Those of us with the types of depression that ebb and flow, insidiously creeping up when we least expect it, might not have our shields up and ready when the tide comes in. But a few months ago I happened to feel another bout of depression looming before it knocked me off my feet and accidentally discovered a strategy for fighting it.
I’ve always had the belief that all of this is my fault, everything that I’ve experienced while at the mercy of my own brain. I believe in a sort of Old Testament karma, only as it applies to me.
Postpartum depression is the moon landing, because even though you are like 99% sure people have walked around up there (I mean, we have dirt, right? Moon rocks? Why would science lie about this?), one day some person will come up to you and tell you that it's not real, which means that it never happened to anybody, least of all you.
This week was the full feelings buffet. Remember, you can always come back for more:
Celeste Ng called How to Make Yogurt in Manila by Grace Talusan ‘beautiful and moving’ (on the Twitter machine) so you don’t have to take our word for its awesomeness.
“Things That Are Meant To Make You Feel Safe And Comfortable In A Psych Ward That Just Make You Feel Crazier.” Episode by Naadeyah Haseeb will tear
Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer to advice@the-toast.net, with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line. Dear Spinster,My unhappiness and depression have accumulated so much that they have blown up my life. I go out for long walks at night when I can't sleep to think about all my passive self-hatred has taken from me, and try not to let it lead me into the nearest…
AXIS 1 Anxiety as Birthright So Jesus asked [the mute boy’s] father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood.” —Mark 9:21 For Maren and Nathaniel—may you be spared. —Scott Stossel’s dedication to his children, My Age of Anxiety We entered in together. Not like a man and woman in marriage. Nor a boy and his saw at the base of a tree. I’m convinced that even as my head…
What does it mean to have a crazy mom? In the Feb. 2015 issue of JAMA Psychiatry, researchers published their findings from an extraordinary longitudinal study. “Familial Pathways to Early-Onset Suicide Attempt: A 5.6-Year Prospective Study” followed 701 children of 334 parents who had attempted suicide. This study is unique in both its scope and its duration. Its findings show that having a parent who attempted suicide, even controlling for other factors, “conveys a…
Elizabeth Mills' previous work for The Toast can be found here.
When I was eighteen years old, after a year of happiness and firsts and fumbles and pain, I broke up with my girlfriend. That moment was a catalyst – the lit match to the gasoline, the first pebble of the avalanche, the final crack in a foundation poured out wrong to begin with. Over the course of the next eight years,
Previously in this series. Before there was #thestruggle, there was The Struggle, or more accurately “I’m struggling.” #thestruggle was sleeping through an alarm, a bathroom with every stall taken when you had a narrow sliver of time to use it. “I’m struggling” was crying every time I heard my alarm, or in that bathroom stall typing that message, or in my car as Christmas music played through my speakers. My favorite season, my birthday,…
Previously in this series. I don’t usually write about depression. I write. I write a lot. I write a lot about pop culture. I never write about me. I used to be on anti-depressants. I started them around the end of my first marriage. I was prescribed Prozac, the standard generic pill of the time. The problem was, I didn’t have health insurance. Yet I found a way to prove to the City of…
Previously in this series: Old Man Winter Ate My Sense of Adventure and Tips for Dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder. I don’t remember exactly when I realized that something was indeed wrong, but it must have been sometime just after my thirteenth birthday. A few months prior, my father and I had arrived in Toronto from our small university town in India. I had little idea as to what awaited me, although I had visited Canada…
Previously in this series. I’m a sufferer of Seasonal Affective Disorder. I’ve had depression off and on my entire life, and as I age, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) has become a reoccurring problem. Over the years I’ve developed a number of strategies to deal with it. While last year was one of my worst years for SAD, this year has been good so far -- mostly because I’ve implemented the strategies that follow. First, know…
I’ve always been a fan of adventures. As a girl growing up on the Great Plains, my earliest playtime memories are a sort of Little House in the Big Woods-meets-Xena mishmash. I was going to go on incredible adventures and consume the world with the kind of relentless tenacity that only prairie life can cultivate. As I grew, my fondness for adventures did, too. I devoured books. I played Dungeons and Dragons. I got engaged…
The first thing I ever did in my life was crash a party. It was two days shy of my sister’s third birthday in 1985 and she was celebrating early with a party at McDonald’s when I expressed what I am now convinced is the earliest recorded symptom of histrionic personality disorder by insisting on entry into the world before she got to blow out her candles. I was born two days later
