Posts Tagged ‘Depression’
What Happens
How many roles do we juggle in living our days? I have been grumbling a lot lately that rehabilitating a hamstring muscle injury could easily be a full time job. What I wish I had available to help me return to previous levels of athletic activity is entire days to stretch, exercise, stretch, strengthen, stretch, receive therapeutic sports massage and also appropriately rest; not only for my ailing leg, but the healthy one, too, ultimately hoping to recover with some semblance of balance. It ain’t gonna happen.
The other morning, while I was too-hurriedly trying to inhale my breakfast while standing, in order to make up for time spent sleeping-in a little bit to give my liver every possible chance to accomplish its overnight recovery (since I got to bed late after working long hours on overhauling my bicycle the day before) I gazed out at the landscape around our house. Just last week, everything was finally released from the grip of the long winter’s snow, and I was struck by the amount of attention it all now deserved. For the most part, our landscape gets left to fend for itself until one sunny weekend day when Cyndie and I will labor intensively to do what we can to influence some control toward appearances of order and intent. I mourn the fact that what we are able to accomplish is limited by having arrived at the tasks later than each chore deserved. Much of what we deal with could be refined by timely pruning or culling in advance, which would allow us to focus more on helping support the things we actually want growing and less on fighting back undesirables. It ain’t gonna happen.
The list of other areas of interest and/or responsibility that suffer similar limitations is long. The majority of them would be much better served given full-time attention.
As I was lingering (longer than the task realistically deserved) with cleaning the greasy sludge that persisted in sticking to my bicycle chain the other day, it occurred to me how this very situation reflects a common quandary I find myself facing. I have started in on the cleaning, and then believe it worthy to complete the task to the extreme, yet have not really prepared in advance to be as effective as my noble intentions now expect. I end up spending a lot of time toiling with improvised methods. The thing is, I enjoy that level of tedium. It becomes somewhat meditative. It has a component that I liken to my pleasure for assembling a jigsaw puzzle.
Unfortunately, one big problem with operating this way is that it runs right in the face of my inability to commit full-time to my projects. A lot more things linger unfinished than ever get entirely accomplished in my world.
There’s a thread in all that which is integrated with the depression I have experienced. My decisions and choices set up the situations and in that way I contribute to being my own worst enemy. My mental exercises to alter the dysfunctional process have revealed the power to change things for the better. But when I grow weary, and when I lose one of my supporting activities, it is surprising how quick I can revert to the sickly comfortable patterns of depressive feelings, behaviors, and when it really gets away from me, depressive thinking patterns.
Yesterday morning I heard the familiar lyrics of a song that John Prine wrote and Bonnie Raitt recorded for a hit, “Angel from Montgomery”
How the hell can a person
go to work in the morning
and come home in the evening
and have nothing to say
Unfortunately, I know all too well how.
Depression Report
Last week there was an article published in the StarTribune about Minnesota clinics publicly reporting their success rates at treating depression. It said the results were sobering. Depression is hard to treat? I’m not surprised. Actually, what the article is revealing about the report by the industry group that tracks health-care quality, is that follow-ups by clinics treating people for depression are hard to do because depressed people don’t follow up.
I can relate to that. I tried hosting a web site for depression support, but it didn’t really work. It was designed to allow online conversations among people who shared the experience of depression, only, participants tended not to return to follow up on topics and there ended up being very little in the way of conversation, supportive or otherwise.
So, the thinking is that if clinics aren’t able to follow up with patients they are treating who aren’t getting better, then they don’t get the chance to adjust the treatment in search of improved results. The hope is that clinics can find better ways to treat patients after seeing this “public report card” revealing the depressed level of success. (Pardon the irresistible pun.)
Last time I visited my clinic for a well-health (I thought) physical to get clearance for my trip to Nepal, I was asked to fill out a survey of my mental state. I was glad for the opportunity. I have had quite a run of success managing my depression without medication, using the knowledge I had gained about depression and how my thinking and self-talk had been unhealthy, plus how much I benefited from regular exercise.
It is the very clinic where I first sought help with depression. Just yesterday, as Cyndie and I were continuing to read the journals I’m salvaging from Hypercard, I was surprised to find this entry for May 11, 1993, revealing the point in time when that clinic visit happened:
Tuesday: There has been a gap in entries, if you notice here by the dates, and I am trying to get started again so this doesn’t just end. I have been busy at work but also I ended up taking last week off work and visiting doctors to to deal with some difficulties I’ve had over the years and recently have become more than I feel I should try to cope with on my own.
Back to that recent physical, I wanted to fill out the survey to show the success I have been enjoying, but it wasn’t so simple. I can’t be anything but honest and there were questions that were situational. When I responded truthfully about the situations of the prior week, it came out sounding like depression, only I knew it wasn’t! I tried to explain, and then felt my explanation sounded like a defense, but I didn’t have anything to be defensive about… Can you picture it? I felt like I was stuck in some scene from a sitcom. Luckily, it was kind of funny and I didn’t fret it, trusting they were able to read the rest of my indicators revealing I was doing ok.
I am happy to report that I am not one of the ones who hasn’t followed up with their clinic to report the status of the treatment for depression.
Glimpse Depression
Depression stalks like a predator and looms large on the brink of moving in for the kill, but it never does. That is what is so insidious and debilitating. It feels like a constant unseen threat. It is like the incredible effectiveness of a torture method that relies on perceived threat, while never crossing the line to following through. It is so intolerable that when individuals can no longer endure the constant feeling that depression is going to move in for that kill, they take care of it themselves. There should be no question why someone commits suicide in that light. Being stalked is worse abuse than experiencing the ultimate confrontation. The confrontation is actually freedom from the burden of stress of anticipated confrontation.
Just like it is too bad that broccoli doesn’t taste like chocolate, it is too bad that the ongoing anticipation that any second will reveal the news of winning the grand prize of our dreams doesn’t loom large on the fringe of our essence day after day after day after sunny damn day. They would need to devise a drug to give us to help us normalize from that constant state of OH MY GOD I’m about to win it all!
I am continually fascinated by the tenacity of depression to cling to the fringes of those of us who experience it. I am never surprised when a person who knows depression reports its incidence. We have periods of respite and feel right with our world. Others are able to enjoy our success. When I see a report of one who is under the oppression, it saddens me for their suffering, but never surprises me that it has occurred. We get to treat it, but we don’t always get to eradicate it.
I have potions and exercises to dispatch it, yet still, in the middle of an otherwise successful amount of healthy activity, I have seen it peek in, as if lifting a facade to reveal the dismal void – a striking contrast; a hilariously out of context glimpse of its threat – that almost make me laugh at the ridiculousness, but for the lethal threat it offers and then find myself back at the task at hand, engaged in the otherwise healthy world all around me. I am duly warned of what waits on my fringes if I ever choose to disregard the conscious decisions I make to walk a path alternate to that possibility.
Maybe I should look at being grateful for the glimpses and for awareness of what they really are. Mostly, I consider them unwelcome interruptions and jarring for their shock value. A lot of, “What is that doing here right now, in this otherwise pleasant moment?”
I think I will begin framing them differently in the future.
Relative Something 