I'm going to talk about depression

I'm going to talk about it, because no one ever does. I don't mean all those ridiculous commercials with the flute music and bouncing little sad bubble, or all the people sitting in their depressing, badly decorated gray living rooms in the dark while the late night television blares into their faces, Clockwork Orange style.

No, I mean I'm going to talk about real depression. I don't want to, because I don't want to hear anyone in my family pat my head. I don't want to, because I don't want my friends who read this blog decide they don't really feel comfortable around me anymore and won't be bringing their children for sleepovers. I don't want to, because I don't know if I can take one more comment like:

• People make their own happiness.
• Focus on the good things.
• If you go down that road of medication, you'll never get off.
• Thinking about it will make you more depressed.
• You need to get out more.
• Get one of those sun lamps.
• You should be happy nothing truly bad has happened to you.
• You think too much.

None of those comments are helpful in the face of actual depression. Because:

• Depression tricks you into feeling guilty for not being able to make your own happiness.
• Depression makes you feel like the world's most ungrateful form of life for not focusing on the good things. I suppose if depressed people could focus on the good things, they would.
• For people with depression related to chemical imbalances, medication isn't a crutch, a placebo, or a fleecing of the public. It's what makes you look up one day and say, "I had forgotten what it felt like to be me."
  
• When you are in a deep depression, you aren't thinking about being depressed. You're thinking about what a terrible wife, mother, friend you are.
• If the lady across the street, who lets her kids act like wild monkeys because it's easier for her, tells me one more time that I need to get out more, I may just punch her. If I do, I promise to try to catch it on camera for you. Standing on the street making small talk to a suburban housewife who lets her children act like wild monkeys is, astonishingly, exactly the very thing I endeavored never to do back when I was 19. So why on God's Green Earth would I do it more often?
• Sun lamps are not the sun. Sun lamps are big metal reminders that you are broken.
• Depression is not the loss of a child, but it is truly bad. It shatters the glass in the frame of your family portrait. No one is left the same, but instead are stretched, distorted afterimages of what they all once were. Especially the kids.
• Not possible. And not something I can control unless I stab myself in the forehead with an icepick a few times.  

Depression is guilt. Depression is why, how, when, what if. I know I started down this path in childhood. I frequently wonder what I would be like if I didn't have it. What would I have done, had I not been paralyzed by indecision, lack of self worth, constant self loathing? What would my children be like, if their mother did not have this giant second head that looks like her, but doesn't sound or act like her? What would my marriage be like?

I don't want to talk about this, because I don't want you to read it. I want you to come here and have a good time, see some good pictures, laugh. I don't want you knowing that I am broken.

But, I am.

I know that it's the most difficult for the people close to me who can't help. My husband, my poor kids, stuck in the whirlwind with me even though they didn't buy a ticket for the ride. But bless them, they stay on and don't throw up. Some days I am me, some days I am not me. Or is it the other way around? Which me is me? My husband, I can't even imagine what he goes through. It surely can't be rewarding. Unless you count trying to chain an angry male chimpanzee to a stalk of bamboo with a handful of noodles while solving calculus problems without paper rewarding. I'm still reaching a point where I feel normal again, as I have good days and bad. A bonus would be to feel productive, joyous, excited, and successful most of the time. The goal is to be healthy, so our family can be healthy.

Sometimes, on this blog, I am completely me. And other times, I hold completely back. Still other times, when I can't be me and I can't hold back, I stay away. I just wanted this thing to be a fun place for me to go and write up cute stories about our kids that we can remember, not a mirror of introspection of which I have too much already, which would subsequently alienate my family, creep out my friends, and bore everyone else. It turned out to be something else entirely. I have an old friend out there who disappears for years at a time, or maybe it's me who disappears...anyway, he and I are exactly alike. He taught me how to think when I was 19, how to be introspective and stop careening through my life like a chihuahua. He also taught me how to pretend to shoplift, for the sheer purpose of driving the department store staff insane. I think that's a pretty good summation of what I aim for on my blog: Think, but pretend to shoplift once in a while.

Next time: The Art of Imitation Shoplifting.