"You catch your breath and winter starts again"

[omnia_mutantur]

seeing this in a random stranger-but-for-lj's journal made me tense up a little and weep a little.

"I suffer from depression. I am a strong, intelligent, capable person. I am neither weak nor stupid nor lazy. Depression is an illness that millions of people suffer from and there is nothing wrong with admitting you need help sometimes.

If you've ever felt this way, copy this and paste it into your LJ. Maybe if we start talking about how we survive depression, we'll realize we aren't alone."

performing functionality doesn't mean i'm not hurting. like lyric's knee, or anyone else's chronic injury, physical or mental, you forget how to evaluate pain, because you can't afford to stop and do so.



there's difficulty for me in talking about depression, because we live in such a medicated culture that everything ends up being called depression, and it's assumed that...it's hard to say without sounding like i'm vilifying other people's pain or ennobling my own...

i have a problem. in fact, i have a lot of problems. functionality does not mean that the problems have gone away, only that i have learned how to deal with them and am only recently come to a place where instead of repressing and suppressing and faking all over the place, i can actually try and figure out why i have such limited range of emotional movement.

statements like the italicized above make me feel like i should lay claim to every possible label i've adopted, behavior i've enacted.

and then i get into the same dangerous land of a previous post, because the laundry looks like i was living out a different lifetime movie every six months or so.

i try not to talk about my past. in part because i don't know if i'm telling the truth, so much has slipped through the cracks of bourbon and zoloft and blood. in part because i don't know how to talk about it without sounding like i want pity. and pity has always sounded to me like someone thinks they could have done better in the same situation, and i have enough balls to want to dare the world to try. i'm not proud of how i got through my hell, but i'm proud of the fact that i did.

how do you lay claim to things without sounding like you're playing misery poker? how do you not lay claim without sounding like you're pretending they didn't happen?

i showed a handful of people something i wrote, trying to sort out some of what college was to me. that was a start. i've tried to keep unearthing things, but it's so bloody free of narrative that the thread tangles itself. what could possibly be less plot-driven than a crazy girl's college years?

this isn't supposed to be a stupid meme, just a variation on what lj can be used for. if you have questions, by the gods, ask. it may not be elegant, but i'll try and answer.

Comments

[sabine791110.livejournal.com]

Sometimes going through the motions of functionality is what it takes to begin to unravel the patterns in our heads that contribute to the emotions that make functionality difficult.

Wow, what a sentence.

I was taught for a long time that feelings are those things that you keep inside and never discuss unless you're happy. Even if you're happy, you need to still be restrained so as to not distress someone else who may not be as happy as you. I've been trying to retrain myself. I still don't like admitting that there are bad days - days where I'm sad, lonely, blue, confused, anxious, paranoid, disturbed, off-kilter, or pessimistic.

i'm not proud of how i got through my hell, but i'm proud of the fact that i did.

Amen. I do not think that's anything to be ashamed of, nor do I think that it's just a bid for attention, or anything else that "They" might say.

This too shall pass. *sad smile*

[mortisnightmare.livejournal.com]

I think, in some ways, this becomes a lot like my illness. The pain of it stops being something you can measure when it never goes away. And talking about it seems like a bid for pity. I cringe inside every time I have to explain it to someone. Because I don't want special exceptions or them letting me get away with something because I'm sick. And I don't want to sound like I'm asking for those priveleges. I just need them to know so that they understand (and occassionally so that they don't fire me).

I don't have the same problem with my depression but that's probably because the only person I let deal with it is Andy. And it's hard to sound like you're begging for pity when they turn around and do something similar two days later.

I hear you. If you ever want to talk, I'll listen. I won't judge. And I've hit rock bottom before about my own things so I won't pity you. I'll just hear what you have to say. Which may sound a little odd or like something everyone says but I do mean it. I wouldn't know how to begin to judge, I don't have the grounds on which to do it. It's just an attempt to get the poison out before it becomes all you can think about.

[wandelrust.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly certain I'll never really know where you're coming from, because the kind of depressed I get seems like a light misting to your hurricane. As much as I realize we have two completely different scales for measuring how we're feeling, precisely because you are so functional makes it hard to remember sometimes that we mean different things when we say we're doing "ok".

I've said it before, but it remains true, so I'll say it again. To have come through what you have, and be as stable, functional, and compassionate as you are makes you the strongest person I know.

Relating ...

[shebear.livejournal.com]

how do you lay claim to things without sounding like you're playing misery poker? how do you not lay claim without sounding like you're pretending they didn't happen?

If only I knew. I've struggled with the same thing, and what I've ended up with is some sort of schizophrenic split life, divided between people who know the deep dark and people who know the surface. So part of the time I'm going for high cards in misery poker and part of the time I'm "normal."

Over the years, I've been able to be a lot more matter-of-fact when describing events, and in a way it's freed me a bit. I can still say it, but people are less likely to give that "poor you" response. Speaking of which ... and pity has always sounded to me like someone thinks they could have done better in the same situation ... I hadn't really thought of this in quite that way, but I certainly see where you're coming from. It's sort of the reverse side of the same coin as "why don't you just get over it already?"

I've had a hard time with it because of a similarly fractured narrative ... it's hard to tell a story that meanders and crosses back over itself and seems to lose itself entirely for periods of time. But getting out the parts that you can is definitely a start. You may never end up with a novel, but perhaps a collection of related short stories.