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Growing up with Depression

Date: July 13, 2012
Author: julietjeske
Categories: Depression, Divorce, Gay Husband
Comments: 11 Replies

First Day of School

I guess it has always been there to some degree since childhood.  I would love to say that my childhood was happy and that everyone around me was loving and supportive.  But who has that childhood?  I have met a few who have been fortunate enough to at least have strength in their basic foundational relationships.  The lucky few who are supported by both their parents, have a secure and safe environment, and a steady predictable routine. My upbringing was relatively stable in most respects but emotionally I would describe it as volatile.

I don’t blame my parents, and at my age I would feel a bit silly putting any blame on them considering my circumstances.  I wasn’t abandoned or left to starve and I wasn’t neglected or ridiculed.  My parents got married young and had four children in five years.  We didn’t grow up with much, and money was a constant source of stress and anxiety.  Their marriage wasn’t perfect and they were not ideal parents but they always made their children their primary concern.  So with all of their faults I knew the did the best they could consider the obstacles they were up against.   I may not have had a father I could have tender moments with, but he worked overtime, marched on picket lines and lived with very little material wealth for the sake of his children.  My mother was in over her head with four babies and a husband who worked all the time but she always made us the center of the universe.   She constantly took us to trips to the library, bought us every educational toy or game we could afford and made sure we did our homework.  She may have been too obsessed, but I would rather grow up with her than an indifferent mother.

School wasn’t much of a solace as I was awkward and socially withdrawn.  I found children my age to be a bit of a mystery and found more enjoyment reading a book than playing with other kids.  There is much more I could write about, but I won’t because I cherish relationships I have with certain family members.  I don’t want to dredge up old traumas for the sake of this blog.  Some things need to remain private, for the sake of my siblings and my immediate family.   When things got bad I literally hid in a closet in our basement.  I would shut the door and wait for my world to stop spinning out of control.  To this day I don’t think anyone in my family knew I would go down there, I guess they might know now…if they read this blog.

Depression has always been there.  The dread that will sometimes wash over me that I can’t shake.  It causes me to overreact and panic and lose faith in others.   My divorce made it much more pronounced but depression has been with me for as long as I can remember.  I had no idea how bad it would get until post-divorce I became suicidal and nearly completely lost my sanity.  Clinical depression is nothing to joke about or to shrug off as just the blues.  I realize now that I suffered from a mental illness that is quite common but extremely frustrating to manage.  But I fought back with traditional therapy, medication, cognitive behavioral therapy and eventually my situation greatly improved.

Although now, I can feel the seductive pull of the dark clouds sucking me back in from time to time.  At first it feels comfortable to give in to the black moods and collapse in tears but they soon take over.  Instead of having a quick therapeutic moment of release the dread wins out and starts to devour me.  I find myself lying on my bed looking straight up trying to fight back a panic attack.  I haven’t had one in over a year, and I am so proud that I have been able to stop them but when things get bad it is a constant struggle.  At least now I know I have some control, I don’t have to huddle in a closet until it passes.   Just knowing that I have some control has been paramount to my recovery.  As a child I didn’t know what it was, I couldn’t understand why I wanted to retreat by myself, why I had difficulty dealing with other and why I constantly had crying fits that were nearly inconsolable.   I couldn’t understand why things got so black in my head, and why hope was such a hard thing to imagine.  My Catholic upbringing caused me to look for a supernatural source but now I know the real demons live inside my head.  If it is brain chemistry or some genetic defect I don’t know, or if repeated trauma caused something in my brain to develop abnormally.  The source of my depression doesn’t really matter, at least that is what therapy taught me.  What matters is management, and trying to live with and fight against this affliction.

For the most part I do alright.  I am so much better off than I was just a year ago, but I still struggle.  I know from the amazing feedback I have gotten from this blog and from fellow sufferers of depression that this disease is a tricky one.  If you are reading this and you have struggled with depression since you were a child, don’t give up hope.  You can and will beat it.  Some of us aren’t as lucky in life as others, some of us are born with more obstacles that the average person, and some of us are born with the biology that causes depression.  But it doesn’t mean that we can’t beat this disease and we can’t overcome it.

