When You'll Grasp at Anything to Find Relief From Depression

You wake up in the morning and take another pill so you can sleep until noon. You think that maybe if you can manage to miss half the day the other half won’t hurt so much. Getting out of bed is like trying to walk right out of surgery. On good days come the dreaded rituals: Brushing teeth, showering, on a great day perhaps a shave.

Coffee just stimulates the pain, not the mood, but you drink it anyway. You sit and stare at the walls, too tired to move, go out, stay in or even look around. You don’t care, and you don’t care that you don’t care. You’re falling, and you’re just too exhausted to try holding on any longer. Imagine spiraling down a hole, ever so slowly — a hole with no end, no destination, just a general direction downward.

Do you know what I mean? Because if you don’t, I am just not going be able to tell it to you so that you understand. And those people at the edge, up top, they look down and shake their heads and tell you to just get up and just go for a walk and just do this and just do that and it hurts so much more because they all remind you how alone you are because they just don’t know what you’re feeling because if they did they wouldn’t say those things and so it must be me and I’m the only “crazy” one in this sea of stuff and… and…

After a few moments there’s the daily Council meeting in your head. Each day it forms a consensus, comes back in the room and declares the results, one more time: “Mr. Secretary, please read the minutes of today’s meeting: ‘You are worthless, you are nothing; you are nobody. You never have and never will make a damn bit of difference in this world. In fact your very presence makes it worse. You don’t deserve to be here. You are a pathetic loser — just look at yourself.’ Meeting adjourned.” And you read the email from the guy who tells you to “Have a nice day.”

If anyone else said those things to you you would promptly show them the door — wouldn’t you? Or you’d hit him or yell or find some way to defend yourself. But here, when it comes from your own head — your own brain — you just sit down, pour another cup of coffee, and listen. You listen and nod and you have nothing to say in your own defense. You believe they are right. And then when they are done reading you today’s minutes, you’re supposed to go out and be in the world. “Don’t worry — be happy;” “People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be;” “Think positive;” “Be grateful for what you have.” And so on. I know exactly what you would like to say to them all.

Welcome to the club. Open to members of all creeds, races, nationalities, cultures and religions. And contrary to popular Western belief, membership is not only involuntary but not at all correlated with wealth, with your stuff. It doesn’t care if you’re rich, poor, sick, well, married, single, homeless or in a palace. You may not believe me, I know — but I have examples. I have the list. I can prove it to you. It’s so hard to believe because we have been trained to think with the template, “If only I…;” Fill in the blank — “Had a love,” “had a better job,” “was single,” “was married,” “had a family,” “had more money,” “didn’t have this disease,” “wasn’t so fat,” “wasn’t so thin,” “looked better in these pants,” “had abs like him,” “hair like her,” “had hair,” and so on ad nauseam.

Then, then, then you become attached to the depression itself! It becomes part of you; it defines you. After awhile it feels like an old friend, or the spouse that you can’t divorce just because you can’t fathom life without them. It blinds us to our choices and makes us attach ourselves to it. Resistance only feeds it and makes it worse. It forces us to feed it and the more we feed it the more powerful it gets. And then of all things we invite it to sit down and join us for our morning coffee and to accompany us throughout the day.

Maybe you come from a Ward and June family (If you’re under 50 look it up). There was more than enough love to go around. No alcoholism. No violence. Family vacations, help with homework, kindness, compassion and understanding; yet you still can’t remember how many times you wished you were dead, or at least thought about it; or that you wished you were someone else. A 5-year-old hides under his bed, thinking about death. He seeks comfort in his parents, and they gave it. But the effects are so short-lived and the monster never leaves. At least not for long. So you’re either in it or you’re waiting for it. And they told you that “Life is just a bowl of cherries.”

As you get older you try therapy, exercise, hobbies, travel, self-help books, medication, you name it. But always the effects were short-lived. The only thing that came close to helping, that actually made the blues go away for just a little while was that bottle of Jack Daniels in front of you. But then that eventually make things worse. A lot worse. It will feed the depression and it will get you a first class ticket into a mental hospital, prison, a spot under the bridge with a can of Sterno or just a quicker death. But thinking about that — I mean imagining all that — it doesn’t matter, does it? You don’t really care right now, do you?

What we think of as “love” is the biggest scapegoat of all. We attribute our depression to not having someone, or someone leaving us by going away. Or by finding out that s/he was never really there in the first place. Most people I meet seem to get that “money won’t buy happiness.” What they don’t get is that neither will love. Sorry folks, I hate to break it to you, but finding that Mr./Ms. Right is not going to make you happy if you ain’t happy now.

True happiness — I mean serenity, not ha-ha-happiness — is inversely proportional to expectations. The word for “expectation” and “hope” is the same in some languages. If you know depression, not just sadness, but the bleak darkness of true depression, then you know what I mean. If you know depression then you know why you’ll grasp at anything — a person, a drug, sex, a sport, a job, your smartphone, a thrill — just to not feel it for a few moments. But the moments end. Always too soon. And we go on living and reaching for those tiny spaces where the clouds have yet to pass that day, but we just can’t quite make it.

Follow this journey on Dr. Bill’s Blog.

If you or someone you know needs help, visit our suicide prevention resources page.

If you need support right now, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255, the Trevor Project at 1-866-488-7386 or reach the Crisis Text Line by texting “START” to 741741.

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Getty image via EREEE