Hey, guess what, here’s a TRIGGER WARNING, because I’m going to talk about my depression, and it’s going to be raw and real, so if you have a hard time reading about suicidal ideation or depressive psychosis, please click the little X on your tab. Please also click the little X on your tab if you’re the type of person to make “lol triggered” jokes because fuck you.

Right, so anyway.

I know I’ve talked about depression a lot, but not in a while, because for a really long time, I was doing really well. My meds (Effexor, specifically) were doing their job, I was feeling pretty good about life, even my hormones weren’t stopping me from being healthy. Ish. I still don’t have the high levels of serotonin required to make a cutesy Zoom video (and, in fact, the handful of video collabs I’ve been invited to participate in since quarantine started have whooshed right by me, for which I sorely apologize), and my energy levels have stayed steadily somewhere around “engages kids in play but only if it doesn’t require a lot of frolicking on my part.” I’d been mercifully free from downswings for years, even in the postpartum times, and I’ve been feeling genuinely optimistic, despite the world being a dumpster fire in a lot of ways. 

And then 2020 happened.

I felt the first hints of a downswing in January, when the president decided that starting World War III over Twitter was a great idea. It wasn’t anything severe at the time, more of a few nights panicking while trying to fall asleep and thinking, “Really. Fucking really. I cannot emphasize enough how little I and everyone else in existence want this, and yet it is happening, and it might result in massive casualties on all sides and nuclear winter. Yayyyyy.” 

But it passed. 

And I might’ve gotten through the year without a downswing, despite everything. The nonstop rush of everything happening so much that’s the modern newscycle has actually been good training for me at getting righteously angry while also being able to distance myself when I need a mental health break. We donated to help Australia recover from its wildfires, I spent most of the winter in bed because of bronchitis or norovirus, and once I’d recovered, I went into Sammy’s class twice to read him books. When I wasn’t sick, I went to the twins’ playgroup every week, and as exhausting as it was, it was good for me, because it was getting out of the house and doing a thing. 

But then Covid-19 came. 

And I hate talking about it as a catalyst for my depression getting worse, because it’s not like I’ve really suffered all that much from it. I have a dear college friend who’s an ICU nurse, and the fact that she’s not just rolling over into a ball of nope every day astounds me. I know people who’ve gotten sick themselves or lost friends and family members. By comparison with all of the above, I should be fine: I’m just homebound. That’s all. 

But depression doesn’t work that way. Instead, it sees patterns and recognizes those patterns as itself. For me, the pattern that pushes me into a downswing is monotony. If there’s little to no change in my day-to-day life, it gets hard for my brain to produce serotonin, no matter what good things are happening, like birthdays and new couches and D&D on the weekends. And I knew the second the Commonwealth started locking down that things were going to get ugly. I hoped that maybe, just maybe, the fact that I’m still on my antidepressant might keep things from getting too ugly, that maybe I might be able to come out of this with the lack of depression that makes sense for someone who’s not really suffering from the situation, just bearing emotional weight for the people around her.

I pushed through it as much as I could. I put off talking to someone as long as I could. What were they going to do, give me medication? Tell me that I could start therapy as soon as things were over? I didn’t leave the house because I’m prone to illness induced asthma and got bronchitis just a few months ago. My days fell into the same routine, even once Isaac’s ABA started and we had people coming into the house. The added pressure of keeping up with the twins’ Zoom call therapies didn’t help things at all, especially when I kept missing therapy sessions because I lost track of who was meeting when. Our poor services coordinator texts me at least once a week asking, “Are you still able to meet today?” when I’m 10 minutes late for our Zoom meeting because of basically no reason. 

I got through half of March. April passed by. We had Easter. We stayed in our routine. We were good. We didn’t leave the house to do anything but get groceries once a week. We washed our hands all the time. We made Isaac’s ABA therapists wash their hands the second they came into the house. We wore masks. Kyle worked twelve hour days, seven days a week, to keep up with a new project his old company was doing to help with Covid. 

And then, on April 30, he was laid off. 

Maybe that was the catalyst for the spiral; or maybe it’s that March, April, May, and June are usually my busiest months, spent obsessively organizing birthdays and anniversaries and holidays, and this year, I’m basically just sitting on my butt, doing nothing. I don’t really know. 

