The slender steepled finger on the clock moves into position at the twelve, the shorter one at eight, and I can feel tiredness seep into my pores like a rising tide. My body sinks into the faded tan cushions on the couch, tiredness making my legs at once jumpy and leaden. The cat curls against my back, her warm fur on my bare skin, her purr a metronome of comfort until I reach out and rub her fur the wrong way and she leaps up in a sudden aerial twist and lands softly on the floor.
I watch the hand on the clock move forward and listen to night gathering. The rain on the windows, the wood fire. I can feel myself out there somewhere at the peripheries of things, like a jellyfish that is present only in its own pulsing.
Someone mentioned depression in the comments to my last post. As in, maybe it’s the thing that’s been hanging around here, like a hungry cur at the back door. And of course she’s right.
There might have been a time when I would have argued that depression only haunts those that have it hiding in their genes like varicose veins; the blueprint for sorrow already stamped into the double helix of their life.
But now I know it is more like mold springing unbidden: on the bread left in the pantry a day too long; at the lip of the jar of marmalade preserves; behind the faucet that has been left to tap a soft staccato of drips into the basin; under the autumn pumpkins sitting fat and secretive on the ledge with their bellies rotting out. I know that for me it’s here now, blue and fuzzy, tainting perfectly good moments.
I might have once been terrified of this. Or ashamed. But the last few years have borne enough ache to teach me this: growth happens when the moments are bitter and slow, when night happens early at the edges of my soul. And also this: that morning comes again. That for me at least, this will not last. In my beet red core I have resilience. In me there is a swift restorative sap that tells me again and again to have trust in my life. I feel this surging even now, in the thick of restlessness and limbo and exhaustion.
Perhaps this makes my depression different than the kind that takes over a person entirely, ceaselessly eating away at the soul like a virus. Still, depression finds me and has found me now.
It follows the hands around the clock. It flutters at the frayed edges of exhaustion, on the hormonal tides of pregnancy and hunger. I see it in myself lately, and recognizing this feels a bit like finding a Polaroid of me in a shoebox and being unable to place the context or the time in which it was taken.
I know I need simple things that I’m not getting. I can see cause and effect. I need rest and rhythm and days that are less jam-packed and cluttered with other people’s needs. I need quiet and stories and live jazz and sunshine. I need running and lovemaking and the ability to breath without congestion. Some of these needs are things I can control right now, but many are things I cannot.
I have to work for the next three months and being pregnant in this context puts me at odds with the things that I need to feel whole. Being pregnant makes me introverted and fragile and susceptible to being sick. It makes me tender and sore spent at the end of the day. I can do nothing but feel like a little alien has invaded and wait it out; stringing together the moments of fluttering and increasingly rambunctious kicks in my belly like beads on an abacus. Three months more.
So yes, depression. Yes winter and pregnancy and over-tiredness. Yes it’s here now, and I still have three months ahead of me of this awkward and pathetic balancing act before I stop working and hibernate with my babe in the middle of a snowy landscape.
Somehow I’ll make it through. Somehow I’ll huddle in the palm of each day and wait to be handed by grace into the palm of the next. I’ll sip good chai tea, and watch how individual snowflakes gathering on the window panes are really all different. I’ll read poems that fill me up and watch my son draw maps. I’ll breath in the warmth of my husband’s skin and order Christmas presents by mail. And I’ll wait.
What about you? Does depression find you ever?
It found me in post pregnancy. Not enough can be said for the hormonal influence I think. I’m starting to see the light of day for the first time in months since giving birth in April. You definitely put words to how I have felt.
Strange how I seemed to plunge into it but the climb out has been a slow and steady process.
Good that you know a new morning will come.
Odd as it sounds, this post is lovely, despite its serious topic. I’m sorry depression has found you. It finds me often…but it will leave, I promise.
Take care of yourself. Get that sunshine and jazz and everything else. Quite seriously, it may save your life.
Be well.
xoxo
Of course. Days continue to be made of minutes but the passing of them brings no joy, no sense of movement or energy. First, an increasing lethargy, tiredness, irritability, labile mood, a tendency to blame others for my increased expectations of them. No sense of beauty, of poetry, of ‘aliveness’ – these senses recede, to belong to someone I used to be, so remote and different. Daydreams, ever my friends, start comprising of such simple things as making a grocery list: imagined but not carried out for I have no energy to initiate… A sense of hopelessness, desolation, of loss of purpose and strength, of identity, of my own power. And then also, till recognized, the trapping of one’s own making, unwillingness to ask for help, unaware of its need, or its power. Oh, I see more; I know the pathways this dark jungle has to offer, mesmerising its prey with this very darkness. I have seen it from the outside, and from within – not enough to be really deep drowning, but enough. And oh, the difference when the sun shines! When you begin to know the shallowness of your own efforts at showing, pretending, even feeling everything to be normal when it was not. And how simple it was all this time, the help one phone call away, or one visit to the doctor, or one night’s long conversation, yet out of reach, invisible to eyes long held bound to the feet shuffling on black narrow paths… I hope that your orbit remains safe, merely burnished by the fringes of this dark ‘holeness’, but if not, you just have to ask. It is simple, really.