I wish I knew what I know now when I was six years old, if I could I would go back to that little girl with the ice blonde hair and the rosy cheeks and tell her that God isn’t punishing her when the gloom overtakes her mind.   Whatever is going on in her head is not pay back for any sins she committed and it is not a battle between good and evil.  The dark moods are just a slight flaw in her wiring, and that flaw is depression.  Everyone has a flaw, no little girl is born perfect.

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Life After Divorce: The Emotional Prism

Date: January 28, 2012
Author: julietjeske
Categories: Depression, Divorce, Straight Spouse, Uncategorized
Comments: 4 Replies

English: Human Experiences, depression/loss of...

One of my most popular blog posts is about the illness of depression. A well-meaning friend just posted something on Facebook basically with the following sentiment, I will paraphrase for length

Don’t be negative or sad, we have all had tough times.  And I have had a lot of tragedy in my life but I refuse to go down that negative path. I will keep it positive.

A nice straight forward message really but it just struck me as overly simplistic and naive.  I know someone else who commonly expounds a familiar message yet is usually sedated with alcohol or marijuana for most of his waking hours.  So I don’t know how well the philosophy is working out for him if he is always drunk or stoned in order to “keep it positive” especially since both of his drugs of choice have a sedative effect.  What really stuck in my craw though in the statement was the assumption that somehow since he had also had tragedy, his pain and life experience was somehow the equivalent of another person’s experience and that his “power of positive thinking” was keeping him from going down a spiral.  For the most part I would agree with him completely, except in the example of the mental illness of depression.

As a person who struggled with a massive reactive depression (due to my divorce) a sentiment like that just rings hallow. I wish it were that easy, and all it would take was to “keep it positive” and that every person out there could be helped with nothing more than a pep talk.  But human beings are like snowflakes in that no two of us are alike. We might be similar in that we all desire food, comfort, companionship and safety and we would all react similarly to basic stimulus or dangers. But even in my immediate family each of my siblings, with similar DNA, raised in the same home by the same parents do not respond to crisis or stress in the same way. We see the world through the prism that our life experience has created for us.

For instance if you had two identical twins, one who grows up as an abused child in a poverty-stricken family and another brought up as a privileged child with a healthy and supportive family.  Neither experience guarantees that one person will necessarily be more positive or negative than the other, but since their formative years were so vastly different they will evolve into two very different adults.  We are all made up of a patchwork of pain, scars, joys and accomplishments with different traumas and experiences so of course issuing a blanket statement such as

I have had it rough too, so I can relate to your pain…

Well maybe, but you aren’t me and I am not you so you don’t really know what I am going through.  We can try to understand each other but no one really can see inside another person’s head.   And that is without even mentioning the mental illness of depression.  The words depression and depressed are thrown around so often in our culture, that the real disease of depression is mitigated to every day blues.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Getting some bad news and mulling over it for a few days is not depression.  Clinical depression is a biological disorder that impedes every bodily function from eating and sleeping to getting basic every day tasks accomplished.  It is why people are sometimes hospitalized for it, and why some even receive successful Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for depression. ECT is actually quite effective for patients with extreme cases of depression.  So if positive thinking could over come it, why does it take electrical currents inducing a seizure to help cure the patient?   Depression is a type of brain sickness that is not cured by simply snapping out of it or thinking positively.   It is also why so many people commit suicide while struggling with the disease, as it completely takes over them and they can’t see logically, they can’t see hope.

As the brilliant Dr. Sapolsky says in his lecture on Depression

Depression is the inability to feel pleasure

And that is pleasure in anything, food, comfort, a pet, music, any activity that used to be enjoyable ceases to bring joy.  Now that I am two years out of my personal hell I know exactly what he is talking about.  I still struggle with anxiety and mood swings but I am able to feel real joy now in any number of things.  I didn’t know how bad off I was until I was completely healed from it.

We can have empathy for each others struggles and we can relate to another’s pain but the only person who really understand their suffering is the person going through it.   I am not one to argue that no one has any control over their moods and emotions, or that clinical depression is a hopeless malady.  And I would agree that run of the mill pessimism and negative thinking is counter productive to leading a happy life.  However it is foolish to assume someone struggling from a major depression simply has a case of the blues or is just feeling sorry for themselves.  The fine line between the two does exist, and there are many that wallow in their own misery committing acts of self-destructive behavior rather than get help.  But after I went through a major depressive episode I will never be so blithe as to accept that a person is choosing their illness or emotionally weak as a result.

