Category : depression

Fighting with Style

In his book The Happiness Trap, Russ Harris offers many techniques (based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) for dealing with depression- and anxiety-related thoughts that get in the way of you living your life to its fullest. I’ve found ACT to be quite helpful in dealing with the lying, sabotaging voices of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. One of Harris’ techniques in particular has been on my mind lately. He suggests that you take the unhelpful, self-destructive, negative thoughts that recur in your head (“Why try to make friends with that person? Nobody really likes you.” “Don’t bother applying for that job. You’d never get it anyway.” “Wow, you’re so fat and ugly! Could anyone actually find you attractive?”) and repeat the thoughts in your head over and over in a silly voice or as a goofy song. Take away the seriousness of the thoughts, turn them upside-down, and take away some of their power over you.

It recently occurred to me that this is a lot like Spider-Man.

One of Spider-Man’s signature traits is his wisecracking, mocking his opponents when they fight. He refuses to be completely serious or take his enemies too seriously. He does this in part to throw his opponents off, to keep them distracted and off-balance. He also does it to keep himself from getting too overwhelmed while fighting. Making fun of your enemy, refusing to give them the respect and seriousness they demand, is a good way of taking away at least some of their power over you. This is how I’ve dealt with bullies in the past, especially ones who were a lot bigger and more physically imposing than me. Instead of just giving myself over to anger and fear in the face of a strong, terrifying antagonist, I would play it cool and laugh at their attempts to intimidate and control me. Of course, even if I was playing it low-key and silly, inside I was furious, terrified, hurt. But not giving the bullies my fear and anger helped me feel better about myself, like I was internally stronger than them.

If I could do this with real people who were threatening me, why can’t I do this with the voices in my head that also try to intimidate, control, and undermine my best intentions? Aren’t one’s negative, self-sabotaging thoughts basically you trying to bully yourself? And aren’t bullies a lot like a hero’s rogues gallery, a collection of enemies that try to pull you down and keep you down? Aren’t I basically fighting Doctor Depression and The Fear-Master and The Insecurity Blanket? They’re strong and they’re sinister and they’ll do anything to get me to lose. They make me furious, terrified, hurt. But one thing I’ve got that they do? A sense of humor. Wit. Absurdity. The problem with taking these villains seriously is it gives them more power and can send me into a downward spiral. “I keep thinking shitty things about myself! Not only are the voices right, I do suck, but I suck even more because I can’t get these mean voices to shut up! I’m so weak!”

Well, maybe I’m not strong enough to silence the negative voices completely. Maybe shutting them down completely isn’t even the point. The point is, I’m strong enough to keep fighting, and I’m clever enough to fight with style, to dance around them, mock them, tease them, take them down a peg or two. “Hey, Doc Depresso! Why so glum, chum? Here, I’ll put a smile on your pretty ugly face!” “Yo, Fear-Master! You sure are good at baiting me! You’re like a…master baiter! BAM!”

Hey, whatever works, right? Excelsior!

9-01-2016 |

Some Days…

Let me tell you about a time I went crazy in a not-fun way (unlike the Prince song, which is going crazy in a fun, funky way).

A friend recently posted online about wrestling with their depression and casually noted that some days are better than others. That reminded me of the U2 song “Some Days Are Better Than Others” and that brought back memories of the first major depressive episode I remember going through, during my last year in college.

The thing is, I didn’t recognize it as a depressive episode at the time. In retrospect, it’s seems blindingly obvious that it was. I would lay on my bed, listening to the bleakest of bleak Cure songs and crying (“Hopelessly fighting the devil/Futility/Feeling the monster/Climb deeper inside of me/Feeling him gnawing my heart away/Hungrily/I’ll never lose this pain/Never dream of you again”). My social anxiety was so bad, I couldn’t get myself to walk into stores and restaurants that I’d never been in before. Sometimes I couldn’t even get myself to leave my bedroom when my housemates had friends over. I had suicidal ideation–I didn’t make any suicide attempts, but I came close a couple of times.