I’ve been reading you long enough to know that you know yourself, but please do be careful with depressing during pregnancy – it increases your chances of PPD. It’s what happened to me with Boychen. And we’re on the other side of it now, but the ordinary, the I recognize this, the this is the way I work takes on a different flavor with all the hormones and sleep deprivation of infancy. Just watch yourself sweetie.
This is so profoundly and beautifully worded; your words are a kind of therapy in themselves. Your capacity to capture elements of life so vividly and graciously is probably a tonic, too; your ability to be so articulate saving you from deeper darkness. It sometimes finds me too, but I’m finding solace in an hour of talking therapy once a fortnight; something I thought I’d never need or do, but it’s quite simply the best choice I’ve ever made. Excited for you at the prospect of hibernation with your babe. I know it’s a cliche but soon these days will seem long gone and though you’ll probably not miss the physicality of pregnancy, no doubt you’ll wonder where the days went, and look back to before your babe was born with a sense of wonder that she (or he?!) was ever not-here-yet!
Yes. It’s a struggle for those of us who connect deeply to the world around us and to other humans. I sometimes secretly envy those people who seem to be able to dance through their lives unfettered by things like fear, anger, caring.
Maybe that sounds mean, but I don’t intend it that way.
Depression is one of those terrible things about being human that sometimes almost drowns out the good things about being human.
Almost.
Oh yes – every winter. Knowing it is there (like mold waiting to grow in the right conditions, oh yes), that it probably will return makes it a little easier to deal with when it does come around.
Like Amy, I have to comment on the sheer beauty of your writing, even on such a topic as depression. I recognize much of what you’re saying, but I don’t know that I can ever specifically name the point in time when I declare myself depressed. Sometimes it seems more constant and other times nearly impossible to fathom such feelings. But it is your perception of it, the resilience you know you possess that lets me know that you will see the other side of it soon.
“Perhaps this makes my depression different than the kind that takes over a person entirely, ceaselessly eating away at the soul like a virus. Still, depression finds me and has found me now.”
me too. and reading your words on it, makes it feel less isolating and depressing, if that makes sense, so thank you.
Yes, it does find me. Not often, but surprisingly hard when it comes sneaking up. Like a jellyfish, sometimes I feel the only way to survive it is to very slowly rise to the surface. Beautiful post.
yes depression finds me. post partum once very badly. and in grief too. you seem to be aware of it and what is in your control to aid yourself but do be carefull. best take it in hand with outside help if it becomes unmanageable. i also find winter has my mood falling down. your writing is beautiful.
… it’s like not being able to open my soul to anything else but more of this feeling. Being shut inside, building the walls myself, grey, wavery, pale. Not dark. Pale. The bursts of color seem to have disappeared, or my abilty to see them. Isolated. insulated to anything but. But. Do you remember the scene in “the piano”, under the sea, tied to the piano, light drizzling through greenish water … untieing the knot, floating upwards, a decision to see the light. It happens to me, without really being able to control it, I float upwards to the light, and break the surface, emerge. Safe again.
I seem to get depressed about once a month, right before my monthly cycle. it hits hard for a couple days and as quick as it came, it’s gone again. i hate that! especially bad in winter with no sun…take care of YOU! get some sunshine on your face and keep writing.
your writing is beautiful>
tara
Your writing is beautiful, stunning, as always, my sweet friend.
Depression does come to me, especially in the winter. Luckily an onslaught of good hormones (at least that’s my theory) have kept them at bay for the past two years, and when I started to feel that old sad dog at my feet recently, I knew immediately that I had to go outside, see the sun, etc. And so I did, and it helped immensely. Last week I spend lots of time outside (on my parents’ farm) and it was so good for me. I tend to hibernate inside.
Still, what you’re dealing with – not post partum depression, but perhaps pre-partum – is real and true and definitely not helped by the fact that you haven’t been healthy for some time. I know Ask Moxie (www.askmoxie.org) has some stuff on pre-partum depression, and some steps you can take, but I would definitely talk it over with your doctor or midwife. Hope this doesn’t sound too ass-vice-y – you know how much I care for you and want you to be well and happy.