And here again is the lecture that I believed put me on the path to recovery.  For the first time I realized what was happening to my brain was medical and not something I could just snap out of.  Just as it would be insensitive to go to a person with schizophrenia and tell them to “Stop hearing those voices” it is just as cruel to tell a depressed person to simply “Get Happy“.

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Life After Divorce – The Holiday Blues

Date: December 26, 2011
Author: julietjeske
Categories: Depression, Divorce, Relationships
Comments: 2 Replies

This is just a message to all of my regular readers.  I don’t intend on trying to get this published anywhere else but on this blog.  The holidays were never a gray area for me growing up.  My family had its issues, as every family has problems, but Christmas was always a joyous time filled with great memories.  From year to year I can never recall what I did for my birthday, or how I spent New Year‘s eve.  Since I work in special events I consider it bad luck if I am not working on nearly every other holiday,  but Christmas is something else entirely, I can tell you exactly where I celebrated it, what I gave and got for presents and what I ate.

I didn’t really understand holiday melancholy until I got divorced.  The first Thanksgiving after I left my husband I tried to keep to the same routine.  A couple that had invited us year after year decided to ask me up and Joel spent the day at the Big Apple circus.  Despite everyone’s best intentions in trying to keep my spirits up I felt like a living ghost.  No one knew what to say to me, so I would get looks of pity and little else.  The hostess tried valiantly to connect with me and try to cheer me up and I will never forget her kind gesture, but to everyone else it was if I wasn’t there.  Conversations would swirl around me and I would pick up phrases here or there but my mind kept drifting to a black void of numbness.  I couldn’t focus for anything but that I had sat in the same room with the same people year after year only this time my husband wasn’t with me.  In the middle of the evening I snuck upstairs to call my brother.  I needed a lifeline out of these frozen memories of past good times.  I just desperately wanted my old life back, even if it was a life based on lies more than anything else.  The host took a photo of everyone around the table and my spirit was so crushed at the time, I actually look gray.  It almost looks like I was photo-shopped into the picture, everyone is smiling and then this odd depressed woman in the corner.

That Christmas I went home to Missouri and stayed with my sister.   I was financially ruined, brokenhearted and alone.  I had no hope that anything was going to get better.  What had happened to my life?  What was going to become of me?  On top of the disaster of my divorce, I had just broken off the relationship that I now call the supernova.  It was a rebound relationship that nearly destroyed me.  I was at the lowest point in my life that I had ever been.  About a month after that Christmas celebration I got into therapy and on antidepressants as I had become out of control and suicidal.

It is now two years later and I feel like a totally different person, but the residual effects still linger.  This year a few days before Thanksgiving I felt dark clouds hovering over me, I had to beat them back with constant reminders of how far I had come and all the good things and people in my life.  The best change is that now, I am no longer dependent on another human being or a marriage for my happiness.

If you are going through a rough time and you stumbled on this blog.  It does get better.  Maybe not in the way you think it will, and it may take a long time for it to happen.  Try as much as you can to surround yourself with people who support and love you, and there are always people who support and love you no matter what you may think now.  Life is just a roller coaster and some of us have to stay near the bottom for a long time before it swings back up, and you may never know what direction that upswing will take you.  If you need professional help with your depression, get the help you need by any means necessary.  The mental illness of depression really can become bigger than you, positive thinking is not going to make it magically float away.  You may need an objective third-party to help you  pull yourself up.  Try to avoid anyone who is not taking your situation seriously or making light of it, they probably mean well but they can do more harm than good.  I know when I was drowning in depression having someone flippantly say

“Other people have bigger problems than you do”

“Go out and get over it”

“You should just get wasted and forget about it”

Comments like these were like pouring salt on my wound.  A major loss takes time, and you should instead surround yourself with people who have genuine sympathy for your situation.  Fellow divorced people, or friends who have experienced a similar loss such as a death are the best people to find for support.  A friend who has been through the same thing will understand you better than anyone.

And if you know someone going through a rough time, sit down with them and just listen.  You don’t have to fix their problems, but sometimes just being a person to hear their pain and their story is more important than anything else.  Try to give them the patience they need, as a person in crisis is bound to be a needy emotional mess.  Give them room and allow them their time to grieve.  There are no magic bullets or overnight successes when dealing with loss.  And remember more than anything, before you know it the holidays will be over and everyone will go back to life as usual.

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