Oh boy, does this bring back memories! Do you have any hope left? Perhaps it doesn’t feel like you do, yet you must or else you never would have…. or maybe you would have—asked this question.
When I was in that hole—or rather, as I thought of it then—ten, twenty, thirty feet under the surface and unable to rise any further, I found a site somewhat like this one, and I poured out my story, over and over again, in questions and in answers. I documented my journey as I gradually rose through that dark water, to a point where I could begin to see some light showing down through the surface. Then I got stuck—so close—just inches below, but I still couldn’t get my head out into the air. I almost lost hope again, then, even though I was so much better than before.
At the bottom, what helped a lot, was having friends in the same situation—especially one friend, who I met in a place very similar to this one. I actually made many online friends, although they never seemed quite real to me. Still, they were good for me. So many people here have been where you are, and they understood, and I can’t tell you how much that meant to me. You may find that, too, if you stick around here, and keep on telling your story.
The one friend—the only one I met in real life—ended up saving my life. We would talk on the phone—my wife encouraged this, even though I had cheated on her with this person, because my wife knew that she was the only person who could get through to me.
What was good about this person was that she was in the same place. Well, almost the same place. I was in such pain, and it seemed like it would never end. I wanted to be where you are. How crazy is that! I wanted to lose my wife and my family and my home and my job. I had a gutter—granite over cobbled stones, stinking of dead fish—where I wanted to lie, until it was over.
Why did I want this? The story I tell myself was that I felt so bad, that I could not imagine why my circumstances were so good. It just didn’t fit how I felt inside. I needed to make my exterior world fit my interior world. Fortunately, people who cared about me kept me from doing that. Not that I believed they cared about me at the time. I knew they all hated me, but some form of guilt was keeping them trying to help me, and the best thing I could do was to get out of their lives. I would be doing them a favor, I believed.
I have to tell my story, over and over, now. I think it is part of what keeps me out of it. When I first heard questions like yours, I could not stay away from them. But answering them would start me down to that place. I learned that I could avoid spiraling down, but I had to separate myself from those thoughts somehow. It was a good sign, that even though I didn’t know how I was doing it, I managed to recognize that it wasn’t good for me to dwell in this place too long. I would start going down and be unable to stop it.
At the time, after I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I was mad at myself for being sick. I was mad at myself for not being able to pull myself out of it. Hell, I didn’t even believe in mental illness at the time. I wouldn’t let myself use the excuse that I was depressed as a way to garner pity. I didn’t want to beg anyone. As a result, I kept on pushing people away.
Of course, what I really wanted was love. And I had love all around me, and I kept on denying it—finding excuses why people were mistaken in loving me. If they didn’t believe me, I would start attacking them—driving them away. And yet—for some reason, I still had this little tiny kernel of self-preservation in me. I knew there was a line that if I pushed her beyond it, my wife would give up. I pushed her up to that line, but not across it.
I remember sitting on the bed one night telling her how unhappy I was, and how I loved someone else, and how bad I was for her and the family, and how she should get rid of me. Yet inside, something said it was time to stop. If I said anything more, she would tell me to get out. We would get a divorce. I would get that apartment, but lose my job, and then lose my apartment. The siren call of the gutter was strong, and yet, not strong enough.
I let my wife comfort me. Sexually. Because that was the only way I could understand love (and to this day, it speaks more to me about love than anything else). I let myself ask her to do the things that I thought would make me feel better. I think that was when I first began to understand how much she cared. Although I still fought it, and I still denied it, and I still felt it could not be true.
The drugs helped me. Lithium at first, then Welbutrin. Eventually lamictal, when the first two brought me up to within inches of the surface, but could not take me into the air. In fact, I thought (and still think) that it was the drugs that did it. My condition was organic, and my brain chemistry was fucked up, and the only thing that could help me was the drugs.
