If at times I am a little unsure as to the state of my mental health, my dreams serve as a fairly good barometer. When I am feeling well, I remember few dreams, and those I do recall are cheerfully weird, like the one about the miniature albino hedgehog I decided to keep in a rice and lettuce wrap in the fridge. When I’m not, my dreams are convoluted and violent, full of people that I try hard not to think about when I’m awake. They leave me exhausted in the morning.
Last week I had a dream that I had a number of large blisters on my….well, I guess that vagina is as good a word as any. I popped the blisters and out of them came a number of very tiny embroidered sheep. My mom loves sheep, so I collected them all into a little pile and was pleased that I had this nice gift to send to her.
I’m pretty sure that’s not good. Right? I don’t see how that can be good.
If the word illness is right there, one half of “mental illness,” why don’t we treat it as such? If I had pinkeye I could stay home from work, but if I’ve summoned all of my stores of energy to get out of bed only to run out when I get to the shower, that’s not a good enough reason. If you have the sniffles and a low-grade fever, you’re allowed to take the day off. If you stare listlessly at your computer with your hands in your lap, taking frequent breaks to run and have a silent cry in the bathroom stall, you’re still expected to do 9 to 5.
I have been on medication since I was sixteen. If they make it, I’ve probably tried it. After a battle with my father, who insisted that if I prayed harder I wouldn’t be depressed, I was an early Prozac baby. When that stopped working I moved to Paxil. And then more, and more, and more, up to five at a time, until my bedside table resembled a pharmacy. I have the pill organizers that you see in catalogues for the elderly, pill cutters, and even empty capsules for when you’re trying to get off of Effexor, one bead at a time. I have slept through years on Ativan, had a full-scale freak-out on Adderall when I made my mom turn over a book because the boy on the cover was looking at me, and I even survived the Lamictal rash. I’d become accustomed to thinking, after four years on Pristiq, that the two of us would ride off into the sunset together, but in the past few weeks, for no particular reason, the world has shifted off of its axis, and a perfectly normal moment can segue seamlessly into a waking fever dream wherein my body cannot understand stairs, my brain cannot prevent me from losing hours staring at nothing, and if that first tear gets out, nothing will stop it turning into a river.
I’ve always wondered what it’s like to be clinically insane. I wonder how aware you might be of your own insanity. I wonder if it happens so gradually you don’t notice, or if it’s sudden, like a light switch being flicked from off to on. Can it be flicked back, or is it irrevocable? If you’re not aware of it, mightn’t it just seem…normal? It’s not that I’m aspiring to be declared clinically insane. But maybe once you are, you can relax. You can stop thinking about all of the things that you are never going to do, because you’re clinically insane, and it’s no longer expected of you.
I have not experienced much tragedy in my life, other than losing my father eight years ago. Some people don’t like that term for it, but I do. Like with a lost thing, I still look for him all the time, and I never find him. Depression is not sadness, or even grief. But when depression collides with sadness or grief, it’s like a hideous chemical experiment that can’t be undone. A poisoning with no antidote. The circumstances of my life right now are dissatisfying. But mental illness transforms them into something much worse.
Every therapist I have had (I am too embarrassed to say how many) has done some gentle prodding, asking if maybe I suffered abuse as a child, since many of my symptoms seem to align with those of people who have. I spent years racking my brain, trying to remember, wondering if there’s someone I could blame in all of this. In some ways it would be a relief to know that something caused all of this. But on the other hand, I’ve stopped looking for a reason. Maybe there isn’t a reason, maybe there is, but finding one wouldn’t fix anything. And it might start a whole new nightmare. If there’s something I don’t remember, I think I prefer to keep it that way.
When you’re depressed, you want to sleep. When they give you medication to combat your depression, one of the main side effects is drowsiness. I can easily sleep twelve hours in a row and then have a nap a few hours later. It’s hard to stay positive when you’re constantly plotting how soon you can be unconscious, honestly wondering if anyone would notice if you curled up on the sidewalk for a bit, or a subway platform. I once spent an hour lying under a jungle gym at night, and I only got up the willpower to leave because I was worried that someone might call the police and report a dead body. On top of the physical sensation, there is a weariness that hovers around what you might call your soul. My brain is tired, my heart is tired. If I knew where to go to officially give up, I would.
You would think that being so tired, I would get to feel numb, but I feel the polar opposite of numb. Numb is what I’m striving for, in all of the worst ways possible. I know that there is a special magic weight which, if I get down to, will grant me emotional numbness. I don’t know what that number is, specifically, and I don’t own a scale anyway so I wouldn’t know it if I saw it, but by God, I’m doing my best to get there. This is a Bad Idea. I absolutely know this. But I’ve had worse.
