It's Thursday. If you're starting here, don't. Read part 1 first, or go back to the very beginning, or (best option) wait for the next post. There is no recap of part 1 because I just can't.
So all of the horribleness of 2016, for unknown reasons, I explained to R in an imaginary conversation as I folded and bagged the fabric. (Don't remember R or the fabric? I don't blame you.) I've never shared any of it with my dearest friends. I can't talk about it with anyone. I'm incredibly impressed I'm even writing about it now --and let's face it, it's because I have no readers plus I know I can wimp at any time and delete (or at least return it to draft status) it at any time.
It was weird. I knew it was weird as I was doing it.
I didn't put on eyeliner yesterday morning. Which was also weird.
And I didn't make a salad for lunch. I just didn't feel like it. Washing and cutting lettuce just seemed like too much trouble, too much effort. Which was really weird. I knew I'd be eating leftovers at work and didn't need to specifically pack anything, but it was still weird.
Yesterday was another lovely sunny day, beginning with a cool, pleasant morning. It was maybe a little bright -- lots of summer sun with only a few wispy clouds. (I don't know what kind. I don't understand why we memorize very specific cloud details in elementary school. We forget all of it once we cram junior high and high school and college sciences into our noggins. And yet I have greater need to identify clouds than locate the liver in a dissected frog.)
And I cried driving to work. I listened to Neil Gaiman talk about Terry Pratchett and I cried. I cried for Sir Terry and I cried for Neil who lost a friend and I cried because it was just a little too bright.
And I thought about that summer, June (probably earlier) at least through September 2016.
When talking about their mental illness, especially depression, people usually describe it as darkness. Which makes sense, I guess, when I listen as an outsider. My depression is a world too bright. Painfully bright. In horribly sharp focus, too sharp to be entirely real. A world that is brighter and sharper and more in focus than reality.
Have you ever had an eye exam, had your pupils dilated, then stepped out into a cloudless day? Or been to a Caribbean island and you take a nap after lunch and you wake up in your dark room (you closed the drapes to sleep) and you wake up and you immediately step out onto your hotel balcony and there's this huge sun and the water and the white sand and it's all so bright after the cool darkness inside? It's nothing like that, really, but those are closest analogies I can make even to myself.
And yesterday I was glad that, while it might be a bit too bright, it wasn't like the bad summer, when I wanted to wear my sunglasses indoors and out except my prescription sunglasses actually increased the brightness and the sharp outlines and the sense of wrongness in my depth perception. And the longer I drove yesterday morning, and it is a long drive to work, the more the brightness hurt, the more it seemed like I could see the outline of every leaf on every tree oddly layered over all of the other leaves.
I told myself it was because I'm wearing my sunglasses from back then, the older prescription, because the ones in my current prescription, well, the frames cracked and I glued it back together and cracked again and reglued and cracked and the lens fell out and I glued the lens to the frames and reglued the frames and cracked and on and on and on. (I know this is all bad. I have an eye appointment tomorrow. I will have new glasses and sunglasses of the same prescription that aren't broken soon. Blame COVID.) But I've been wearing these old sunglasses for a few months now.
And just to clarify: it seems like edges are sharp and outline and ultra-defined but they aren't. Depression does not grant me super vision. There was a rabbit huddled in the middle of the extra windy two-lane road (the shady path through some otherworldly elfland I mentioned the other day and where I followed the house on a trailer a few weeks ago. And for once I wasn't alone on the road. Two vehicles headed toward me. And I knew I would either have to kill the rabbit or probably kill myself swerving up the hill which climbs sharply about six inches from the edge of the road. I slowed, nearly stopping altogether. And it was a crumpled brown paper sack.
(I know what small wild rabbits look like. One was hanging out on my driveway when I got home. Part of his family's tunnels come up in my backyard. I have never successfully grown broccoli in my veggie garden because of his forebears. He does not look anything like a bag tossed out of a car window.)
Ive been tired. Sleepy, regardless of how much or little sleep I get each night. Tired in body, like someone notched up the gravity setting. Every step is a slog through treacle and mire. Tired in soul, too. And it's been increasing, getting just a teensy bit worse every day.
Until the day I am too tired to put on eyeliner. Too tired to wash lettuce.
I started a journal in 2017, many many months after the bad summer ended but long before I was really back to something we'll call normal. It gave me some perspective, viewing it all from a little distance away. And one thing I learned, maybe the biggest thing, is that my depression is too much feeling. I read suicide message boards and lots of people wrote about the excess pain but most wrote about the numbness and about wanting to feel anything, wanting to feel pain to prove they could feel something. But just as my depression is too much light rather than dark, I felt everything.
Everything.
Every thing every human around me felt. All of the stress, the sadness, the frustration, the anger at work -- I was a lightning rod for all of it. It vibrated off of my own negative feelings, and multiplied them to an unholy degree. People are just bad for me.
And there was the itching. It's a hard symptom for me, because every allergy, no matter how minor the reaction, will include random itching. And then my nerves will fire off distress signals in rashes during high stress. Five years ago (it started waaaay before spring and continued in some form for a couple of years) I discovered an extreme new level of itchiness that feels like bugs all over me.
Not bugs on my skin, not on the surface of my skin. Bugs marching, their multiple cleat-wearing feet on the underside of my skin, the side inside me. Which meant my body was full of bugs. Ants and beetles and earwigs and spiders.
That feeling took a long time to completely fade without popping up again the next week.
Tonight it's back. This is not the first time I've felt the bugs return, not the first time I want to cut off all of this skin so they have nothing left to walk on.
But this is the first time I wasn't surprised. I expected it, was waiting for it. This is the first time I recognized the symptoms almost as soon as they started. The excessive breadth and depth of emotions. The painful intensity of light. The constant feeling of jumpiness inside myself, like my organs and tissues and tendons are reacting to a never-ending stream of surprises. The increased tiredness no matter how much I sleep. The bugs inside me, making my skin itch from the inside out.
This is my depression.
And because I recognize it, because I named it, I can fight it. Five years ago my body sent me all of these warnings and I didn't see them, not for what they really were. And I fell into a terrible place. I won't let that happen this time.
I've been sure I could never talk to someone about it. It was such a struggle, so hard just to journal about it after the fact. It took me days of writing to get it all out before. I cried so much just trying to explain it to myself. I wished I could start therapy via e-mail -- writing is always easier than speaking for me -- and maybe, eventually, I could build up to actually talking.
When I started writing this (part 1) about 24 hours ago, I was hopeful but not at all sure I could type it all, pin it to the screen, post it for anyone to stumble on and read. I cried a little typing part 1, not at all on part 2. I always hoped I could someday really talk to someone, actually speak it with my mouth and larynx, but deep down in my soul I knew I would never be able to do that. Today I think that it's not impossible, that I am so much closer to that than I believed possible.
I'm rambling. I'm still typing now to support myself and congratulate myself and keep the focus on how much I've accomplished and how well I'm doing, and to keep myself going for the next step. Getting help. Help outside of my own head. Definitely outside of my body that's filled with bugs. Help before I make another plan.
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