On Getting Down: I've Been Down So Long It Feels Like Up to Me

A quick disclaimer before I start: everything here comes out of my own life, my own history, and whatever sense I've managed to make of it. My site has been offline lately, partly from personal trouble and partly from technical trouble, and I've mostly been my own tech support. On top of that there's my own health to deal with, time owed to family (there are 18 of us when everybody gathers), plus the usual round of budgeting, housework, and shopping.

Depression, for me, reads as getting down. My eyes fill up, though never enough for anyone else to notice. I lose interest in eating or in sitting out where the TV is going. I keep taking most of my medication because I have to, but getting all of it swallowed on schedule is a struggle. What I do is stop talking to people and retreat to my office, the room with my spiritual things, my papers, the boxes stacked up waiting for the rest of the house to finish being remodeled, and the computer gear. The only ones who follow me in are my cat, my husband's dog, and the grandkids. Shutting the door doesn't even keep all of them out, the teenager especially.

A lot of the time I feel invisible, and that pushes me out the door. I leave understanding that the family won't register I'm gone until I walk back in. When I return I don't explain why I left, because they wouldn't know the difference or care. I nearly always come back carrying something, so they assume that errand was the reason I went. They light up over whatever I brought, less so over me being back. One cousin, someone I almost never see, actually figured out why I'd gone the day I came home with a Dairy Queen cake for dessert at our reunion. That's the trap I lay when I'm trying to find out whether anyone notices.

There used to be a recurring dream. In it I'd get pulled into some crime I never meant to be part of, and I'd end up hurt either during it or afterward from the police. Usually I managed to slip away, but then the injuries would catch me. I'd be picked up because I went to a hospital looking for help, or because I collapsed and someone carried me to one. Once there I would refuse treatment if I was able to. If I couldn't refuse, the hospital staff would bring the police in, and I'd try to run again rather than be cared for.

This is about as exposed as I've written. The short version is that I want to be cared for in my life. When I ask for help I'm often told to handle it myself, and if someone does have to step in, I feel I now owe them. My spouse tends to take charge in those moments and thank the person for the trouble of helping me. The clearest time I ever got what I needed was my first encounter with Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. During an externalization session she held me and let me cry while I said, "I want to go home and it's not here." It was completely real, and the same was true of the handful of externalization sessions I did with people she had trained. I'd hover at the edge of those groups wanting to be pulled in, never quite certain. Another time in one of them I said, "Don't hit him; hit me," before the leader called me into the circle. That's when it landed that I was the protector. I'd actually done it once, in grade school, stepping in when a boy was beating up my older brother.

With relatives I'm close to, the running theme is what I ought to be doing while I'm around them. It lands on me as being bullied, so I shut down and just get through it. What I register is anger, rejection, and one more demand that I change to suit them, with no curiosity on their side about what I might actually want, a hug for instance. So I sit and watch them interact with each other or with their friends, and it takes me straight back to everything I skipped in school while I was busy learning and practicing my profession. Yes, that cost me socially. I watched a lot and got asked to join in very little.

I've gotten away on a few trips, going places they either couldn't manage or had no interest in, places where I felt more welcome and some of what I care about got met. Out there, not in here. I'm certain a list exists of everything they HAVE done for me, and I won't pretend that list isn't real. Even so, there are days I feel like I'm about to curl up and dry out. How is it for you?