I kind of feel about describing depression like I feel about travel photography. Stick with me on this. When I travel, I don't take pictures unless they have me and/or my traveling companions in them. When I travelled to Turkey with my sister, she was constantly taking pictures of our surroundings. The beautiful, other-worldly rock formations in Cappadocia, the Aya Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Nemrut Dagi at sunrise. It didn't make any sense to me. Buy a postcard I thought to myself. How can a picture that you take capture these things as good as or better than a professional photographer?!*
In other words, in both travel photography and writing about depression, someone else always seems to do it better, so why bother? I have read some descriptions of what it feels like to be depressed that made me want to make photocopies and hand it out to everyone I've ever met and say, SEE!! This is what I've been trying to tell you!
A description that always comes back to me when I'm in my darket places is one by Tracy Thompson (author of The Beast and The Ghost in the House). She says that depression is like "a psychic freight train of roaring despair". This one particularly resonates with me because sometimes I can hear the freight train coming. I'm doing fine for a little while, be it minutes, days, or weeks, when all of the sudden I hear a distant whistle. I feel the ground start to rumble. I close my eyes and know it's coming, and there's nothing I can do to stop it. I want to get away, but I'm tied to the tracks. And what sucks about being a mom is that my husband and kids are tied down with me. All I can do is wait as the rumbling gets louder and louder and the ground shakes more and more. And then it hits.
Another unbelievably eloquent quote I just stumbled on through the miracle of Google. Psychcentral.com made a list in 2007 of the top blogs about depression, and one of them was a blog called Save Your Sanity for Later by a girl named Erika who describes depression this way:
Being severely depressed is having things in your brain randomly light on fire. If you’re severely depressed, these fires happen so frequently that all you have time to do is run around trying to get the fires to go out. Sometimes you have water for the fires, sometimes all you can do is try to light a backfire. Sometimes nothing works, and you want to die. Sometimes nothing works, and you live. You can’t tell what’s going to happen, but you can’t ignore the fires because they’re FIRES. You have to put them out. Trying to get back to normal is like building a house. To build a house, you need blueprints, materials, labor, and know-how/experience. I have some of these things, but not all at the same time. And all my experience is in putting out fires. Not building.”
Amazing, right? The above quote pretty much makes me want to give up on the whole blog-writing thing because it says it better than I could ever hope to.
But here's the thing about travel photography. When you take a picture of something, it's a picture of something that you were there to see. That picture of the Aya Sophia that my sister took? It's gorgeous. And it's the Aya Sophia that we saw, that day, that will never be the same. It's special because we were there to see it in a way that no one else will ever see it.
I guess it's the same way with feelings. While Erika and Tracy Thompson describe depression in a way that is achingly familiar, it's not EXACTLY what it feels like for me. Only I can explain exactly what it feels like for me to be a mom and depressed. So I'm going to try and get over my insecurities and give it a shot. Actually, many shots, as they come to me. Here goes.
It's like trying to defuse a bomb. While a fire rages around you. And a the fire alarm is going off. And children are screaming. People are huddling around you, jostling you, telling you to hurry up and defuse the bomb. You learned how to defuse this bomb once in the past, but you can't concentrate enough in all the chaos to remember how to do it. You're concentrating SO HARD, and you know that everything depends on you being able to do it.
This description is how I feel when I'm in my kitchen trying to make dinner. The kids might be happy for the moment, quietly (or not so quietly) playing in the living room. But I know it could end at any moment, the crying will start and I still just need a few more minutes to get dinner in the oven. To me, I'm in the fire, defusing the bomb. To my 9-year-old daughter, it looks like a peaceful afternoon and I'm calmly occupied with making dinner. So when she asks me an innocent question like: Mom, what are we having for dinner, and I turn around screaming: Can you just wait a SECOND?!? it doesn't make a lot of sense to her. But if you saw what I saw: the bomb, the fire, the screaming, my answer would make a lot more sense.
Here's another one, just because I just finished watching The Return of the King**:
It's like when Frodo and Sam are trying to make it up Mount Doom to finally destroy The Ring. The Ring looks like just a normal ring, right? If you weren't carrying it, you wouldn't know what a horrible, heavy burden it is, slowly taking over Frodo's mind. The audience (who has been watching the movie for what seems like years and is super sick of Frodo and his whining, and his creepy shiny eyes, but that's another rant altogether) wants to scream GOOOOOOOOOOOO already!!! The top of the mountain is so close!! Just run! But he can't. The ring is weighing him down, making every step painful and the next seem impossible. The simple task of walking, as easy as it looks from the outside, is just too much to accomplish.
So there. My first two attempts. There will be many more. I'd love to hear some other "It's like..."'s from my imaginary readers. If anyone ever stumbles across this blog I'd love to hear what it's like for you to be depressed. You can e-mail it to me at crazymama4115@gmail.com or put it in the comments section and I'll publish them here under future "It's like..."'s.
*I should say that my sister came back from Turkey with some truly beautiful pictures. She is an amazing photographer.
**Lest you think I am a science-fiction, fantasy watching freak (not that there's anything wrong with that) I have to say that this was all my husband's idea. He got a vasectomy last week and has had a bad recovery. Of course, since this was all my idea, he has blamed the loss of his manhood on me, and I have attempted to make it up to him by letting him choose what movie to watch during his recovery. I thought we would be going to see the final Harry Potter in the theaters (which would be painful enough for me as it is) but instead he chose the DIRECTOR'S EXTENDED VERSION of all the Lord of the Rings movies. Sweet baby Jesus, those movies are long. I secretly enjoyed them.
