The first post on this blog was an act of desperation. It describes a trip to the airport to see my daughter, Echo Romeo, off to a new chapter in her life. Like any parent, I was sad to see my child depart the nest — an abundantly normal, typical human sadness. But watching mine go through the airport door unleashed such a flood of hopelessness, I didn’t see how I would make it through the rest of the day, or the rest of my life. That’s how depression works. It takes a mundane emotional trigger and turns it into the end of the world. You know your brain is sending you bad signals, but you believe this distorted, bleak world of your own invention.
In an agony of despair that day, I reached for any handhold I could find, one of which was to write about what was happening — i.e. this very blog.
Now, just a few days later, everything looks and feels different, better, “normal.” Which is another truth about depression, at least the version I know: put a little time between yourself and the last bout of hopelessness, and you can scarcely believe it happened. There is a distance there, almost as though the overtly dark phase happened to someone else. It’s like drinking to excess or being physically ill, or anything that temporarily distorts your perception. When the cloud passes, there’s a disbelief, a distance, an unreality. It’s like trying to recall the darkest, coldest day of winter from the vantage point of comfortable summer.
I came back from the airport convinced my life, already pretty much a waste, was on a downward spiral that would leave me a useless hulk of a person. In turn this would sour my wife’s naturally abundant well of joyfulness because she would have to take care of me. Yes, I was going to die, unhappy and unfulfilled, in some shadowy corner. And that would be best for everybody. Except that I had already passed on my depressive genes to my kids, so their happy wells were soured too. To borrow a line from the ever-cheerful T.S. Eliot (I believe his initials stand for Terribly Sad), I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
Yeah, I know. It’s like third-rate literary fiction with yourself the maudlin hero. But you believe it anyway. The airport episode and its long tail lasted nearly two days.
Oddly distant as the dark bouts seem during this interval of normality, I remain aware of the real risk: which is that the bouts grow in duration and the intervals shrink. And then you are living in perpetual winter.
The purpose of this blog is to avoid that eventuality, which last befell me at age 11…. Next post.
-Aikree Van
fivebythreenorth 