I have a few minutes before I need to finish getting ready for work, so I thought I’d post an update.

Depression is a horrible thing, and I hope that none of you ever have to experience its wrath, although I suspect some of you have or will in your life. For the past two weeks I have been learning the dance of psychotherapy, and it seemed to be going well, until yesterday. My menses were due to start, and my body chemistry went haywire. A wall of depression hit me, and I had to stay home most of the day, alternating between sleeping and crying and praying that it would pass soon, that it was just a fluke of hormones, that I would stop feeling so much hurt.

Someone who has never experienced clinical depression cannot truly understand how debilitating it is. For someone who is not depressed, a simple action like getting a drink of water is just that, a simple action. For someone in the depths of a depressive episode, this can feel like the hardest, most painful thing in the world. Every action gets broken down into its component parts. First you have to get up, and crushing fatigue can make even this feel like it’s not really worth the effort. You think to yourself vaguely, through a veil of apathy, “Do I really need that glass of water? It’s easier to just lie here and feel miserable. I’m not even sure I have the energy to move.”

Once you summon the large amount of will needed to get up, then there’s the matter of walking to the kitchen and getting down a glass from the cupboard, all while feeling like you really don’t want to be standing. It takes a lot more energy than sitting, which takes more energy than lying down and going back to sleep. Then there’s the matter of turning on the faucet, which is probably fairly easy at this point, you’ve worked up the momentum. And then you have to drink that glass of water you just poured for yourself. That’s probably not too hard, but if it were a glass of juice, or a muffin, or something more substantial, you may not really feel up to it. You may be feeling queasy, or just plain not hungry, or hungry but not interested in the effort it takes to eat.

After all this, you can go back to where you were sitting, probably staring at a wall or your hands, or where you were lying half-asleep, in the peaceful land of half-consciousness where things don’t feel quite so heavy.

This may sound ridiculous if you’ve never experienced it, but it’s a fairly accurate and not at all exaggerated account of moments of my yesterday, once the crying fits had passed. Today I’m feeling slightly less bad, less prone to crying, but with the combination of period fatigue, depression fatigue, cramps, and a headache, I’m still feeling less than good.

The worst part is that such a large part of the world thinks of depression as nothing more than an intense sadness that you just need to suck up and talk yourself out of, its difficult to feel justified in believing that there’s something legitimately wrong with me. Every time I leave work “sick” I feel like I’m being weak and lazy by not just sticking it out. Every time my husband comes home and asks “what’s wrong?”, saying “I’m depressed” doesn’t seem like a sufficient answer for him; I’m supposed to be upset about something in particular and he doesn’t quite believe that I can be this upset and sick without a particular cause. Yes, this depression was triggered by specific events, but at this point the depression has taken a life of its own that has nothing to do with any of the things I’m upset about. The pains I’m feeling are real, and my fears and anxieties and worries are their fuel, not their cause.

Now I’d better go before the cat purring in my lap convinces me that a nap is a better use of my time than breakfast and work.