On Saturday, I visited some friends who had rented the game “WarioWare: Smooth Moves” for a party the night before. I’ve been intrigued by the idea of a WarioWare game for the Wii, since I enjoyed the previous versions for the GBA, but I haven’t been willing to shell out the $50 for a game with subpar graphics and silly mini-games. After an afternoon of playing it, though, I was sold, and I drove down to the local EB the next day as soon as I could to buy a copy.

It turned out to be the best thing I could have done for us, and definitely not a waste of money. J and I spent the next six hours taking turns at unlocking games, laughing at the crazy Japanese oddities (such as the creators’ obsession with bananas and noses), and having a genuinely good time together. The fog of depression completely cleared; I was up and moving and cheerful and feeling great. I’ve known that movement is a good way to battle depression, but my experiments with DDR usually result in disaster. I become stubborn and so focused on doing well that when I don’t play as well as I’d like, I get frustrated and self-defeatist and angry at myself. It gets me up and moving, but in the end it makes me feel like more of a failure. The nice thing about ten-second games is that if you fail at one, you’re likely to succeed at the next, and when things move that quickly, it’s hard to get caught up in thoughts of “I’m not good enough to even do this”. The simplicity of that instant gratification was extremely soothing, and the shock of the bizarre humor was just what I needed to stop the circular thinking that was dragging me down and keeping me locked inside my mind.

The rest of the evening continued to be great, and this morning was the first time in at least a month that I’ve awoken without an upset stomach. That in itself is a blessing. But now I can feel the demon struggling to regain control, and its influence is creeping back in. It’s strange - I’ve struggled with mild depressions for most of my life, but I’ve always thought of the melancholia as a part of me, something to cope with and accept. This time around, I have definitely identified the depression as an evil demon, as something residing inside of me, but separate from my “self”: unwanted, uninvited, unwelcome, and an entity to struggle against, to do battle with and eventually conquer and exile. It’s an entirely different way of seeing myself, and it’s a refreshing shift in thinking. It means that I don’t have to live with this pain. I do need to accept its presence for the time being, but I don’t need to resign myself to it. I can do something about it, even if “doing something” means waiting through the really bad times and being proactive in little bits when I can.

I read something a few days ago in a FAQ that struck me as extremely profound and yet stupidly obvious. It said, “You cannot simple make yourself ’snap out’ of the depression. Asking you to ’snap out’ of a depression makes as much sense as asking someone to ’snap out’ of diabetes or an under-active thyroid gland.” Even though I know that depression is an illness, I’ve always felt guilty for not being able to just ‘get over’ the bad moods. But it’s not just a bad mood, and fully accepting over the past few weeks that yes, I’m actually sick, has been truly eye opening. It’s allowed me, among other things, to openly discuss how I’m feeling with my friends, and not feel like I’m discussing something shameful, and to write about it here without feeling that I’m being vain and narcissistic. If nothing else, I’d like to think that I’m leaving something for other people to reflect on, and maybe someone else will stumble on these pages and find comfort or coping strategies in the midst of their own suffering.