Fri, 18 Nov 2022
A Day Beyond Depression
A week ago, I experienced a full day with absolutely no depressive symptoms. It was the first time that happened since late April or early May of this year. From about the middle of May, the onset of a depressive episode crept up on me, and a few exacerbating factors plunged me into mental health crisis the likes of which I had never before seen. There have only been two moments in time throughout my life where I've even come close to what I experienced this year.
Historically, depressive episodes only ever last me between a few days to a couple weeks. After that point, the fog clears and the skies open up again; I return to baseline and my emotional reality begins to feel less and less dire. Not so this year. A full six months of this year was spent in a deep depressive "episode" (using quotes because I don't know if episode is even the right word for this anymore; it has been so fucking protracted and ensconcing).
For these six months, my emotional baseline has inverted. I didn't have depressive episodes; I had episodes of feeling okay. Every day was primarily spent in the throes of a despair so deep I didn't know if I would ever come back from it. I've experienced more suicidality this year than I'd like to say. I was beginning to think that this was just the new baseline, that I was entering a much, much darker chapter of my life, and that it was the final chapter. The only real question left to me became: How long is this final chapter? I wondered if it would be measured in months or in years, and I legitimately didn't know.
If you told me at the beginning of 2022 that I would spend such a significant amount of time fantasizing about death, I wouldn't have believed you. Sure, I have a proclivity for depression, but I was seeing growth and improvement, I believed I could turn the ship around. The idea that I would spend so much time craving nothing more than oblivion seemed extreme.
Similarly, if you told me in July that, by November, I would experience a day where I didn't want to die—where I wasn't even depressed at all—I would have met you with equal incredulity.
During the worst of it—from late May through August—there wasn't a day that went by where I didn't want everything to end, where I wasn't so overwhelmed by the sheer toxicity of simply existing that I couldn't imagine living for even months longer, forget about years.
If you met with me in a snapshot of either before or during this traumatic season of depression and told me what was coming, I would have laughed you off as out of your mind.
And yet, both of these realities happened.
***
If you haven't been suicidal or acutely depressed, it's really difficult to describe. The entirety of our human evolution has essentially been the fight to survive at all costs. The idea that one would not only want to die, but would be tempted to take one's own life is counterintuitive and evolutionarily paradoxical to a degree not lost on me.
But when you enter a depressive vacuum and all feeling is evacuated and leaves you with nothing, every waking second is an agonizing, torturous, and Sisyphean crush of seemingly eternal isolation. That loneliness and desperation affords no hope of relief outside dispatching oneself from the unfortunate state of existing. It is truly the definition of Hell, sans fire and brimstone.
So yeah, I've spent about half of 2022 wishing I didn't exist, knowing that's not actually what I want, but not knowing how to reconcile the cognitive dissonance. If I'm honest, I still don't. But what I do have is unequivocal proof that it is pragmatically possible to not experience depression. Was that day a one-off? Yes, kind of. I've been depressed since, and I will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
That said, I learned there does exist a particular set of factors that will allow me to experience an entire day without crippling depression. The task before me now is simple, but not easy. Knowing what I now know—that yes, it is, in fact, possible for me to go through a day without depression—what factors were at play to allow this? Were any replicable? Can I create the conditions for this by doing or not doing something elective?
If so, I'd really like to know what those things are; my life likely depends on it.
***
This evening I went to dinner with several coworkers. I was a little nervous because I have been finding that social time is a likely catalyst for depression right now. Plus, I'd just gone to dinner for a work event yesterday, and I met a friend the day before that, and I saw another friend the day before that, and it's the end of a very long week irrespective of any extracurricular social time; in addition, I'm meeting friends tomorrow at multiple points throughout the day.
But I went anyway and had a good time, and was also very depressed because progress is not linear. I've seen what is possible. I have a recent enough data point now that I can recall what it's like to feel unencumbered by the anchor of depression.
The holidays are coming up. Seasonal Affected Disorder season is rapidly approaching (and is now here, in fact, I’m just in denial). A near perpetual state of emotional exhaustion is not a great starting point for this time of year. And I was really dreading the impending season a few weeks ago. I'm still dreading it, but not in a mortal kind of way, which is something like progress. I will take any modicum of progress I can scrape off the goddamn floor at this point.
I have a long way to go, but I found the path a while back. And I'm taking those first steps down that path, knowing little about where it will take me, also knowing it can only be better than where I was heading before.
I feel like I'm at that point in an ultramarathon where you're not so much in pain anymore as you are tired; it's not that you want the pain to stop, it's that you just want to lie down, you just want to sleep or eat. But the ultramarathon is not yet concluded. There are yet more miles to go. The cool thing about having run ultramarathons before, though, is you know this feeling, and you know that it's fleeting, and you know that it will return again. In between there's pain, the good kind and the bad kind, sometimes both simultaneously.
There's also the most intense euphoria I have ever experienced, or even could imagine experiencing. There's joy in every ultra, but in some moments it is easy to forget.