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There’s something about depression, this self-propelling spiral. You start feeling tired, isolated, lonely, so you respond by locking yourself in your room and withdrawing even more from the world. The experts tell you to engage, find a hobby, call a friend, even take yourself out for a walk, but they don’t realize that all of those activities require energy. Energy you don’t have when the depression’s sucking you dry.
Or they tell you to clean up. People who live in cluttered houses are three times more likely to develop depression, studies find. Did anyone stop to think that maybe the reason depressed people have dirty homes is that they’re too exhausted to clean up?
So much of depression treatment these days is putting band-aids on the symptoms. Have you noticed that? Like telling the woman who’s isolated herself from the world that all she has to do is join a pottery class or sign up for Pilates and she’ll be back to her old chipper self. Or making folks who are prone to depression feel even worse because their homes aren’t picture-perfect every moment of the day. The way I see it, you’re not entitled to tell me how to help myself if you haven’t struggled with depression firsthand. I’m not talking about feeling a little melancholy every now and then or developing a minor case of the blues. I’m talking about crawling inch by inch across the grimy bottom of a seemingly endless emotional pit where you sink into the muck like Jean Valjean in the sewers beneath Paris and there’s no foothold there to pull yourself out.
Once you’ve experienced depression like that in its rawest, truest form, you’re not about to go blabbing to others or telling them how to make things right. That’s like giving a blind man written instructions on how to read Braille.
I haven’t warned Mel yet. About the depression, I mean. I really should. But so far, it’s just been casual comments and an encrypted allusion or two. One day we’ll have to have that heart-to-heart — if I’m still around by then. I’m pretty lucky to be getting room and board free, but I honestly don’t see Mel as the kind to be totally supportive and understanding the next time my brain decides to shut down. She’s had a difficult lot — you’ve got to give her that. And sometimes that makes people compassionate and soft around the edges, and sometimes that makes them hard. Like leather. Mel’s the leather type. If you were to hear her story, you’d know why. Like I said, I don’t judge her. But I know I need to think up some sort of contingency plan because my guess is the next crash won’t be long in coming.
Thinking about my past with Chris hasn’t helped either. I don’t know what you were thinking when you told me to write everything out. What good did you expect would come from it? From rubbing salt into old wounds? The funny thing is now that I’ve started, it’s almost all I can think about, especially when I’m out of the house and don’t have Jasmine’s incessant screaming or Bowman’s relentless questions grating my ears.
It’s a shame things turned out the way they did because Chris and I had such a good start. Such a solid foundation to our marriage. Isn’t that what youth pastors and Christian parents are always telling their kids? Put Christ at the center of your relationships, and everything will work out in the end.
Well, we did everything right. Waited to have sex until our wedding night, the works. Do you know how hard that is to do in this day and age? Do you know how many Christians treat premarital sex like it’s no big deal? I’m serious. All the conservative fogies at Orchard Grove would be shocked to read the statistics, they really would. That’s not how Chris and I did it, though. We’d made ourselves a commitment, and we stuck to it. I’m not saying we were totally platonic or anything like that. Passion is still passion no matter what your religious convictions are, and we were two young, healthy kids madly in love with each other. So do you have any idea how much restraint it takes to do it right?
And you’d think after all that — after we jumped through all those hoops people hold up for teens who want to follow Christ into their twenty-something years — you’d think God would somehow bless us or reward us for our obedience. Guess it goes back to the whole thing about the rain falling on the just and the unjust. I swear that’s got to be one of the most depressing verses in all of Scripture.
The night’s getting cold. So far the winter’s been a particularly nasty one. And here I was thinking global warming was going to mean I could stop worrying about things like a scarf and gloves.
I pop into the liquor store at the corner of Mel’s trailer park. She really should start saving up to move her kids to a better neighborhood. I know she’s got to go where the assistance will take her, but if she started saving up now ...
Well, it’s none of my business. I doubt I’ll stick around long enough to see her life change at all. Time to be moving on soon. Get myself settled, hopefully before my brain shuts down again. I can do it. I know I can.
One day at a time, right?
That’s what I keep telling myself.
One day at a time.