are a lot of tricks which I have learned over time to help jar myself out of the negative cycle of depression, and sooner or later, it is usually effective. When I start to go around the corner, heading into dangerous territory, I have people who warn me, and remind me that there are a lot more good things than bad in my life and the world at large. I can go out and do yard work, I can play with my dogs, I can bake a cake, I can do positive things that put sights and sounds and smells and feelings in my path to help me overcome the negative emotions that depression induces.
The single most important thing for me, however, has always been my sense of humor. It is ever present, and whether it is in a gentle phase, or sarcastic mode, it allows me to make fun of myself, to see life with humor, and to minimize, or perhaps put things in their rightful place. If laughter is the best medicine for most people, humor is the catalyst for me to climb out of the pit of despair and into the light.
In the last few days, I've had one thing after another - drip, drip, drip. In life, some people are fortunate souls. Things, by and large, just seem to go their way. They are people for whom, generally, it was a close call, but everything worked out all right.
I am not one of those people. On the contrary, if it can go wrong, it generally will, often in more than one way. For example, this weekend, I decided to attack a small case of rot on a window in my family room. I expected it to be a bit of a job, of course, it was a fairly widespread area, but I assumed that ultimately, with some filler and a little elbow grease, I would be in good shape.
Well, right off, I jabbed my screwdriver in there to see how deep the rot went, only to have it go all the way through. Even better, it broke the glass in the window as well. Then I started to glance at other windows, and realized that I have a severe situation on my hands, rot on several windows, an overwhelming job that I simply cannot deal with, given the limited amount of time available to me.
Needless to say, on top of a number of other things which also went wrong at exactly the same time, I went into melt-down mode. My long suffering mother had to listen to me whine and complain and throw a pity party for myself for hours on end, until, eventually, I was able to have a sense of humor again. I realized, talking to her, more than ever before, the sign that my foundering ship has righted, is signaled by the reemergence of my sense of humor - a joke at my own expense is a sign that I have stopped taking on water, and I am once again bailing as fast as I can.
My lovely daughter is as subject to the vagaries of my depression as I am, since she lives with me, but her role in helping me overcome it is more direct and to the point. As I was bemoaning the fact that I have to cope with all this maintenance on my own, and it would be nice to have a guy around to handle some of these practical matters, she scoffed at me. Then she pointed out that while I would appreciate some things about having a guy around full time perhaps three times a year, the other 362 days I am perfectly satisfied as things are. In fact, she went on, the husband I did have was useless in dealing with home maintenance anyway, so there is really no point in taking myself down that road.
In the end, of course, I am paying someone to swoop in and fix what I cannot handle on my own, life as we know it has not stopped, and we have moved on to the next problem this morning. It's an endless drip, but the good news is, you won't drown from a drip unless you decide to stick your own head in a pail.
I would encourage you to look around yourself and see who you know that has been feeling down for longer than they should be. It may be that they are depressed, and need a listening ear, or a kick in the psyche, from someone who doesn't see them as fatally flawed, but as creatively challenged. And remember, under that lost interior, there may be a a genius looking for a way out.