I just know that one night, I was sitting on my new couch, watching my kids play, and suddenly, it was like a little gremlin in the back of my head, saying, “Isn’t it a shame that you can’t want to die because of your kids?”

I should’ve seen it coming, probably. All of my previous hobbies have gotten kind of lackluster to me. I can’t disappear into writing anything anymore. None of my video games are fun anymore. I can’t make myself get up and read a book anymore. Even looking around at the mess in my house that needs cleaning makes me feel frustrated and empty, like why even bother when we can’t get it done while the kids are here anyway?

But there it was, that first intrusive thought, something I haven’t had since I started Effexor. More followed, usually late at night when I was trying to fall asleep. They really were like little gremlins sitting in the back of my head, saying things I didn’t like. “You know,” they said one night, “if you told Kyle you were going to take a nap, you could sneak up here and do it in a way you can’t sneak away any other time.” 

And the rest of my brain was screaming, “But I don’t want to die!”

Another time: “Let’s google ways of doing it painlessly, because pain isn’t fun.”

And the rest of my brain was screaming, “Dying in general isn’t fun either!”

I’m not a self-sacrificing idiot. I did some googling, not of painless ways to die, but rather of potential side effects of all the medications I’m taking. My birth control pill had listed under its name, “Contact your doctor if you experience new or worsening depression,” so that was the first step I took, calling my OB-GYN and saying, “hey, I don’t know if this is because of the progesterone or anything, but…”

And in a heartbeat, although Covid still mattered, it didn’t matter. Immediately, my doctor set up appointments for me to come in and see him. At the same time, he set up an emergency triage with the mental health department, which made the appointments kind of weird: I sat in his office having a pelvic exam, PAP smear, endometrial biopsy, and polyp removal (owwww), and then I went into another room and had a phone call with someone from behavioral health to make sure I wasn’t in any immediate danger.

And I wasn’t, because the gremlins aren’t terribly convincing, but they’re still present, so the mental health provider set me up with one of her colleagues, and we spoke on Friday.

The first appointment with any new doctor is an adventure, because you have to go through your medical history with a stranger and talk about how you’ve only ever smoked tobacco once and it was a pipe in college and it was terrible, and how having three kids and taking progesterone to help with PCOS means that your sex life is a craps shoot as to whether or not it exists and so on. 

The first appointment with a therapist, though, is basically an emotional debridement. You don’t just talk about your physical health and history, oh no. You have to go through the history of your mental health, which means delicately going into your background and realizing, as you talk things through, that maybe you haven’t been as okay all along as you previously thought. Like for example, your therapist asks, “How long have you had intrusive thoughts like these?” and you start to answer that it’s just been in the last couple of years, but no wait, you remember them in college, and no, they went back farther than that, and suddenly, you realize that you were having intrusive thoughts as a kid, and you were so scared of them because you grew up in a church that preached demonic possession and didn’t want your parents to think that you were possessed, so you kept it all to yourself. 

“What were they like as a kid?” the therapist asks, and at first you think you don’t remember, but then you do remember the thought of wouldn’t it be nice to get hit by a car or be sick in the hospital so that everyone would feel sorry for you. “What a weird thought!” you say laughingly, and the therapist says, “It sounds like you subconsciously wanted to ask for help but didn’t know how.” 

So you have to absorb that while also chatting about yes, things were better for a long time after you started meds, but now they inexplicably are not better anymore.

It’s a lot. And as you’re raw from letting this all sink in, the therapist remarks, “I think you’ve got severe depression and depressive psychosis, and also your meds don’t seem to be cutting it anymore. I’m ordering a medication review with your PCP and one of our prescribing RNs to see if we can’t find something that will work better for you. And you and I are going to talk again next week. In the meantime, here are some crisis numbers. Please make sure you’ve got them on hand and make sure your husband has them in case there’s ever an emergency.”

And you’re like, oh, I guess it’s worse than I thought.

I’ve got a lot to unpack over the coming weeks and months, on a lot of levels–judging by that, more than I probably realize. Having therapy to look forward to is helping in the short term, but in the long term… I don’t know. I just want to feel hopeful again, you know? 

Anyway. I didn’t write any of this as a ploy for sympathy or to try and divert attention from infinitely more important causes (and if we’re friends on Facebook, you know where my mind’s been this past week), but just because I want to be honest on this blog, as I always have wanted, and that means sometimes telling some hard stories. So there you go.