Oh, I know that I look like I’m walking around like the rest of you, laughing at jokes and saying excuse me, buying snacks and thinking about the kind of shoes I like, and sometimes I am. But sometimes I am walking around with the distinct impression that my air is running out and I am flailing my hands, and no one sees me. Or if they see me they mistake it for waving. Because who wants to go get a drink with the drowning girl? Not me. I have drinks with myself on a regular basis and it rarely ends well.
I have not cut myself for over seven years. But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to. The other week I ran a rotary cutter blade across my leg (because along with being mentally ill I’m also a dork who sews), but luckily I’m pretty lazy and the blade has needed replacing for ages and was too dull to break the skin. I didn’t really try and then I gave up, because i wasn’t depressed enough to break a seven year streak. I’ve thought a lot about it, and I’ve had friends and family members ask me why. It’s not because I have a thing for blood, or because I’m really into pain. This is the best way I can think of to explain: The late, great Barbara Park wrote one of my very favorite books, Skinnybones. I loved this book so much that I was once Alex Frankovich for Halloween. In the book, there is a part where he gets punched in the arm by his best friend, and he keeps checking it on the way home to see if it’s bleeding. And then he thinks this: “When something hurts this bad, the least it could do is bleed a little.” I do it because then I can point to it and say, here, look. This hurts. Doesn’t this look like it hurts?
I don’t consider myself suicidal, I never have. In Andrew Solomon’s life-changingly excellent book The Noonday Demon, he talks about the often-misunderstood relationship between depression and suicidality. They are definitely not the same thing, and for many people, like me, they have never co-existed. For one thing, when you’re depressed, you are way too lethargic to get up the energy to actually take your life. Personally, I’m way too petrified of death. I have also promised my mother, and since she’s gotten me through so much so far, it’s a promise I mean to keep. And if I ever did it, I would not put it past her to charge into the underworld Orpheus-style and haul my ass back, yelling at me the whole way. That’s how upset she would be.
That said, it’s been on my mind a lot lately. Not on my mind in a Google-search-of-popular-methods-and-techniques kind of a way, more in a Ryan Adams kind of a way, as I like to call it. Some days that line from ‘Dear Chicago’ runs on a loop through my head: “I’ve been thinkin’ some of suicide, but there’s bars out here for miles.” It’s punctuated by another line a little farther in, “I’m gonna die alone and sad.” I know I’m going to be a crazy cat lady someday, which worries me. I have allergies and I don’t actually like cats.
It’s not quite a voice in my head, it’s not a voice, but a sentence that has taken up residence somewhere near my ears. “I would like to kill myself.” Hush, I think. No I wouldn’t. I think about plunging a knife into my temple. Which I’m sure would be a really terrible way to do it. But once my brain has thought the briefest thought, I can’t get rid of it. Think about it: the first few times you hear something silly, you dismiss it out-of-hand. But the longer it sticks around, the more it might start to make sense. If you told the Molly of five years ago that she would now own a pair of harem pants, she would slap you in the face. But own them she does. (They’re really pretty, okay? Black, and kind of minimal, with this drapey belt…) I’m afraid if I keep listening, suicide might start to make sense. I can say that I know I will never try to kill myself, but I alsoknew that I would never buy harem pants. I am not a trustworthy person.
My past is littered with a trail of minor breakdowns. A three-hour anxiety attack in a hotel on Independence Square in Kiev after my brother’s wedding. A crack-up in the subterranean University College Dublin theatre when I sliced every finger with the shards of a broken wine glass. A gash I put in my thigh with a razor in my first grubby apartment in Brooklyn, bandaged by my roommate who found me weeping and blood-spattered, which is apparently a real turn-on to some people. A trip through Europe when I was a child that was akin to a month-long temper tantrum. A last straw upon my solitary junior-year arrival in Florence which saw me flee back to London in floods of tears. The half jolly, half sinister man at the hotel I checked in and back out of in half an hour hugged me and said, “Molly, a little girl like you should not travel alone. Always remember, the world is shit. You, you are the best!” He did not give me my money back. Trying to ask for a ticket to Paris on the overnight train in Italian would have been tricky in the best of times, but I also couldn’t breathe or stop sobbing. The clerk sniffed at me and said, in perfect English of course, “Miss, it is just a train, it is not life.”
But it was, and it is, my life. It is my life that seems to be racing past at an inhuman rate, with entire years swallowed up, and memories whose edges have been blurred by nearly twenty years of medications that no one knows the long-term effects of yet. I have lost friends due to behavior I am unable to control, and things I am unable to explain. I am a difficult person, and all I can do is apologize, and it doesn’t always make a difference.
