A Known Unknown

Just yesterday I started to write an entry where I wondered why in the world I've been so depressed lately. I don't know if I've really talked about it a whole lot, but I have been depressed, depressed in a way that I considered telling our doctor last night that I need to be put on meds ASAP--that kind of depressed. I'm barely doing anything during the day. I have headaches all the time. I feel like sleeping the day away and howling at the moon at night. Laughter barely escapes my lips, and those same lips hesitate to form even the glimmer of a smile. I haven't an appetite at all, not even craving my very favorite comfort food of homemade chocolate chip cookies, yet I eat and eat and eat all day long. I don't want to leave this house that's making me crazy. When I do, and I'm driving along, I think about what it would be like to be in a terrible accident in a detached sort of way, as if I would watch it from a distance rather than really be in it. It's that mechanism that gets me through each day. I detach. I go through each hour in a haze that sometimes seems to manifest itself in a swimmy head. But I couldn't figure out why I felt this way, all of these ways. I thought something was probably wrong with me. I was right, but it's not a tumor or a fatal disease or even hormones.

As we drove home from counseling last night, it occurred to me. Actually, it didn't happen in that one instant. It sort of worked its way into me throughout that hour and ten minutes we spent on that couch, sitting next to each other without touching, like we always do. Counseling sessions have been tough, causing both of us to walk in silence out to the car and continue in silence most of the way home, unable to make even the smallest of talk because we are completely spent. After more than a year of counseling, we have finally filtered the thick murkiness that clouded even the counselor's vision of what lay at the bottom of our little pond, and it is dark and heavy and ugly. Now we face that every Tuesday evening, and we can't ignore it throughout the week anymore. At least I can't. But it wasn't until that ride home that the pieces finally clicked solidly into place, and I knew. Without doubt. Without denial.

It's the denial that has kept me going for so long, yet at the same time, it is what keeps that sometimes thin, sometimes thick blanket of depression over my life. What happens now that I've faced the thing I've been denying? What happens now that I have to talk about it every single week? What happens is a thicker, heavier depression, like the difference between a wet wool blanket and a dry one. I'm practically immobile. But it's only yesterday that I finally realize that is why I've felt so incredibly dreadful these past few weeks. It might seem like an easy association to make, but it's not so easy, particularly when you're the one wrapped so tightly in it.

I fooled myself into thinking I was happy that we were getting somewhere, completely happy. On some level, I am happy about that, but it is not the prevailing feeling, as much as I wanted to think that it was. There is no one feeling to describe what comes out of this work. I feel all the feelings I've felt for years, only now they've come rushing in at once, instead of being partially hidden in denial at the bottom of that muddy pond. I saw only shadows of the true feelings that were deeply buried. Now I feel the full onslaught of hopelessness, frustration, anger, sadness, and exasperation, and it's too much. I can't say I feel broken, because I wouldn't even bother trying anymore, but there is a certain sense of despair, that this is all just too overwhelming, that I will never be strong enough. I still forge ahead, with that small bit of hope that now that we've cleared most of the extraneous, we can get somewhere, get to happiness, or rather, contentment, comfort, a little bit of ease.

It's tough though, and I haven't given myself that. I berate myself for being lazy and having such a muddled head. I feel incompetent, defeated, weak. I think I should be able to deal with all of this, be happy and hopeful for finally having this breakthrough in counseling. So when I don't feel that way, I feel like an ungrateful failure. I have to give myself time and stop thinking I'm the only one on earth that couldn't get through this without some down time. I'm having a down time. I'm troubled and scared. I'm allowed.