One thing I remember clearly is listening to U2’s Zooropa album over and over and over. My favorite U2 albums are the ones they did with Brian Eno, but for some reason, my depressed brain really latched onto Zooropa, the song “Some Things Are Better Than Others” in particular. (That’s not an official video, so it may not play in every region and may not last on YouTube.) I loved the way the lyrics went back and forth playfully between positive and negative imagery, but the lines “Some days you hear a voice/Taking you to another place” really resonated with me. Like Bono’s voice would take me to another place, a world where I didn’t feel so sad, so lonely, so afraid, so unlovable, so ugly, so empty inside. But it was even more than that. I became more and more convinced that the album as a whole was ripe with hidden meanings that I needed to decode. If I could figure out the secret meanings, I would have a way to open a door to another reality. I’d sit on a bus going through my college campus, listening to Zooropa on my Discman, gazing out the bus window, and if a flock of birds suddenly flew across my view, I was sure it meant something, I just wasn’t sure what. Signs and portents were everywhere, their messages just out of conscious reach. I didn’t talk to anyone about this at the time. It’s not that I thought I was crazy because I didn’t, I just assumed no one would understand or be able to help me figure out what the album and the world around me was secretly saying.

Like I said, I can look back now and see what I was going through as something that could have, should have been treated with medication and therapy. Instead, I rode it out, somehow managing to pass all of my classes, go to work, go on dates, go to parties with friends, and otherwise function like a mostly-normal person. But it wasn’t fun. Luckily, I haven’t had a depressive episode since that lasted as long and got as bad. Some days are better than others, and those days were definitely not my better days.

8-30-2016 |

Rewriting the Story, Part 2

A little nerd history: Champions, a superhero tabletop role-playing game, was one of the first RPGs to have characters that were created by spending an allotment of points, instead of rolling dice to randomly determine characteristics. You could get more points to spend on your character’s attributes and powers by taking disadvantages. The disadvantages could be things like having a secret identity or being hunted by a particular organization or villain. They could also be physical limitations, like being blind or having a heart condition, or psychological limitations, like having a severe phobia or depression. Disadvantages were only worth points if they caused real complications in the game, so if having a secret identity didn’t really matter to the story, it wasn’t worth any points. But having a physical or mental condition that got in the way of your character living a “normal” life? That would give you points you could spend to have better superpowers.

I’ve written about how growing up with ADHD–and living with cyclothymia and anxiety on top of that–can do a pretty fantastic job of screwing with your self-esteem. I recently had to leave work early because I got hit with a migraine, something I’m prone to (like my brother, my mother, my grandmother)(yay, genetics!). Because I’ve had to miss work due to anxiety attacks and depressive episodes, missing work when I’m physically ill makes me feel guilty. It’s not enough I miss work because I’m crazy, I also have to miss work because I’m frail? As I drove home that day, my sunglasses didn’t just shield my migrainey eyes from the too-bright sun, they hid my tears. I was letting my co-workers down. I was failing everyone. Because my brain and my body are broken.

But what if I’m not broken? What if that’s not my story? What if…?

My girlfriend recently posted this piece by Bunmi Laditan to my Facebook wall. It resonated so strongly with me, I cried reading it. And this part was like a flash of lightning in my mind, illuminating everything I’ve been thinking about lately:

People with mental issues, I’m talking to you. I know we’re in mixed company with the normals, but this for you. What if we’re special? Yes, it hurts. Yes, we get sad. Yes, we’re tired of being in body that tortures us regularly, but what if we’re special? What if there’s a reason?

I don’t want to bring Marvel into this because DC Comics is superior, but what if we’re like X-Men? Take Cyclops. He has to wear those special glasses or he’d burn holes in everything with his laser eyes which must be hard, but he’s also used them to save lives on missions. And Rogue. She hated her ability to absorb powers and longed to be able to do simple things like touch her boyfriend without possibly harming him, but through her interactions with Wolverine and Magneto, we all learned how amazing her gift is. Eventually, she learned how to hone and better control it.

What if we’re like that? What if our brains that cause us so much torment, have hidden potential. What if we’re special?

(For the record, I don’t think DC Comics is superior to Marvel. I’m an equal opportunity fanboy.)

And so. What if my depressive and hypomanic episodes, what if my anxiety and panic attacks, what if my lack of time sense, my distractibility, what if all of those things are side effects of my superpowers? What if I need the points from those disadvantages in order to have my talents and powers as good as they are? What if I would be too much awesome for people to handle if I didn’t also have to deal with my mental health issues?

I know I’m tired of feeling broken, fucked-up, a failure. I know I’m tired of seeing so much of who I am as a negative. I know I’m tired of apologizing for being daydreamy, talkative, socially anxious, loud and dramatic, imaginative and unrealistic, nonlinear, and emotionally sensitive. I know I’m tired of beating myself up for not being “normal” when I’ve never really wanted to be “normal.” I want to be a superhero. And being a superhero means accepting your weaknesses as well as your strengths. It means realizing that your disadvantages just make your advantages more amazing.