I do not like being like this. But I have accepted it. It’s not like a cancer that you can fight, and maybe it will go away for good. For a long time I thought it was, and expended energy I didn’t have trying to draw a demarcation line between the illness and myself, pretending we were two separate entities. Now that I have accepted it as something that will most likely always be a part of me, it is easier. I do what I can to assuage the worst times. I keep busy. I do things out of the house more than I would like. I knit like a fiend. I am never without a book. I set myself immense tasks to see if I am stubborn enough to conquer them. Monsieur Proust is currently bending to my will, I bought Volume III of Remembrance of Things Past yesterday. I am bumbling my way through a sewing class at F.I.T.
There are things you have to do to keep yourself sane that other people will not like or understand, and sometimes those people end up being collateral damage. On those days when your own brain is your mortal enemy, other people are going to suffer too. You can only apologize so many times, and it’s easy to understand that there comes a point where the apologies seem meaningless, where people assume you are just willfully fucking up again and again, too lazy or unconcerned to act differently. I’m not excusing the genuinely shitty things I have done. But there are things that were not my idea, and although it may sound ludicrous for me to say there are times when I cannot control myself, it’s true.
Sometimes I do have good days, sometimes I have a run of good days. But so many days…one moment I’m dying and the next I’m fine. Mini-swings from blackest depression to mild mania wring the life out of you the way you twist water from a towel. It doesn’t stop. When the letup is the upswing, and you know that you’re too cheerful, that things aren’t actually good, even though you brace yourself against the inevitable fall, it’s always the same sucker punch. Every goddamn time it crashes into you like the first time, and you’re left reeling and confused. And once it starts, you look down and you can’t see the floor, and that makes it worse, because you just keep looking and looking and thinking oh shit not again and that just makes the abyss beneath your feet get bigger and darker by the second.
I am having a hard time writing this, because it means I have to think about it. Usually when the thought arises of My Life As It Is Now, the next thought is stop it stop it stop thinking you can’t think of this think of something else sing a song read a book be busy stop thinking please just stop.
I wish I had advice. Advice for me, advice for anyone else living through something similar. But maybe there are only two choices: keep going, or don’t. If you choose don’t, that could still be a whole range of things, it doesn’t have to be suicide. It could be quitting your job and moving home, it could be withdrawing from social life and spending every night and weekend in bed. Keeping going, just putting one foot in front of the other, sounds simple. It’s not. But it’s what I’m choosing. I hope I keep choosing it.
Tags: depression, health, mental illness, molly pohlig
Oh god.
This is…
It’s hard to comment on other peoples experience with their mental illness except to say: Yes, I know, yes, I’m here, and though the individual effects may be different we’re still trying to find our way in the same wilderness, with only a faded, incomplete map and a broken compass.
I’ll leave signs as I go, if you’ll do the same.
(Low medication, not suicidal just don’t want to exist, possibly Unipolar, possibly BPD here)
You summed up my feelings for this post, perfectly.
(ADD, shadows of manic depressive, former low medication, here).
This spoke to me so hard:
“There are things you have to do to keep yourself sane that other people will not like or understand, and sometimes those people end up being collateral damage. On those days when your own brain is your mortal enemy, other people are going to suffer too. You can only apologize so many times, and it’s easy to understand that there comes a point where the apologies seem meaningless, where people assume you are just willfully fucking up again and again, too lazy or unconcerned to act differently.”
through the past year and a half of school + work, I’ve been so tired and stressed that it took my mental health into a bad place. My husbands shitty behavior (involving drinking and drugs) was usually the “last straw” in this mess and now I’m the “crazy wife” from various public outbursts. He’s now in treatment for his stuff, as I have been since I started seeing that things weren’t working well in my head, and they’re getting (much) better. But I’ve got this handful of shitty situations now in my past that haunt me. I’m glad I’m not alone, and that there are other people who have “collateral damage” friends.
I am sorry and this is true and you said it well. Why does science really know nothing about the human brain? It seems like we should spend all the money figuring that out, rather than cure toenail fungus or make eyelashes grow. But that is a subject for another day.
Each hour upright is something. Each minute of pushing away the demons that suggest, oh so gently, how you deserve to suffer and die, is a triumph. My thoughts are with you.
Thank you so, so much for writing this. I loved it. I loved the line about your dad, “Like with a lost thing, I still look for him all the time, and I never find him.” I loved the line about cutting oneself, “I do it because then I can point to it and say, here, look. This hurts. Doesn’t this look like it hurts?” Oh my god, both lines perfectly illustrate what I imagine those experiences would be like, and both lines made me cry. My husband and I both have depression, but I’m not on anti-depressants and my husband is, and sometimes he doesn’t understand sometimes how bad I’m hurting. If I could point to a wound it would be so much easier to explain. Just, thanks for writing this. Life is so hard for some of us sometimes.
