rebeccmeister | Depressive Reality (Reply)

I think I am figuring out that at least some of the present insomnia is allergies, once again. Thanks, spring. I mean, I feel shitty and all but it's out of sync with the emotional processing.

Sometimes I *can* feel the shift in my emotions, like the snap of a rubber band or a pinging sensation. Friday there was an unexplainable sense of relief, this morning it is that sensation that says, "REACH OUT TO HIM" with every fiber but right now I just don't know if I trust my emotions and I don't want to be a chain-rattler. I have to sit and wait. Those two emotions are at opposite ends of the spectrum, bracketed by a deep anger that tells me that I am hurting and that I care. The opposite of love is ambivalence. Interspersed with a horrible quantity of mucus production from the unending crying. I had to sink-wash 8 bandanas yesterday, and let me tell you, snot is gross.

I've heard on numerous occasions that depressed people actually tend to have a better grasp on reality than non-depressed people, but in such reports nobody ever seems to just up and ask, "Yeah, but is that a good thing?" Its prevalence suggests that either selective pressure against it has been relaxed (in the same sense that it has been relaxed for many other diseases, through modern medicine and technology) or there is something beneficial to it that keeps the propensity around, at least in minor variants, not extremes. This doesn't exactly answer the question either. I know when I am on the edge of those lows sometimes it feels like I can channel more intellectual capacity, but I also manage to stay out of the bleak realm of "unable to cope."

There was one striking episode in Texas where S's emotions took him for a ride so suddenly that I trace the memory back to a single timepoint, lying in bed while he was on that rollercoaster, trying to get some company* and mad that I wasn't saying anything. I guess that, like another friend of mine, I don't know the right thing to do under such circumstances, from a cognitive behavioral therapy standpoint, which was why I was so quiet, but that explanation was swiftly shot down by the subject. There's no consulting nurse phone line to call up for that kind of question, as best as I can determine (the consulting nurse is for those embarrassing times when you can't decide if it's appendicitis or just a really bad gas bubble and the internet sure ain't helping). The best I could come up with was what thewronghands articulated in a recent comment, time. And in time he came out of it and we could talk.

It's so hard for us humans to just come out and talk about these things, still, and I don't take the project of writing about this stuff lightly and it is filtered on some level, I hope akin to the way in which the author of Hyperbole and a Half was eventually able to write and draw about her experiences with depression. I take the Christian Science Monitor's motto pretty seriously in that regard (though a less sexist version), "to injure no one, to bless all humankind."

-I feel I have to reiterate my policy that this blog is about me and any requests for removal of personal identifying information will be honored, including of S.

*hope the meaning is clear-emotional company in that he wanted me right there with him in unhappiness-because I sure wasn't going anywhere in a physical sense