Coming to the Surface

I sink.  The weight of the water pushes me down, down, down to the bottom of the pool.  I struggle and my limbs barely respond to my brain's panicked urging.  Swim.  It seems so easy.  But nothing happens and I lay on the bottom of the pool the world above hazy and distant.  I can see my family walking around up there.  "Mom?" I hear my daughter ask.  I try to respond, but it seems terribly hard.  Her face blurs.  I'm numb.  Nothing really matters down here in the depths.

This is how I described the way depression makes me feel to my therapist several months ago.  It took some time for me to finally admit that I had been struggling with depression for quite a while.  It's always seemed an indulgent disease to me, selfish even.  But having lived through it and denying it's existence in my reality I know firsthand that you don't choose to be depressed.  There were days I thought to myself,  I had a happy childhood, a relatively uneventful adolescence, I have a husband and a child...why do I feel this way?  The feelings of sadness and worthlessness engulfed me totally. 

Two summers ago when everything started to unravel for me, where I started to acknowledge the failings in my life I was attending a baby shower with a close friend.  I hadn't seen my friend, the mother-to-be very much since high school.  But there was a time that I had spent many hours at her home getting to know her family.  As we walked through the doors her mother, who I had always admired and liked greeted me.  She faced me and said, "It's been so long, let me look at you."  As an insecure 16 year old she had made me feel special and beautiful when all I saw was a girl with non-trendy curly hair and a big nose.  She had once told me I reminded her of a Greek Goddess.  You can imagine a compliment like that leaves quite an impression.  As her piercing blue eyes probed my face I felt terrified and panicked that she would see through me.  See in the depth of my eyes all the sorrow and turmoil that had been bubbling up in me for years.  I turned my face from her and went to greet her daughter. 

I don't know what she saw, but like my unhappiness in my marriage I told myself I was hiding my sadness well.  I'm sure that wasn't true at all, just like my pretending everything was fine with my marriage didn't fool anyone close to me either.  For me admitting that something was wrong with me was a shameful sign of weakness.  Other people get depressed, but I'm fine.  I can deal with it.  It's laughable that I thought I was dealing with it.  There were days at my worst where getting off the couch in the morning and taking a shower seemed like a monumental task.  I don't know how to explain it to someone who has never experienced it besides everything seems inflated.  Every problem, every task at hand, is huge.  And the constant stream of negative thoughts poisons any confidence you have in your ability to achieve things.  At least this is how depression manifested itself in my life.  I guess I can't speak for everyone who has ever experienced depression.

I wrote a poem when my daughter was two entitled Of Dishes and Laundry where I express my desire to be a rain drop that can be evaporated up into the sky, and I wish that I would never feel anything ever again except to fall from the sky and be taken back up over and over again.  Reading it now I feel so sad for the woman I was, for the experience I was grappling with, for how isolating it all was.  I learned as a child in a family of five children that the best I could do was to pipe down and not complain.  To blend into the background because I wasn't that important.  My sister was important.  My brother was important.  But I wasn't.  I didn't need to cause problems.  I didn't need to be a burden to anyone.  In fact my role was to lighten the mood.  To smooth problems between others.  I was the happy one, the one that dealt with things and no one needed to know if there were issues in my life.  If someone hurt me I just pretended as if I was okay.

Reflection on that attitude has taught me that I don't need to pass that legacy on to my daughters.  Speak up.  If something is not right you say it.  Voicing your feelings...good and bad is very validating.  I never want to make my children feel as if they need to hide what is going on in their lives to make my life easier.  It has not been healthy for my life to be this way.  It kept me in denial for years about what was actually going on around me.  It served to simply allow those who would hurt me to do so with my permission.

When I started going to counseling with my husband it surprised me that as I spoke candidly about my experience that a pattern emerged.  What I had supposed to be the cause of all my unhappiness...my marriage, really wasn't.  It was part of it, but in the grand scheme of things it was only as they say the tip of the iceberg.  The anxiety that had pervaded my life for years it turned out is not experienced by most people as I assumed.  Other people don't obsess about their daughter being kidnapped night after night, or a fire ravaging their home, or you name it...any other calamity that can happen in a person's life.  Other people don't feel their chest tighten in the middle of the night as scenes of these possible scenarios play out.  At least mentally healthy people.

Counseling has helped me enormously.  I never envisioned myself needing therapy.  Once again, I thought it was for weaker people than myself.  Because I'm super strong and "normal".  When I left my husband and my marriage I was running from an unhappiness I had not yet fully examined.  I'm glad now that my husband was so persistent about us going to counseling.  I had zero faith it would help our situation.  Now months later I feel like I'm closer to knowing myself.  To being honest with myself and those around me.  To know that getting help for something as debilitating as depression and anxiety is not a sign of weakness.

I'm not advocating that taking a pill is a cure all for the symptoms of depression.  With my doctor we decided on a course of treatment and an anti-depressant is part of that treatment.  I feared being mired in those same feelings after the birth of my second child, and so far I'm happy that things are different.  Of course being a woman, I feel guilt that with Brielle I am able to bond and manage my mood better with her and feel as if Ava was robbed of the full interaction of a loving healthy mother.  I can't change the past.  All I can do is be truthful about my experience in the hopes that honesty can help others who may be struggling know that they are not alone.