Thanks Molly. Much of what you wrote (not all, but most) resonates with me too, and other people I know. I have no magic solution, no, not even close. But thanks for writing and making me and others feel a little less alien from everyone else.
This is breathtaking.
I am sorry and it is true and thank you.
(Generalised anxiety disorder, bipolar II, others yet to get their Diagnosis, over here).
as said above – I’ll leave signs along the way if you will.
Oh, ouch, my heart. Fellow Prozac baby! Wonderful, wonderful you.
I was diagnosed with depression at 7 (hi, former doctors, turns out I have ADD just like my older brother, but girls didn’t deserve that diagnosis in the 1980s, apparently) and my entire catalog of childhood memories is vague and cloudy, with huge empty swaths of time during which I know I cried a whole bunch, and other stuff happened too, I just don’t know what. I’m grateful to have survived my childhood but I’d also like to remember, like, 3rd grade.
Looking for the official giving up place too, sometimes. And I want a time machine so I can tell wee Kat to stop believing that all the other kids had just as much chaos and pain flying around inside their skulls and still managed to be so normal so maybe she should just suck it up and stop crying. God, I was (and am) so mean to myself.
Wonderful piece.
Sidebar: I wasn’t diagnosed with dysthymia/depression or ADD in elementary school. (Although my resource-specialist mom suspected ADD, and I’ve since been diagnosed with both) I remember a handful of moments of first, third and fourth grade, the rest is a blank. My mom has photos of me with strange children she swears were my friends. It’s actually not that weird to forget stuff from that young. Or anyway, your medication may not be the sole thing to blame.
This is a beautiful piece, and one with which I identify very strongly. That said, the graphic descriptions of self-harm are triggering, and, as someone who gets that thought in my head that won’t go away and maybe eventually I’ll act on it, I really think there should be a trigger warning on this, please.
Thank you for this. I'm so glad that you're here and that you have this gift and that you can share it with us.
Holy god, I experience so much of the same stuff. The years swallowed up, the not remembering. Like, I don’t remember most of 2000. I remember only summer and fall of 2001. Every time I climbed out and forced myself to do the normal people thing – job and self-sufficiency – I would think and hope it’s the last time, but then BAM, back in the hole. This round doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to end.
The freaking out even when you’re in public. At my last job, I had to go and stay in a supply room a bunch of times, until I could face humans again.
And yeah, it’s hard to wrap your head around having a mental illness. I fought hard to keep it at bay since I was a teen, and I never even thought of myself as someone who has a mental illness – it’s just normal life, and it contains a certain amount of struggling with things other people don’t seem to be struggling with, and I have to do normal even though it takes everything I got.
And with time, I ran out of energy to do the normal, and now I have to face it and acknowledge that it’s not going to go away.
I was abused as a child, and I have PTSD as well as major depression, but for me, it doesn’t make any difference. Doesn’t make the thing I have to constantly wrestle with any easier.
God, the dreams. Holy freaking moly. I don’t think I have ever had good dreams. And they are so long and florid, it’s like sitting through all Lord of the Rings movies at once, except the content is an unholy mix of Lovecraft, Kafka and early Stephen King. Wake up all drained out like Lucy Westenra, but no handsome, brave men offering their blood to perk me up, like, ever.
I feel you on quitting Effexor. That thing is vicious.
I feel you on quitting Effexor. That thing is vicious.
Sometimes i think taking effexor was worse than not taking anything at all. especially the mornings i wasn’t exactly on time with it and would spend the first class or two of the day shaking and unable to focus on my teacher. Quitting it was even worse.
Also it caused synesthesia for me, weirdly.
Effexor really helps me, despite side-effects, but I don’t like being drug-dependent, so I went off it a few times. I think the first time I didn’t know enough to titrate and it was a bad scene for a couple of weeks.
I just want to say thank you. I lost a good friend to mental illness earlier this year, and right now I’m trying to work through a separation agreement with a mentally ill spouse. Reading this was incredibly helpful. For what they are worth, good wishes, and thank you so so much for sharing.
Thank you for writing this and having the courage to share it with us. Your writing is very clear and powerful, and I hope to read more of it. I wish the best for you.
It’s not quite a voice in my head, it’s not a voice, but a sentence that has taken up residence somewhere near my ears. “I would like to kill myself.” Hush, I think. No I wouldn’t.
It’s so scary to admit, out loud, that I’ve had these thoughts.
I’ve felt that there’s a small person living in my brain, who isn’t me, who whispered in my ear “what if you took all those sleeping pills? what would happen?” I told that small person, “I would never do that.” My psychiatrist told me that’s a good sign – that even if those thoughts come to me, I can reject them.
It’s not the easy choice, but it’s also the choice I’ve made. One foot in front of the other.
Fuck.