It was almost an out-of-body experience. I could watch my thoughts changing as the drugs kicked in. It wasn’t just my feelings that changed—not just my mood—but the actual thoughts I could think. Just a day before, I could not have conceived of ever being happy with myself, or even just being ok with myself (I will still not admit to happiness, but being ok is enough—I don’t want to jinx it by being happy—I don’t want to be complacent or ever take it for granted again). The day after I was hopeless, ready to die, I found that I could consider or even imagine a time when I would not feel this way. I could imagine thinking that maybe I did have something to offer others.
I still fight that notion. People here tell me they appreciate what I write, and my therapist says it is good for me because I am helping people by offering my story and trying to explain what I’ve learned from it. I don’t know. I still have a hard time (tears are coming to my eyes now)... I still have a hard time thinking that anything I do could be any help to anyone else. It’s so weird. So weird. It’s as if I fight any kind of good feelings I might have about myself.
So that night, when I was at my worst, and dreaming of death, and thinking about whether I actually could slip out my window on the eighth floor of the building I worked in. Imagining that final (I hoped) flight down to the cement below. Imagining flying into it, head first—maybe even regretting that I had let go…..
I couldn’t do that if I thought there could be a regret. I needed help. I turned to my depressed friend. I called her one night. I asked her to make a suicide pact with me. She was not ready to do that—she had children and said she couldn’t do that to her children. Well, I have children, too, and that sunk in a little, and I really did not want to miss them growing up—even if I was treating them so meanly—they were the one thing that I really did not want to give up.
Even so, I asked her to help me let go. So we started trying to think up suicide scenarios. And we started laughing. Each scenario we came up with seemed a little bit more absurd. I don’t know what happened, but we were laughing harder and harder, until I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t breathe. Most importantly, I could no longer let go. Of life.
I started reading. I read a book about CBT, but that made me worse. I tried the exercises, but I only became more and more guilty about being unable to make them work. It made me worse. My therapist said—and this is really important—she said that if that (CBT) didn’t work, then we’d try something else.
It was just like the drugs. If one doesn’t work, you try another. There are dozens that they try. Some people in my support group have been through almost every single one of them. Some of them two or three times. Some have done electroshock therapy as you have. It seems like if you keep at it. Eventually you do find a drug that works—maybe for a while, maybe for a long time. It’s a work in progress.
So it therapy. If one brand doesn’t work, try another. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll find a therapist who knows several kinds, and can try them. Other people have to find a new therapist to get a new technique. One of my friends on that website suggested I try ACT. Like CBT, there is statistical evidence to show that it works. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is a more formalized or maybe just Westernized version of mindfulness—the Buddhist approach to spirituality.
Using that, I learned that I didn’t have to blame myself for my failure. I learned that I could detach myself—to some degree—from my attachment (perhaps even my love) of those painful feelings. I didn’t have to take them so seriously. They were just thoughts and feelings, and I didn’t have to let them be what defined me. I didn’t have to pay so much attention to them!
That’s what I do now, when I start feeling it again. I don’t pay so much attention. Maybe more importantly, I don’t get mad at myself for feeling those things again. I don’t feel like I have to banish them. I don’t feel like a failure because I couldn’t control them. I have found that I don’t have to control them. All I have to do is not get so attached to them that they control me.
It is really quite freeing to give up. To realize that I have no choice. I feel what I feel. I can’t stop it. I am powerless. That means I don’t have to fight it. And in not fighting it, it loses some of its power. It wants me to take it seriously, because that gives it energy and more power. By not being so attached, it gets less energy, and it has less power.
I don’t try to feel good about myself. I just try not to think about judging myself. I realized that it really doesn’t help me. I fail all the time at not thinking about it, but I can do it enough—just sort of seeing it, but not seeing it; like when you see someone you’d really rather not talk to, so you pretend you haven’t seen them—I can do it enough that I really don’t see it, except out of the corner of my eye.
