I am currently in one of the worst depression episodes I have ever experienced. I've had depression for over twenty years, so I have a lot to compare this to.
This coincides with a very rough patch in our marriage, and is the third? fourth? major long-term health crisis for me this calendar year.
One acquaintance picked up on the shift within two weeks of my depression symptoms (re)starting this spring and opened a conversation with my husband and I about it. Things between my husband and I deteriorated this summer, though I kept trying to reach out to him, kept trying to tell him I was struggling badly and needed him to be there for me. He consistently and categorically refused. I reached out at one point to a mutual friend of ours, who ghosted me. I added her to the very long list of 'people who said they cared about me and would be there for me and then definitely weren't.'
The message was clear -- I was still too much. So I suffered in silence, as I always had.
In the middle of August, there was an incident between my husband and I that broke me on a deeper level than anything I had ever experienced before. At that point, I reached out to the acquaintance from the spring again because I had nobody else, fully expecting that he would help for two weeks -- a month, tops -- before dropping me just like everybody else always did. Turns out he had been observing the situation for years and knew exactly which threads to pull, so he did. And while everything I had tenuously built my life on unraveled around me (some of it pulled apart by my own hands when I saw how much of it was lies), he stood calmly in the middle, an anchor point when nothing else -- not even my own life -- was guaranteed.
As my life burned to the ground around me (again), my depression fast-traveled to new and unexplored depths. I am too exhausted to be actively suicidal and I have no plan, but I told Sam on Sunday that I just want to lay down and never wake up again. I told another friend that I don't see a future at all, good or bad. I don't know if my husband is in that future or not, because I see nothing, at all. I told Sam I used to have writing projects and dance goals to keep me moving forward, but right now I don't have any of those either. There is nothing to keep me tethered here, to the ball of death hanging in space. What other people didn't tear to shreds, the depression has built fortified walls around. All I do now is sleep and argue with my husband. The fact that I'm writing this -- writing anything -- now is a big deal.
Yesterday I had a doctor's appointment, and my doctor talked me into trying an antidepressant. Despite two decades with this disease, I have never actually tried meds for it. Today was the first day, and he warned me that my symptoms could get worse before they get better. (So far, no change -- good or bad. It's been not quite two hours since I took them.)
When I got home from the appointment, I told Sam I was scared to take the meds.
The lens of depression has filtered every single thing I have thought, or said, or done, or heard, or seen for over twenty years. Practically every artistic thing I have ever done was inspired by something I saw or heard through the lens of depression. 'If I take that lens away,' I said to Sam, 'then who am I? Will I find the real Kate, or will I fall for an imposter? Will you even recognise me?'
Despite Sam's reassurances, I'm still frightened. I know I can't go back the way I came, through the depression, but I'm afraid to go forward into a world that for all I know might not even exist. Is there a world without unbearable pain crushing my brain, without the white-hot poker of rejection burning in my lungs every day?
All I see is darkness, and as far as I know, there is nothing on the other side of depression.