Almost every word of this resonated with me. I’ve never been able to easily put into words how my chronic depression fucks up my life. Thank you. I’m not going to be able to not appropriate the two excerpts below in my own life, sorry.
“On those days when your own brain is your mortal enemy, other people are going to suffer too. You can only apologize so many times, and it’s easy to understand that there comes a point where the apologies seem meaningless, where people assume you are just willfully fucking up again and again, too lazy or unconcerned to act differently.”
“Depression is not sadness, or even grief. But when depression collides with sadness or grief, it’s like a hideous chemical experiment that can’t be undone. A poisoning with no antidote. The circumstances of my life right now are dissatisfying. But mental illness transforms them into something much worse.”
Depression is not sadness, or even grief. But when depression collides with sadness or grief, it’s like a hideous chemical experiment that can’t be undone. A poisoning with no antidote.
Suffering an episode of serious, major depression while also suffering a breakup of a relationship that I’d had for seven years, while also being forced to move twice in four months? I honestly think it’s a wonder I didn’t try to hurt myself. I mean, more than I did.
It was a poison, I felt I’d been poisoned, I was constantly trying fruitlessly to explain to others that I was dying, slowly though, on the inside, not all-at-once like dying should be. But it was hard to translate, this struggle. And when I said things like “I think I’m dying”, no one understood what that meant.
I didn’t, stupidly, go seek therapy then. Not even when the anxiety attacks came in the morning and I’d throw up as soon as I realized where I was and remembered what was happening to me. I didn’t take any medication, I thought this was normal, just like I thought it was normal to get two hours’ sleep a night for weeks at a time. I thought that coming to work every day with puffy eyes because I’d been crying for four hours before my shift was perfectly ordinary.
Things got better, eventually, but I look back at that year and a half like a black hole that I’ve just barely crawled out of. There is so much I could relate to in this essay that it brought tears to my eyes. I get it. I do.
/hugs
Geez, Louise, do I identify with this post. Here are my scattered, disjoined thoughts:
First, this is kind of a helpful suicidal scale: http://natashatracy.com/mental-illness-issues/sui…. I can’t advice you here because I’m at a constant 7, but it helped me to talk about these thoughts. They get worse if you bottle them up.
Like you, I’ve taken many medications (20 and counting) and have yet to find the right mix. The medication failures reinforce the idea that I deserve to feel depressed. If I didn’t deserve to feel worse, then something would help me feel better.
“My brain is tired, my heart is tired. If I knew where to go to officially give up, I would.” Agreed….just agreed.
As someone who does feel numb, it’s the same as not feeling numb…well, it’s better in some ways but worse in others.
I also constantly consider the decision to keep going or to give up. I don’t have an answer because I sincerely believe that it won’t get better. I keep going to avoid disappointing, upsetting, and angering my family and friends, which isn’t a great reason because it makes me irrationally angry at my family and friends.
Regardless, this comment is pointless and rambling. Thanks for the post. It’s a good one.
My God, my God, my God, Molly, I could have written almost every word of this (in spirit if not so well expressed). I want to print it up and carry it with me to hand to new people I meet: “Hi, I might want to be friends with you, but there’s something you should know.”
Most resonant lines:
“It’s not that I’m aspiring to be declared clinically insane. But maybe once you are, you can relax. You can stop thinking about all of the things that you are never going to do, because you’re clinically insane, and it’s no longer expected of you.”
“It’s not quite a voice in my head, it’s not a voice, but a sentence that has taken up residence somewhere near my ears. “I would like to kill myself.” Hush, I think. No I wouldn’t.”
“There are things you have to do to keep yourself sane that other people will not like or understand, and sometimes those people end up being collateral damage. On those days when your own brain is your mortal enemy, other people are going to suffer too. You can only apologize so many times, and it’s easy to understand that there comes a point where the apologies seem meaningless, where people assume you are just willfully fucking up again and again, too lazy or unconcerned to act differently. I’m not excusing the genuinely shitty things I have done. But there are things that were not my idea, and although it may sound ludicrous for me to say there are times when I cannot control myself, it’s true.”
“Mini-swings from blackest depression to mild mania wring the life out of you the way you twist water from a towel. It doesn’t stop. When the letup is the upswing, and you know that you’re too cheerful, that things aren’t actually good, even though you brace yourself against the inevitable fall, it’s always the same sucker punch. Every goddamn time it crashes into you like the first time, and you’re left reeling and confused. And once it starts, you look down and you can’t see the floor, and that makes it worse, because you just keep looking and looking and thinking oh shit not again and that just makes the abyss beneath your feet get bigger and darker by the second.”
Thank you for reminding me how bad I don’t have it. My weight is heavy but others bear far more.
