“Poor coping skills” and “unrealistic expectations”: These phrases from the pamphlet in the doctor’s office, hung in the self-serve info rack beside old college standards like alcohol abuse and STD’s, haunt me like the truth. The nurse handed me a questionnaire in order to quantify my depression: 13. The fine print said “16+ SEV,” so color me on the high side of moderate, three shades short of a clinical emergency. Later the doctor came back just to tell me, “We need to change how we think about depression. It’s not a character flaw.”
A day or two after I posted my last blog entry, I got a phone call from Dr. Mullins. Not only is he the founder of Teacher Corps, but he is one of the best professors I have ever met. Dr. Mullins is tremendously respected by everyone. He is also a busy and important figure at the university; his office is next door to the chancellor himself. So it meant a lot to me that he personally took the time to call me. He urged me to see a doctor, and he offered to help me set up an appointment at the university. His personal attention helped me change my mind about seeking treatment.
When a person suffers from heart disease or cancer, we rarely waste time burdening one another with shame over the poor choices which led to the disease, even when diet and other lifestyle choices such as smoking or (lack of) exercise may have been strong contributing factors. Rather like obesity, however, depression carries the stigma of a disease often seen as something a person brings upon himself. It’s not black and white, though. Yes, circumstances can lead to depression, and decisions such “poor coping skills” can also contribute to its onset and severity. But consider this: I have a relatively fast metabolism and am known for eating a lot of food very quickly. Despite some occasional good intentions, I go through periods where I eat nothing but repetitive junk food and exercise very little, yet my body weight fluctuates only marginally. If I were born into another body, making the same choices, I might very well be fat. Likewise with depression. The same circumstances, the same choices, which for some people may be well within the range of normal and healthy, for me occasionally compound upon themselves into an uncontrollable tailspin. Cause and effect is such a tricky thing when it comes to body and mind.
Up until yesterday, I was avoiding all my friends and family. I felt ashamed of myself. Yes, I recently posted on this blog a very pointed account of my depression, but otherwise I told no one, talked to no one. When my parents called, I let it ring. It was so hard to face up to reality, to confess all the messy piles of unaccomplishments that clutter my awareness. It all seems so eerily similar to past episodes of personal collapse, which I now so strongly regret. To admit my present downfall was to accept an almost hopeless, seemingly permanent, shame-ridden vulnerability. How do you think I dropped out of high school and earned a 2.7 GPA in college? Could it be that nothing changes?
There was a time in my life when I vowed to myself never to play another
MMORPG. But this past June, during one of several passing suicidal lows, I caved in once again and started playing
World of Warcraft. A classmate here in Teacher Corps plays, but she is Little Miss Perfect. She claims she never plays WoW until all her work is done, and I believe her, but I am not that strong. I play to escape. Just an hour or two, I tell myself, then before I know it that becomes all evening and just another wasted day. Computer games are my only addiction. It is escapism in the purest form, the total of evacuation of the mind, an alternate attention with goals and decisions, losses and victories completely devoid of all reality. This is my fun little elephant in the room, the “poor coping skills” read to me like an indictment in the doctor’s office. In my own defense, the depression and the disappointments, the bottom-scraping lows, came first. (Unfortunately, I have selected a particularly unglamorous demon. Some of my favorite music is about heroine addiction, for instance, but online games are interesting only to gamers, and there is something cartoonishly lame about them, even to me. Perhaps it is best this way, however, as it wastes only my time.)
I consistently aspire to be much, much better than I actually am. It is a bad habit of my idealistic youth, perhaps. The problem is my almost inexhaustible believe in myself, and an absurdly optimistic view of my all-too-human weaknesses. I am ashamed to admit what seems so silly in moments such as this, but the truth of the matter is, my list of resolutions at times of new beginnings is literally longer than I can ever remember. As a result, I often cycle between boundless optimism and semi-defeated self-recrimination, because I never take the time to reconcile my ambitions to my limitations. In our leadership class, we read biographic profiles of renowned leaders in education. The number one thing that struck me, the thing which separates them from me, is “drive.” The thing can be put no simpler than that. Drive. It strikes me as a profound revelation. That is what great individuals have, and I lack! Oh well. I should probably get used to it. I mean, let me be honest with myself for a moment: I enjoy my do-nothing time way to much to accomplish nearly as much as I often would like to imagine. Why has it taken so long for me to realize this? So how do I balance my dreams and ideals against this newfound realistic view of myself? It’s hard!
The other part of the “unrealistic expectations” indictment has to do with love. We all want it. Some of us want it all. For some people, everything seems to go according to plan. They get married, have kids, get a mortgage, etc. Take my brother and sister, for instance. Once again, I am the misfit of my family, the one my mother worries whether she is going to get any grandkids out of. I think those people are the realists, who do not expect love to be perfect. They find someone roughly compatible, and they just get on with business. Then you have me. Perhaps I expect love to be too perfect, you know… to complete me and fulfill my every need, etc. As a result, I can feel incredibly lonely while feeling attracted to almost no one around me. Holding out for what? And it makes me ultra-vulnerable. As recently as last month, I was still grieving a relationship that ended a year and a half ago! Sick.
This current depression roughly coincides with a pretty fundamental shift in perspective for me, a sadness as deep as any loss. My whole life, I grew up thinking I would someday find “the one,” and everything would be just right, and we would have our 2.3 children in a perfect portrait of domestic bliss. I really believed that, like the pious prayer believes in God, I believed it. I had to. It was my dream. Then a few months ago, I began to doubt, and it was more than just some passing cloud this time. The weight of the evidence seems greater for the side of disbelief. My standards are too high, there is some flaw in the way I relate to love itself, I am unwilling to compromise something essential, etc. The halfway-plausible explanations are long and exhausting. Whatever the reason, I have lost faith in the dream. My love life will be more difficult, perhaps more itinerant or less complete, or simply less altogether, than my childhood dream. What a sad, sad thought. I miss love, I miss sex, real sex, on a more than daily basis. And I look forward to nothing. For the first time in my life, I imagine the next few years of my life hand-in-hand with no one. And that depresses me. How can it not? Perhaps I will someday pass through this dark passage of disappointed expectations and discover something less idealized but more than halfway satisfying on the other side. That’s what age is for, right?
I am talking to my friends and family again. I am telling the truth now, and I am feeling better. For about seven days now, I have been taking a drug called Lexapro. Today, I actually almost felt like getting up in the morning for the first time in memory. My mother is making plans to visit me later this month and help me out “until you get to feeling better.” My friend convinced me not to feel ashamed about accepting help when I need it. I will do better with the depression this time, because I have listened to my friends, I am accepting help, I am willing to change my thinking. I maintain my resolve to finish what I started.
Still, I look back at my own blog and realize I should have started this drug in April or May.
Witness this! I feel like I have been sleepwalking through the last five months of my life, broken only by occasional moments of lucidity. Where were my friends back then? You have to casually mention semi-credible thoughts of self-harm to get anyone’s attention. And that ain’t hardly right.
