neadods | On Depression and Decisions (Reply)

This is a post about depression. It links to a series of other posts that I think are excellent, important reading but all the same, TRIGGER WARNING FOR EVERYTHING BELOW THIS LINE.

First, via

penguineggs, is a House of Commons debate that touches, among other things, on OCD and depression and depression should be treated. Not just treated in the sense of "trying to make it go away" but in the sense of "stop treating it like a life and career-ending stigma and lump it in with all the other health issues that need to be recognized and managed but not judged."

And that wonderful dry British wit is in full evidence with lines like "I am delighted to say that I have been a practising fruitcake for 31 years."

The next link is infinitely darker, but if you've never been in a depressive crash, you absolutely MUST read it to understand what it's like. Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed... And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge.

Or, as The Bloggess Jenny Lawson puts it succinctly, Depression Lies. (I can't recommend The Bloggess highly enough. When Jenny isn't writing stuff that will make you laugh until you cry, she writes some very, VERY powerful stuff about depression that will flat-out make you cry -- but also not make you feel alone, especially if you read the hundreds and hundreds of supportive comments. The most powerful posts about depression are Tighrope Walker, The Fight Goes On, Wow, and It Comes Around and Around, in that order.)

The reason why I'm writing this post today is that I came to a startled realization that I'm in a depressive slump and probably have been for a couple of weeks. And the thing is, when the depression is *bad* it usually has a big trigger and is as easily recognized as the prelude to The Sound of Silence (Hello, Darkness, my old friend).

But when it's mild, when it's weak, it can take ages to realize that I'm not tired all the time and uninterested in anything and trying to live on Ritz crackers and lemonade because of (check as many as apply) I'm trying not to catch M's cold/I'm recovering from the terror of the derecho/I'm physically stunned by the heatwave. I've avoided the cold, I didn't freak at the mild thunderstorm a couple nights ago, and the heat has broken. And still I'm sitting here, with kittens in full "ZOMG, lookit the world!!!1eleventy1!!" mode around me thinking "is it worth going to knit night? Do I even want dinner?"

And *then* I start second-guessing decisions I've made, and that's where the true madness lies. CBT therapy, which is what I had, is based on judging your thoughts against 10 cognitive distortions and number 8, the "Should statement" is my particular nemesis.

I *should* be volunteering for clinic work. After all, I made a resolution to go once a month. (Recent decision: stop going when the weather's over 85 degrees because I'm not physically up to it.)

I *should* be more careful with my money. (Recent decision: fuck the debt, I'm going to live with 2 months more of it and order the Little Free Library I really, really want and not the budget one.)

And bizarrely the most controversial in my mind, I *should* be gearing up for the Ravellenic Games, after all, I've talked about them, pimped them, begged my way onto a team, picked a project... and recently decided to scratch from Team Sherlocked. It's not that I don't support the Games or want to do it (or even that I'm not planning on playing the home game); it's that I looked at how much everyone else was putting into it and thought "I'm not ready for that right now."

And NOW I'm making myself crazyer second-guessing everything, because when I'm crashing, mild or not, I don't trust myself to make good decisions even on the most inconsequential of things.