This is one of the most similar-to-me descriptions of depression I’ve seen yet. The constant exhaustion and being too worn out by fighting the exhaustion…
” For one thing, when you’re depressed, you are way too lethargic to get up the energy to actually take your life.”
was me this morning. now i’m at work and busy distracting myself from it, but when i pulled into the parking garage, the railing on the fifth floor looked awfully tempting. but it was too much work to bother, and then my family would have to deal with all my bills and everything and i don’t like the idea of leaving them with my mess to clean up (they already take care of me too much).
i wanted to talk to someone about it, how i never know if i step back from the railing because i really don’t want to die, or i’ve just been told “suicide is bad” and “it’s wrong to think about it” so many times that the guilt of breaking a Major Rule + the Too Tired To Care Enough keeps me from doing it. but i don’t want people to think i’m just trying to get attention, and it’s not like i have the energy to go through with it anyway.
so i guess that’s why i’m posting here. to have a place to express this without feeling like i’m going to be accused of acting out for attention, or closely analyzed by a therapist. it is what it is, and i’m tired of the weight of these feelings inside my chest.
i’ve been off and on medications for a long time, too, but never so many. i’ve been taking Savella for a couple years now, and it worked amazingly well. the first few months, at least. not so much anymore. and i missed two doses Sunday night/Monday morning, which is why i’m feeling so low right now, i’m sure.
but i’m also pretty sure that trying to maintain a regular work schedule is wearing me down, and i’m terrified of what will happen to me if i actually manage to get a 40 hour full-time job, instead of the 32 hours i’m currently doing. (i functioned much better back when i only worked 4 days a week, too, instead of spreading my hours out over 5 days) (but 24 hours at $11 isn’t enough to live on) (and lord knows i can barely keep up with this job, which i *like*, so there’s no way i can pick up a second job)
Thanks for sharing your experience. How so many of us manage to work full or near-full time jobs is amazing to me. Sometimes it feels like I’m pushing myself so hard just to work a 40-hour week schedule. I wish there was a better system out there to financially support people with difficulties like ours.
Thank you, and yes. The 40+ hours of working just to stay afloat is killer. I floundered at university because of my depression and anxiety, and now I don’t have the background to get the kinds of jobs I know I’d enjoy (and be good at), so I’m stuck working low wage receptionist gigs. And there’s no way for me to get the background I need, because I can’t afford to quit my job and go back to school part-time. It’s an ouroboros of suck.
Replying super-late, but this is actually the reason I had to quit a job as a delivery driver, despite having nothing else lined up. It would have been way too easy to just not brake, or to let my scooter veer out of control, and that terrified me.
There’s no race, there’s only a runner
Just keep one foot in front of the other
There’s no race there’s only a runner
1, 2, 3 even when you get tired
Just keep one foot in front of the other
There’s no race, no ending in sight
No second too short, no window too tight
Just turn off the lights when you leave
‘Cause we’ve got everything we’re gonna need
We’re on the run, we’re on the run, we’re on the run child
We gotta run, we gotta run, we gotta run child.
(depression, anxiety, overthought and overwrought)
“It’s not that I’m aspiring to be declared clinically insane. But maybe once you are, you can relax. You can stop thinking about all of the things that you are never going to do, because you’re clinically insane, and it’s no longer expected of you.”
I have this thought all the time. Thank you, Molly. I think a lot of us are feeling less alone right now.
How incredibly brave of you to put all of this into words.
I’m coming back to this essay repeatedly, finding myself giving thumbs up to so many comments, not because I’m stoked about all of our ordeals, but because I’m so glad that we’ve got a space to discuss it and maybe feel (more) normal for a bit. I can honestly say I’m proud to be a part of this community.
Thirded. I keep refreshing the page and hoping there will be more excellent comments.
Not waving but drowning
Just want to thank everyone for the comments. Feeling incredibly heartened right now.
your essay is amazing, as is the level of fortitude and bad-assness that you have in handling your mental state. you’ve just made yourself a bunch of fans (and friends).
Thank you. For writing this. It must’ve been so difficult. I want to print copies and staple them everywhere. I want to share this on every site possible, email it to my entire contact list. Just thank you.
Thank you for this. It’s not quite right to say I’m glad this rings true to so many of us, but I’m glad we have a space to acknowledge it when that’s so hard to do in daily life.
Fuck me, this is good.
12 years on Prozac, Ativan…then Prozac (more) and Wellbutrin which immediately jetted me into a manic episode that lasted six months, then more Prozac and no Wellbutrin until I’d run the Prozac train into the earths core and was in the worst depression I’d had since I had the near psychotic break post partum.
Now I , too, take Pristiq ( 4 years) and Trazadol and just said to my doctor: “What if THIS stops working? Because some days I think it may be waning….”
