The Great Depression

This week I've been faced with big decisions and a tight time frame, and they've been driving me batty.  I've been going back to my old tricks, my old depression symptoms. Four and a half years ago I fell into The Great Depression, the bleakest period in my life when I was in my last year of law school and my boyfriend dumped me suddenly one day with no explanation.  About the same time, I found out that the law firm I'd worked for the last summer had decided not to hire me after I graduated.  I was devastated all around.   I've spent my whole life being worried about things and having anxiety symptoms come from that.  The symptoms usually mean a tightness in my chest (that I stress out even more about because I think it means heart trouble), difficulty breathing, stress-induced irritable bowel syndrome that prevents me from eating anything with fructose or lactose in it (comfortably, I mean), and sometimes really bad stomach pain (emergency-room style).   But depression symptoms are worse because they're scary.  There's the crying, sure.  I used to schedule time in law school to go to my car and cry for an hour between classes.  And the despondence and not wanting to get out of bed.  But mine was supposedly just a "borderline/mild" case.  I was still able to do all my work and get to places I was supposed to be.  Albeit with swollen eyes.  Every day I would wonder what the purpose of going through al my daily activities was.  When I wasn't depressed, I wouldn't know the answer, but I wouldn't think to ask the question either. The bizarrest and scariest symptoms, though, were the thoughts about hurting myself.  Thoughts would pop into my head whenever I felt guilty or ashamed (which was usually).  They would be about slitting my wrists or my throat, or the insides of my elbows, or my inner forearms.  In these fantasies I'd cut myself with whatever was available, but usually glass or a knife or something.  The thoughts stopped right after the point where I imagined putting the cutting surface to my skin.  There was never any thought about the feeling of pain or the resulting blood or anything else that came after the act of self-destruction.  Definitely no thoughts about dying.  The only time this feeling ever translated into any other kind of thought was for a while when I would identify kitchen knives not as kitchen implements, but as things that one could cut one's wrists with. I don't know where these thoughts came from, but they didn't surprise my psychologist at all.  I guess they're textbook.  She was sympathetic, but not freaked out about them like I was.  She said they meant I felt battered and bad, or that I was under the false impression that I deserved this bad treatment.  When I assured her that I never had any thought of acting on these fantasies, she accepted that.  But I never fully did.  If my brain was capable of coming up with these random thoughts, what was to say that my brain would not tell me to act on them? Now that I've been in therapy since the Great Depression... which is coming up on five years... I have worked out a way of living with this.  I'm on antidepressants, which have brought me back to a normal life, but the depression has not fully gone away.  It pops up from time to time when something distressing is going on.  Like infertility.  Whenever I have a stray thought about wanting to hurt myself, I think, "Oh, it's a depression symptom.  I'm having a temporary relapse."  Sometimes I don't even fully have the thought: I just have an awareness of the insides of my wrists, or I find myself rubbing them.  Or I touch my jugular vein in passing.  It's just a reminder that this never really goes away, and my brain has never really recovered from the tremendous disappointments of 2003.  And it's a signal that I'm feeling especially bad and need to cut myself some slack. All this has taught me that our bodies are like history books, journals, of everything that has happened to us.  Descartes talked about the "duality of nature," the idea that our minds and our bodies are separate entities.  FALSE.  I am one walking tangle of my mind and my body. Trying to conceive is just another example of the inseparability of mind and body.  My mind is held captive to this biological need to reproduce.  Or maybe the bodily need comes from our minds.  I have said before that I think the need to procreate is part of our bodies.  In a way I would hate for my baby to reside in the same body that has these terrible thoughts.  But there are a lot of things I like about my body and mind, so we'll hope those even out. Anyway, this has been my treatise on depression.  Suffice it to say that I'm in a relapse period right now.  But that's just who I am, and unfortunately it's part of this big bundle of experiences.  I thought I'd write about this stuff, because although I'm reluctant to tell people how crazy I am, writing does help.  And I bet I'm not the only person who experiences stuff like this. I just hate this week.