I’m ready for my story to be amazing.

8-04-2016 |

Self-Diagnostic 2

I’ve written about going off of my anti-depressant and how I tend to get summer seasonal depression, so I thought I’d do another self-check to see how I’m handling all of this opposite-of-thrills-and-pills, and then write about it because that’s what this blog is for.

Short answer: I’m doing okay.

Longer answer: I woke up last Friday feeling exhausted, groggy, cranky. I’d gone to bed at a decent hour the night before, and I slept well through the night, but I was having a hard time waking up and was feeling petulant about having to wake up at all. I’d been feeling that way all week, waking up feeling sleepy and grumpy (and probably dopey, too), wanting to go to sleep almost as soon as I got home from work. But on Friday morning, I felt this sudden out-of-body, looking-at-myself-from-the-outside experience and I thought, “Oh, duh! I’m depressed!” Then I wondered if I should call my doctor and ask to go back on the ol’ Celexa. But unlike in the past, I can recognize that this is depression, it doesn’t feel anywhere near as bad as it has in the past when I’ve been unmedicated, I’m still on my mood stabilizer, I have a psychological toolkit to deal with it, and I know it won’t last.

Seeing it, identifying it, and viewing it as a relatively small thing that I can handle made me feel strong, stronger than the depression itself. I’ve usually felt overwhelmed by it (and I still feel overwhelmed by my anxiety more often than not), so it’s pretty fucking great to feel…if not underwhelmed, at least, um, whelmed. Take that, depression!

Whelmed

In other self-care news: I still haven’t found regular exercise that I’ve been able to get myself to do, but seeing as how I’m dealing with a medication change and my least favorite season, I’m not beating myself up about it (too much). I installed the Google Fit app on my phone, set-up a daily goal of 30 minutes of walking exercise, and have hit that goal at least one day a week just by working a typical day at the library. I’m aiming to level up to hitting that 30 minute goal more often by walking around more during the day, but that probably won’t happen until the weather gets cooler.

But even a little progress is progress, and I’m happy with that.

7-19-2016 |

A Season in Heck

I have a tendency to forget that summer is the worst time of year for my depression. I think it’s a combination of me not dealing well with heat and humidity, an increase in daylight hours, and my allergies getting worse. Maybe it’s just that this time of year plays havoc with my brain chemistry more than other seasons do. I talk a lot about not liking summer, but it’s often only when I’m deep in the muck of bad mood swings, melancholy, lethargy, anhedonia, and a difficulty reading and writing with any consistency that I remember that summer is my kryptonite.

This weekend, I did my usual hanging out at my local, favorite coffee shop, where I do a lot of my writing. I skimmed a few chapters of a few different books, I wrote a few lines of poetry, but I mostly sat in front of my laptop and…just stared. I’d bop around on Twitter and Facebook, read some entries on TVTropes, and then go back to trying to write and not writing anything. I got home on Sunday evening and felt…I’m tempted to say “awful,” but it was really more like “MEH.” I couldn’t even get my emotions cranked up enough to be upset at not having written anything. I felt blue, but it was a beige kind of blue.

But then the sun went down, and I sat down at the desk in my living room and said to myself, “Self, how about you don’t write anything, you just…write nothing. Nothing of consequence, nothing of sense. Don’t try to write. Instead, play a game. A game called ‘automatic writing.'” I opened a new browser window (instead of opening a new tab, because a new window meant I could obscure my other browser window and not see if I was getting new emails or new Facebook notifications or be otherwise distracted), went to 750 Words, and just started typing furiously, whatever came into my head. I stopped at 758 words and realized I felt good. Not great, but good. Good enough for a summer Sunday night. Better than the beigey blue I’d felt before. It was the brain equivalent of feeling physically better after getting up and exercising. Maybe I’ll do something more with what I produced through automatic writing, maybe I won’t. The result isn’t the point, just the doing.

When my strength and energy are being sapped by the kryptonite of summer, I’ll take whatever constructive and creative salves I can get, and I think automatic writing is one of those. So lap on with the swordfish underpants of thine most instructive dessert and high tide the coconut dragoons exclusively pitterpatted with sticky buns!

7-12-2016 |

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