I find myself crying at ambulances on television and at children forced to be adults too soon. I have been staring at rain on glass, running my thumb along the tips of my fingers, and silently praying to the moon. I have been laughing less.
These last few months have been good. I have been exercising daily, eating more regularly, and trying to recognize the moments before I nosedive into “that place”. That place where there is no such thing as heaven, where I shout four letter words at the top of my lungs into pillows. But those low places are higher than they used to be and I have been moving, at a steady pace, closer to the centre of the bell curve. This is called improvement.
You see, my brain does not work in the same way as a “normal” person’s brain does. It responds differently to diet, to stress, and to itself. If I skip eating for a day or sleeping for a night, the physical crash is nothing compared to the mental. There are so many little triggers that can push me further to “that place”, triggers that do not make sense to the people that I love. They do not understand that they cannot tell the difference between a good day and a bad one.
Today, I did not get out of bed until 5pm. I was told that I am “lucky”, “lazy”, and “needed it”, but this is one of those indicators that I am supposed to be watching out for and prepared to deal with. The most immediate solution is to work it off: to throw myself into some exercise so that my body floods with endorphins and gets me high. Then my exhausted limbs will demand that I fill myself with food to replenish. I will shower. I will shave. I will clean up. This is my routine and I have been doing it preemptively to manage this disease.
It is now 11pm. I am nursing a coconut cream doughnut and a bowl of Jelly Bellys. Also a coffee. The only time I left my room today was to get that doughnut and that coffee.
This is dangerous and I know it. But tonight that danger feels like letting your hand come to rest on the thigh next to you during a first date. It feels like standing in the middle of an open field during a thunderstorm. It feels like slapping god in the face.
I am on fire right now and the high that I am feeling could easily be mistaken for a good thing, but I am going to wake up tomorrow starving and broken. My head will hurt. My body will be heavy. I will be deep in “that place”.
I used to believe that my depression was necessary for creation — that I could not write without it. Some days I still believe it. But even now, I can feel the fire fading. My hand is shaking and I am on the verge of tears for no reason at all. My breathing is uneven and I just need someone to tell me that they give a shit about me.
This is how my disease operates. It makes me think that I am doing okay. It makes me think that I am in control. It tricks me into believing that I like it, that I need it. I cannot manage it alone, but I have also found that depression is worse than leprosy. People conflate depression and suicide, when the two have almost nothing to do with each other. Depression is a disease that strips me of my mobility. Suicide is an action. If I am capable of suicide, I am also capable of getting the fuck out of my bed and running as far away from this disease as is humanly possible. But there seems to be no way to overcome that perception, even with those who love me.
So I manage, as best I can. Which sometimes involves doing all the right things to beat this disease and sometimes involves crashing after eating a bunch of sugar. Tonight it also involved putting my problems onto the internet as if this tumblr were a LiveJournal. And, believe it or not, sometimes I am capable of helping myself.
So fuck you, depression. I’m going for a run.
