Pandemics and Depression are Common Bedfellows

 The pandemic has caused many people to struggle with mental health, primarily anxiety and depression.  Everyone is scared, sad, touch-starved, struggling to make ends meet, all the things that go along with this dumpster fire of a year.  Even my husband, who has never had mental health issues (and in fact has trouble relating to them), is definitely experiencing some depression.  I've experienced a resurgence of my depression, and it's taking a different form than it ever has.

Typically, my depression comes out as anger and irritability.  This year, I've encountered those as well as changes in appetite and sleep patterns, which have never been things I struggled with before.  I've also attained a level of apathy and lack of motivation that I always thought was a myth.  My children roller skate in the house.  I don't care.  My 10-year-old hoards candy in his bedroom.  I don't care.  I have no clean clothes.  I don't care.  There's no food in the house.  I don't care.  Christmas shopping has been a total nightmare, even though I did it all online.  And now that all the gifts are here, I wonder how much I would have to pay someone to wrap them for me.  I have completely lost touch with my wardrobe.  I wear scrubs at work (one less decision to make), and when I come home I take a shower (at least I still do that!) and put on my pajamas.  At 3:00 in the afternoon.

I'm retreating.  I'm isolating.  I'm hiding.  All signs of bad brain action.  Honestly, the hardest thing about this whole situation has been forcing myself to do the things I need to do.  There are days when all I can do is go to work and go home.  No laundry, no errands, dinner ordered in.  I have a very autonomous job, and most days it's up to me to get things done on my own schedule.  Most of the time I like that, but right now I kind of need someone to hang over my shoulder and remind me to do things.  I mean, things other than sit at my desk and play Candy Crush.

Everything takes so much energy, so much strength, so much work.

People think depression is being sad or despondent.  For some people it is.  But it's also lack of motivation, lack of pleasure in things you used to love, the inability to prioritize or make decisions.  I increased the dose of my antidepressant, and that helped some, but mostly I've just been putting one foot in front of the other, trudging forward, hoping it will pay off one day.  And hoping that when this all ends, and we all go back out to the world, it won't linger.

Because the thing is, it's normal to be depressed right now.  I'd be a little weirded out if I weren't.  It's not normal to continue to be depressed when the circumstances change and we get back to living.  I've realized how many of the things I did were coping mechanisms for this same depression.  Now that they've been taken away, I see why I did them.  They got me out of the house and out of my head.  They allowed me to interact with people and be social.  They allowed me to have something to ground myself.

Every now and then my husband will randomly ask if I'm okay.  I always tell him I am, while simultaneously wondering why he's asking.  Last night I realized that he asks that because he really doesn't know.  I've retreated so far into myself, began listening to my own internal monologue so much, that I often don't talk.  So the days blend together, one after the other, all the same, and I just keep plodding.  Hoping something will change.  Hoping something will break.  Imagining... what?  What will the world be like when we all surface again?  I like to think we all learned something about how to relate to each other, how to be kind to each other, how to see things in a new way.  But I know humanity.  American humanity in particular.  We're very resistant to change and learning.  We don't learn from our past experiences, which is why history really does repeat itself.

One thing I know for sure: I'm not the only one.  In fact, for perhaps the first time in history, mental health is affecting more people than not.  I have a group of friends, we call ourselves the Crazy Moms Club.  We all have issues with anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, body image, you name it.  All of our husbands are what we like to call neurotypical, meaning they don't have mental health issues at all.  We are all abundantly thankful for our "normal" husbands because they give us perspective.  They tell us when we're being crazy.  They pick up extra slack around the house when we don't have the energy.  They remind us to feed the children.  And when we get together, our conversation almost always revolves around the difficulties we face being moms with mental health issues.  Some people may say it's commiserating.  Maybe it is.  But it's also therapy.  It reminds us we're not alone.  We get ideas on how to cope.  We remind each other of our worth.  I love those Crazy Moms.  But right now, we can't get together.  We can (and do) FaceTime or Zoom, but anyone with kids knows how that goes.  You spend half the time talking to your friends, and half the time dealing with the kids.  It's less helpful that way.  But what else are we supposed to do in these times?  So we grit our teeth and move forward.

This will all be over someday.

Ruminations on a Another Year Gone By

I have spent a lot of time in the last few months proudly proclaiming that I would be perfectly happy if this year just didn't exist at all. That really what I would like to do is go straight from last year to next year and just forget that good old 2010 ever happened. I mean, let's just catalog the reasons why this would be a good idea, shall we? Come with me on a trip down Misery Lane as we discover why this year should be made a gap in history.

