Rainy day blues
2005-02-28 @ 5:33 p.m.
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The weather is back to dreary and cold. That sucks.
I read a really good article last week on depression. Actually the article was about a book that is coming out by John Head on depression in African American men. He is recovering from depression himself, and, as an African American man he knows how difficult it is to admit to any kind of weakness and be able to maintain respect (self and of others) especially if you are already seen as lacking by the larger society. He makes connections between depression and the overwhelming number of black men in prison. I'd never thought of that, but it makes perfect sense. He also talks about his own considerations of suicide, actually rehearsing, but then deciding he could not do that to his young sons.
My thoughts of suicide were similarly aborted because I couldn't do that to my girls, Badsnake, Jake and Sara. But at the time it felt like a warm, friendly release from the pain I was feeling. I didn't understand to what degree depression was a treatable illness until I started taking the drugs. The first drugs we tried didn't take me all the way, but they helped, and I realized I was going through something I couldn't fix on my own. I've been used to talk therapy and trying to understand my problems to fix them. But this was something beyond understanding. Something in my brain finally snapped and I lost touch with reality. I made assumptions about people based on my own speculations. Reality didn't look the same to me as it did other people. For that matter, reality didn't look the same to me when I was depressed that it did when I was sane. It was frustrating going through periods of sanity and thinking I had it licked, then dropping down into depression again, sometimes without even realizing that was where I was. The craziness seemed to make perfect sense to me when I was depressed.
I resisted drugs at first because I thought I could fix it. But I couldn't fix the depression any more than I could have set my own broken leg or treated myself for cancer. I understand that now. I've read about other people who've gone through depression and learned that so much of what I experienced paralleled other people's experiences.
That's enough depression talk for today. It's too dreary a day to get bogged down in that. Drugs are a wonderful thing.
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