I’m 44, darlin’. I started therapy when I was 19.
I had two major depressive episodes in the 6 years it took me to do the PhD.
While I’m not a cutter, I am a scratcher. I dig at my skin – usually under very hot showers. Someone I loved once exclaimed in horror at my shredded chest and legs and all I could say was….that it helps relieve some of the pressure in my brain.
I must plan my days to keep busy because not having a plan = either sleeping or stepping off the carefully tended path of my sanity. There are things, just beyond the line of sight, that wait for me. They rejoice when I step off the path.
It’s not that I am suicidal, but frequently wish to stop existing. To silence all the shit that spins, endlessly, in my brain. Over and over and over and over, back and forth, up and down.
My tether to the world is my daughter, now 16. I forge ahead because I must. Not because I have some sugary vision of my role as mother, but because I am aware of the damage that my self removal would do to her. During the days I would plan my exit, I would think to her learning that her mother had bled out in the bathtub.
The irony of having this fucked up brain chemistry is that we exert *more* energy in trying to rebalance. I try harder to compensate for the weeks/months/years of absence. No one can punish me the way I can.
I envy the normals. The people who just walk through life without this thing inside of them. They take their ability to brush things off, or sleep like a normal person, or recover from disappointment for granted.
Not me. I haunt the wreckage of my life with a tenacity that is the envy of a harpy.
Be well, sweetness, and know that there are so many of us walking around in our meat suits wrangling these same things…that live just beyond our eyeline.
Thank you. I know we’re not alone, but it helps to be reminded of it.
I just want to say that I will eagerly read as many essays on living with mental illness as you guys can publish. This is so helpful and important.
Thank you so much for you honesty. I have been on both ends of this, growing up with a mom who had schizo-affective disorder plus battling my own depression as a young adult. Who knows what causes any of it, personally I have found sober living/yoga/being and being very very kind to myself to be extremely helpful tools. Much love to you and thanks again for sharing this.
Hi MistyEyes, I just wanted to say hello because my experience mirrors yours. Schizoaffective mother, depressive self. It is the toughest most energy draining exercise there is to be kind to myself, but it is the best one I’ve found so far. Wishing you well.
Thank you! And I apologize – in retrospect I realize that “gee that side-effect sounds nifty” is not a particularly mature or helpful response.
Wow thank you so much for writing this. It resonates with me so much.
And FUCK EFFEXOR.
I can’t believe how much this described my life, and the little Effexor beads were the icing on the cake. For some reason I had never thought anyone else would really do that because you aren’t supposed to. God this piece is spookily similar to me. Bravo for writing it so well and being brave enough to publish it.
Thank you. I have a lot of stuff I’m struggling with lately, and not feeling alone helps.
holy fuck those last two paragraphs just hit home so hard for me.
much love and strength
holy fuck those last two paragraphs just hit home so hard for me.
much love and strength
So ironic that I should find this today, after having yet another exhausting discussion with my mother about “what’s wrong with you” and “well, what’s the answer?” Going to print this out and let her read it, not that I expect it will have much impact – it’s a family/generation gap around my Pit of Despair.
Danielle, my mom is the same way, and the best thing I ever did was stop having those conversations with her. Those conversations are part of the problem.
So ironic that I should find this today, after having yet another exhausting discussion with my mother about "what's wrong with you" and "well, what's the answer?" Going to print this out and let her read it, not that I expect it will have much impact – it's a family/generation gap around my Pit of Despair.
This was really great.
This was really great.
So well put. Especially the part where you talk about suicidal thoughts; you give the best explanation I’ve come across. It’s not that the depressed person WANTS to, necessarily, but you can’t trust yourself to keep that thought from growing and developing. Thank you.
So well put. Especially the part where you talk about suicidal thoughts; you give the best explanation I've come across. It's not that the depressed person WANTS to, necessarily, but you can't trust yourself to keep that thought from growing and developing. Thank you.
Gosh this is incredible. You are an incredibly generous writer. I feel like sending this to my loved ones to say, see? I promise I’m not exaggerating, and I also promise I’m not going to leave you, but I promise you when I said I want to bury myself in a hole and stop breathing and come out as somebody different, I mean it. I don’t want pills for this, I don’t want a counsellor asking me ‘do you think it would be easier if your mother was dead?’, I just want to be buried under the earth and grow out as somebody different, or maybe still me, but the me without a fog in my brain.
