I knew of depression as any layman understands it: the blues, sad days, gray days, tears and slow music. A frozen moment in time, yes? Like mourning a death, sooner or later, I’d snap out of it. I just couldn’t understand why I felt so tortured, why my brain seemed to turn on me. Everything I wanted to forget — all the mistakes and sins and embarrassments — released like wolves panting and sprinting in the lightless night toward carrion. The mammal ensnared in the trap was me. The wolves ripped me apart day and night.
[…]
Since, I’ve been meaning to research (i.e. Google) post-major-depression trauma. One can’t really be the same after being devoured by imaginary wolves. I’m no longer the same, for I don’t care as much as I did before. When your body and mind decide, almost on a whim, to become your worst enemies, … There’s little time for the outside world. I became, and remain, vigilant with respect to my moods, my immediate condition.
I don’t pay attention as much as I did before. I hear, but I’m never really listening — not completely — and forget about my surroundings. Trees and buildings all look the same when viewed from the peripheral, if viewed at all, so a street in downtown Chicago is no different to me than an alleyway in Philadelphia; I couldn’t care less about their actual differences.
This makes the so-called “writing life” difficult, and it is why my work has become so solipsistic over the years. I am my favorite subject, I am the mystery which confuses and seduces me, I am that which I know nothing about, and so I must write about it — me — to get to the answers of unknown questions.
I am so fearful now, six years and three major depressions later, of myself, of some deep flaw within me that I might’ve missed or neglected. And the advice from friends and family and lovers is, typically, to live and let live. Enjoy life. The answers will come. Their kind words come from the belief that I’m on a spiritual quest when, in fact, I’m sort of like Bruce Banner: I’m trying to find a goddamn cure before my depression destroys my life yet again.
Because ironically, depression is not a solipsistic disease; it is not a self-inflicted gunshot but, rather, a bomb detonated in the middle of a family function or, in my case, a very quiet explosion as I read my second set of vows, as I wondered if it was happening again, as I knew everyone in the room was about to be wiped out by my disease — they just didn’t know it at the time.
[…]
Because after the storm subsides, after the wolves slink away sated and ready for sleep, after the antidepressants circulate in my blood, blunting the blows, it’s a challenge to look outward again, to remember that it isn’t all about you, to again understand the connection between all people. But I try. I try.