1) I found out I am infertile. Now, I want all of your out there to try this for me to understand the weight of this statement. Imagine that you are a 29-year-old woman, who has been "trying"- as they say- to conceive for almost 2 years. Every month you think, "Maybe this is it. Maybe this is the month we got it right." And every month, you're still not pregnant. You begin to wonder if you've done something wrong. Something you don't remember doing and you're not sure why you're being punished. Every month you scrape yourself off the floor and try again. Along the way, you try to keep your marriage together and keep your husband from feeling like an unwilling participant in some sick biology project.

Finally you ask for help and seek out a specialist. Surely this person can help, can't they? This is what they do. Look at all the thank you notes in the office. Look how many people have been helped so far. Surely this is the right place. Turns out, it is the right place, but there is no help for you. And there you are, a young, vibrant, eager, hopeful mother-to-be, in an instant reduced to broken, flawed, helpless, and useless. This thing that so may people do by accident, you can't do at all. These people who take for granted that they can have children (of course they can... who can't?) all around you. Your friends who are trying to decide if they "want to have another one" and you'd give your right arm to have just one. And as a bonus, you find out you get to have menopause 10 years earlier than anyone else around you. And no, you can't have a hysterectomy, even though you now have a reminder every month of that worthless lump of muscle in your abdomen.

2) Our adoption application almost got stopped because I have epilepsy. I have had epilepsy for going on 5 years now. I've been seizure-free for 4 of them. I was up front on our adoption application about this condition. Our social worker's supervisor wanted a guarantee from my neurologist (who had already written a letter saying that there was no reason I couldn't be a mom, that she considered my seizures very well controlled, and that I was a compliant patient who did everything I was supposed to) that I would never have another seizure again. This is, of course, impossible and we told her as much. We ended up going to HER supervisor with our case, and suddenly the doctor's letter was just fine, application approved.

3) Ryan's pay got cut 15%. I know we've all heard about the State budget and how in debt we are. One of the ways the government has chosen to alleviate this debt is by cutting State employee pay. This is because MOST State employees are paid from what is called the General Fund which is the pool of money the State has at its disposal. It does save a lot of money to cut the pay of employees who are paid out of this Fund. However, Ryan is not paid out of this Fund. His department generates their own salary from the citations they write. Therefore, it makes NO SENSE to cut his salary. But cut it they did, and we spent most of this year wondering how we were going to pay our mortgage.

4) I took a pay cut when I was unceremoniously fired and took my present job. I took the first job that came along because the job market in my chosen field is not good right now, and it is a managerial position. The responsibility was a step up, the pay was a big step down.

5) We had our children returned to their convicted-felon birth parents. And the social worker on the case had the balls to say she understood who hard this was for us. A woman with her own children who treated us as if we were nothing but a thorn in her side the entire time we dealt with her. She was rude, she was unprofessional, she refused to give us information we asked for, she didn't return phone calls or e-mails in a timely manner. She didn't understand anything, let alone how hard this was for us.

6) Car and house projects abound. These things are always around, but added to everything else, replacing the roof on the back patio, 2 car radiators, some broken sprinklers, and a couple of broken door handles were the sprinkles on the cookie of disaster that was this year.

However...

1) My sister got married this year to a wonderful man who treats her with all the respect and tenderness she deserves. Their wedding was such fun and seeing the family we don't get to see very often was a blast.

2) My new job is a fabulous one with a staff of people who care about each other and the practice so much that I don't miss the money (much). My boss is the best one I've ever had. He appreciates the staff, and has our back no matter what happens. The associates are fun to work with and ask for opinions rather than dictating orders. The staff genuinely likes each other and it shows. And when I needed to take time off both when we got the kids and when we had to give them away, they were so understanding and helpful. And when I came back to work, no one forced me to talk about anything. I wanted to get back to life as usual and they understood that.

3) In the face of this year, my marriage has gotten firmer and richer. Things I never would have been able to be honest about before, I can now. Conversations I couldn't imagine happening do.

And here we are, staring another holiday season in the face. What do I do? I have a choice. I can be angry and bitter and depressed, or I can be hopeful, positive, and a little wiser as I go forward. I choose the latter.

Bad things happen. I know that better than most. If I don't choose to learn from them, I can never figure out why they happened. So maybe I still wish this year hadn't happened. But the lessons I learned and the wisdom I gained are a small but rich reward.

"'For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord. 'Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future.'" -Jeremiah 29.11