My therapist calls uses the metaphor of putting it in a box, up on a shelf, out of sight, out of mind. I don’t think of it that way. I think of it more like when I’m driving a car down a highway, and the scenery is going by so fast, I don’t have time to focus on it. Instead, I focus on what I’m actually doing at the moment. Like now. I’m writing to you. I’m writing my story, and those feelings that make me sad—make my eyes start to well up—they are there, but they are sliding by, and I am somewhere else down the road.
I found a support group (which I highly recommend—the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance has a list of contacts for support groups all over the country) and in listening to other bipolar or depressed folks coping techniques, I learned a lot about what might help. They are the things that almost everyone here will tell you: exercise (hard exercise so you get really tired), helping others, regular sleep hours (oh God that is important), decent nutrition, therapy, meds, finding a therapist you can work with, practicing gratefulness, practicing mindfulness, learning about the disorder by reading about it, researching it, getting support from people online….
They all help. I got a lot of help, but of all of it, the support group probably helped the most, next to my depressed friend. And my wife. And my psychiatrist. And my therapist. Ok, so I owe a lot of people a lot in my recovery. Still, if you don’t already have one, find a support group. Please.
I had a lot of help, and I never felt like my recovery was anything that I did. My therapist says I worked hard. I don’t know. I’m just me. I don’t know anyone else’s experience. I can’t compare. It doesn’t feel like it was my work. It feels like it was everything else.
Well—maybe a little. I did take my meds. I did exercise. I did go to the therapy sessions. But all that was doing was allowing others to help me. And maybe that’s enough. Just allowing others to help, instead of pushing them away, as I did before.
A job? That’s nice. Your job right now is to work on your mood. The hardest thing to do when you are depressed is to organize yourself. To manage yourself. You should have seen my desk after a year of disorganization. I could not have done our taxes, if my wife didn’t sit next to me every second I worked on it. I would have gone back to the online community otherwise. I had an assistant sit here, in my office, to make sure I organized my office. Fortunately, she was OCD, so she couldn’t leave until it was done.
I’m lucky that I never lost my job. I hardly did any work except training my assistants well enough that they could handle almost everything. Although, when I did help clients, I did feel better, and I lost my self-absorption for a moment. See? Helping others?
You can volunteer somewhere. Helping others. That often turns into a job. A paying job. But is it is mostly for your health. You can work with other depressed people. Help in mental health organizations. Halfway houses. Something. You can work part time at Whole Foods, too.
Love? You can find that too. You could find that here. So many folks here are living in the Bay Area. But it doesn’t matter where they live. This is a good place to answer questions and people will get to know you, and I’m sure that folks will soon become interested in you—maybe as a friend—maybe more. This community has seen at least one online proposal, made in front of the community, that resulted in a real world marriage. No guarantees, mind you, but it is possible.
Being smart? Aw, fuck that. People say I’m smart, but, while I want to be thought of that way, I can’t think of myself like that. It seems too arrogant. It’s not for me to say. I am grateful when other people say I have helped, even if I never quite believe it. It’s what you do—not how you think of yourself—that matters. If you focus on what you are doing—on what is right in front of you—you’ll lose track of those thoughts about who and what you are. They will become blurry, receding in the distance. They won’t matter so much.
What you are doing matters. What you are thinking? Just thoughts. Just fantasies. And when you get involved in what you are doing—when you focus on the moment you are in, instead of judging and planning and worrying, then you lose track of your depression—maybe just for a moment—but it’s an important moment. It shows you the way towards more moments.
Ok, I’ve got to stop. Try to find a conclusion. There I go again. Planning. Judging. Telling myself what I should do. Fuck it. There is no conclusion. The work just goes on, and as long as the work goes on, so does life.
I’m going to press “answer” now, and then I’m not going to think about this, and wonder how other people think about it. I’m going on to another question, or maybe I’ll go get a latte, or maybe I teach my assistant something. This is over, and I can’t think about it any more, or I’ll lose my focus. Does that make sense?
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