TheBanyanTree: Out of Character

[Janice]

Ah! Depression.  I've known a few.  The most interesting lasted about 8 years and ended about 8 years ago.  That was the one in which, because I am a trained observer, or maybe just because I was older and wiser, I managed to notice some aspects of the black dog that I had missed in previous encounters.

First, I can disagree with myself.  Or, maybe, my body is not my mind.  Or, maybe, the fact that I am having emotions that make me feel like I want to do something (or, rather, not do something) doesn't mean that my mind is involved.  In fact, my mind was elsewhere, as though it was sitting outside me, listening to my thoughts and telling me that it would be very wrong to do what I wanted to do.  So I didn't.  

Second, my mind can get tired, or maybe overwhelmed.  Despite the fact that I had experience of making more or less serious attempts to get away from my problems, beginning when I was just a girl of 16 (razor blade, gas and, finally, successfully, by running away from home) I had never understood how anyone can find enough courage to actually do the deed.  (In those teenaged attempts I'd chickened out.  The razor blade hurt too much.  The gas was taking too long, even with my nose stuck right up against the jet, and I was terrified of being interrupted before getting done.  What I discovered is that having courage is not the necessary thing; allure is.  You just have to get to the point where you're tired, tired, tired of struggling and getting nowhere and then, say, walking in front of the next oncoming car, can become not an act of courage or will but of desire.  

Obviously, I didn't walk in front of that car so I can say that my rational mind hadn't completely deserted me, but I felt that desire and, because I still had my mind, it scared me.  So I went back on the SSRIs and started praying, in even greater earnest, to be shown how I was contributing to my own misery.  It turned out that, despite knowing intellectually that we're all sinners, at bottom I'd bought into the idea that we're all born good and only get turned bad by bad experiences so I was forever expecting people to behave decently and getting disappointed when they didn't.  I felt that lying nut crack and dissolve - felt it physically - and then I was OK.  At least I was OK for a good while.

The next time I started going down I also started wondering what the problem was this time and that led me to considering why it is that, for what feels like my whole life, I've been going down and up, down and up.  Given that coping (and not coping) styles tend to be formed in childhood, what is it about my childhood that makes me prone to feeling depressed?  What does "feeling depressed" really mean anyway?  For me, it means feeling trapped; unable to do anything to improve my situation; unable to stop what I want stopped; unable to get what I need.  It means feeling like I presume those lab rats must feel who are constantly getting electric shocks to their feet but have learned they have no way of escaping their cages so that even when an escape route is provided they do not move but sit quietly, quivering, accepting the pain.  It's learned helplessness.  I learned it under the tutelage of my older, and much bigger, sister's bullying and violence.  I learned it when I asked for my parent's help and they laughed as I wept.  

Now I have to unlearn it.  I wish it was easy.  Mostly, these days, I get angry rather than depressed when I'm feeling abused.  At least I'm sticking up for myself.  Soon enough, I hope, I'll be able to do it without the yelling.

Janice