Plus, I got depression

Let's talk about my feelings

Señor Mojito [yesterday]: You don’t have some terrible childhood trauma that you haven’t told me about?

H-Bird: No; no.  That’s not how it works unfortunately.

Señor Mojito [today, pointing at my grandmother's glory box]: What exactly do you keep in there?

H-Bird: All my sheet music.  No, wait: childhood traumas!

The señor has spent time with me while I’ve been under the wheel before, but not since we have been living together.  He is coping very well, but I think it is unsettling and a little scary for him.  Depression doesn’t typically respond to the normal social cues, and once I’m down a rabbit hole of despair, even for just a few hours, it’s difficult to elicit from me predictable interactions.

Yesterday was quite hard, not least because I’d been keeping a grip so fierce at work, where student and staff needs continue to amass despite the alleged holiday season.  Sprung from that trap, I was variously grumpy, shouty, moody and weepy.  A successful visit to the supermarket felt like we’d surmounted a minor mountain range, although I recognise that such feelings also owe something to the time of the year.  (There were a lot of people on those premises laughing a little too loudly for no reason at all, and even more standing apparently helpless in the middle of aisles, blocking the way with their trolleys as their minds reeled at confectionery and decorations alike.)

I tend to think that depression doesn’t actually manufacture such feelings under its own steam alone: we are all capable when sane of feeling weepy, moody, shouty and grumpy, and there are plenty of ways in which one can feel terrible existential despair without being a nihilist or mentally ill in the course of a day.  What depression does seems to me quite similar to what hormones can do: peel back with a breathtaking rapidity the self’s outer claddings of functional optimism and equilibrium.  All those feelings that need to stay buried in order for us to go about our day–the fear, the horror–get called upon abundantly and unnecessarily.  Depressives spend time in the shadowlands that the mentally well need only enter in generally dark hours.  It’s ridiculous and infuriating, but there it is.

I will be alright in a bit, as I usually am.  I rather wish the señor didn’t have to see me like this, but it won’t be the first or last time I slide this way.  I am grateful–indeed, I think we both are–that there is around us and within us an abundance of black humour through which to view my mental fragility, not least of which is the canon of Roast Beef in Achewood.  His sufferings, though fictitious, are far worse than mine.

• Roast Beef’s Classic Depression-T
• A Sideshow Quality Mind
• Going to the Grocery Store
• Beef needs his S.A.D. lamp
• A dude from Circumstances