I said this was gonna be a 3 part series on my last post, right? Well if I didn’t, I’m saying it now. Living with bipolar disorder I’ve learned the 3 basic states of being, outside of my baseline, are anxious, depressed, and hypomanic. I want to delve into what these 3 emotional states feel like to me. With more and more people learning about mental illnesses, the human aspect is sometimes still lacking. When symptoms are discussed they are explained in very clinical ways and don’t always take into account that we are all still individuals and our symptoms don’t all look the same. I’ve already gone over what anxiety feels like to me in “Panic in Prose,” now I want to talk about depression.
Imagine existing underwater. Not as a happy go lucky mermaid or mystical creature that thrives in the sea. But as you. A flesh and blood human being. Wearing an old scuba diving suit, with the globe helmet, and an air supply that doesn’t quite allow enough oxygen in at a time, because if you took a deep breathe your scuba helmet would shatter and drown you in water, or in reality, tears.
Depression is so much like being underwater but without the soothing sounds of the calm water or the vibrancy of coral and exotic fish. It’s the cold, half lit place underwater. It’s where nothing is illuminated and all colors are muted. It’s so far down that you feel the pressure of the water pushing against you and keeping you in place no matter how hard you fight it. You’re stuck in this big, bulky suit that keeps you from moving about freely while watching others swim past you in wetsuits and lightweight air tanks that supply them with more than enough oxygen.
You can be moving along through life just fine, nothing is going wrong, you’re actually productive and feeling good about yourself and then it hits. Sometimes like a quickly rising tide that you don’t notice has sunken you in the sand and surrounded you waist-deep in the water while you were looking off in the distance. Sometimes you can wriggle yourself out of this and climb to higher ground, but sometimes you can’t make it out in time before the ocean swallows you. Very often it comes at you like a 9-foot tall wave hitting you out of nowhere and dragging you under and the more you resist the more discombobulated you become.
It’s like drowning in something deeper than sadness. It’s a grief that fills every part of you making every breath labored and every movement an arduous effort. Time is no longer linear in perception. Your thoughts are like schools of fish darting around trying to avoid a predator. The world has lost its color and you can’t fathom that it will ever return. Depression is painful, like trying to hold your breath for too long. It strains every muscle, every organ, every nerve ending daring one more thing to go wrong.
The things you must do to sustain life become the most burdensome of chores. Eating is a fight between your rational mind knowing you need to eat, anything at all just eat, while your depressed mind saying “why bother?” Or depression making every food available to you seem as unpalatable as possible. Your favorite foods make you grimace in disgust. Drinking water? Tuh. If I drink water I’ll have to pee which means I’ll have to get up from the bed, the couch, the floor, wherever my safe place is and struggle to the bathroom being out in the open and vulnerable and human.
Depression was not always just a sullen mood or outlook on life. It has been radioactive anger that was unleashed towards myself and others. Before I had the words, before my hormones balanced out, before a lot of things happened I was the Hulk. I would lose myself in the rage that sometimes comes with feeling hopeless and helpless. My words just weren’t enough. But breaking things was at least cathartic. This rage has never left, but I have managed to channel it into less destructive actions.
Depression is a storm. You don’t know exactly what path it will take until it touches land. You don’t know how long it will last or what the damage will be. No one can give you an exact forecast and you can only plan based on previous storms you’ve weathered. Living with bipolar disorder, depression is a constant threat. You don’t get “used to it,” it doesn’t get easier, and it doesn’t become predictable. All you can do is hunker down and hope that the damage done is only superficial.