Dear Molly
In the 15 years I’ve been shunted about the mental health system this is hands down the. Best. Ever piece I’ve read describing what mental illness feels like. I have come back and read this so many times and the details are so exact I feel like you ARE me. You don’t write with an ounce of self pity or artifice. For the first time I am telling some people about what this really feels like and it’s amazing to be able to give them this article. I don’t think you’ll ever know how much you’ve done for me and the rest of the comments reflect my feelings too – Fuck Elizabeth wurtzel and mental illness memoirists with books and awards. This short piece is worth more than all the rest combined. I am going to print out so many copies to give to family and friends. Please please please write some more. I will be checking to see if you have for the rest of my life probably. You deserve a serious literary award or something. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Each and every one of these comments is amazing, but this one just poked a big hole in the big grey cloud I’ve been under this week. I will keep writing, and I so love the thought of leaving signs along the way.
(Late reply sorry)
*so surprised at the (retrospectively self evident) realisation that something I wrote in a comment could actually affect someone’s life in a positive way. *
I can relate to a lot of things in this piece – there were so many things you expressed beautifully and painfully, and it was such a relief to read it and then to read the comments below with other people relating and sharing. Lately I have been feeling so isolated and so lonely because the few friends I have left after my breakdown haven’t tried to understand or actively support me and instead just ignore it (and sometimes me) so that my illness sits there like an elephant in the room while I try my hardest to be happy and engaging and light so that they feel at ease. So thank you so so much for writing this with such honesty and reassuring me that I’m not wholly alone.
‘I spent years racking my brain, trying to remember, wondering if there’s someone I could blame in all of this.’
That paragraph about wondering if there was some hidden childhood trauma really hit home. I’ve wondered about that too, I even had a dream about it once and for a split second after I woke up I almost felt relieved. Then I cried because that’s a horrible thing to think and I cringe at how disrespectful it is to people who have gone through such trauma. I feel ashamed admitting it.
Thank you so much for writing this. You are wonderful and brave and I am so sorry that you have to fight this fight.
Thank you especially for the lines “I’m afraid if I keep listening, suicide might start to make sense. I can say that I know I will never try to kill myself, but I also knew that I would never buy harem pants. I am not a trustworthy person.” I wish I didn’t relate so much.
Thank you so much. I don’t know what else to say.
I have major depression. Some of the meds I've tried (esp geodon) made me hear things that weren't there. I'm on a cocktail of 3 antidepressants and still often feel life is hopeless and I can't stop hating myself. I've tried numbing myself with alcohol, benzodiazepines and opiates and have fought addiction with all of them.
Id say about 90% of the time I just exist Ya of course I go through the motions and pretend to be (sane)… I keep myself occupied with distractions I guess anything to prevent unwanted mind wondering around in an eternity of negativity and loathing. Like you, all I want to do is take a well deserved vacation from myself, with my more gratifying existence known as sleep, though I cant do it at night! I find myself sleeping from 7am to 3 or 4 pm but never feel like im well rested no matter the length of sleep or rest. no energy no interest in anything ….. I know I need to stay positive or pick myself up so Im told but it seems no matter how joyful or positive I try to be The gps of my mind brings me right back down the same old worn out treacherous foggy off road destination and of course just like any road that seems like it never ends one has to wounder how much gas we have left or is the automobile going to break down b4 we even make it to a gas station?
Though I have never thought of cutting or hurting myself , Im stuck in a routine of one meal a day supper and then mindless late night /morn eating b4 I sleep when I feel full I think I sleep better? I dont know why.Everyone around me has got sick of the apologies of course. up to this point my life has been one long long down hill slope.
around the age of 8 I started smoking pot and cigarettes then graduated to much harder( distractions) all the way until 3 years ago when I stopped self medicating I put my self through intensive out patient program to kick the routine of self-destruction. so of course I have no real friends because drug associates are not friends and anyone who was or is close family or what not I seem to just push them away?
So yes im sober but still just as much self-destructive emotionally still. using drugs at least gave me a temporary sense of chemically induced joy or even empty happiness which I know was just forcing serotonin to create a distraction or temporary seatbelt for my anxieties…. I guess I have no idea where this is going I guess also I have no idea where im going but I cant even create a vision of the future I never could which I assure you is very confusing and sad. I have ptsd and depression, meds only seem to make me more drowsy and never seem to see the supposed therapeutic potential of which these meds where designed…hmmm sunshine in pill form sounds so attractive but it has yet to allow its rays to pierce this dark cloud that has become more of me then..me!
I have become very good at pretending to be happy and A ok when In public by creating a overly funny overly smiling distraction I guess to hide my true feelings? this has been my whole life even when on drugs I acted that way. to the untrained eye It would seem that I was completely fine if being observed by strangers I could entertain for hours or as long as I could keep up the act and honestly my distraction character I created which has become me for the last 34 years it worked for me I held spot lights, ladies loved me the whole nine but its like I can no ;longer preform to many kinks in my armor its really hard to pretend your happy when your eyes show sadness … but now I stay home…… thanks for reading if anyone out there would pray for me to for once in my life be better. THANK YOU