I Can Breathe Again . . .
Sometimes I can’t see how much I’ve been struggling until I look back from a place of feeling better. After almost three years I’ve resumed a medication that in hindsight was helping keep me from having depressive episodes. It took two years of a steady decline in which my depressive episodes became more frequent and more severe before I realized (accepted) that I needed to do something and talked about it with my psychiatrist.
Being the analytical sort, I’d been keeping a mood record in a spreadsheet, and finally created a longitudinal chart showing monthly averages over two years. Lo and behold, the chart confirmed that my mood had been deteriorating over the past two years. After ramping up to a therapeutic dose on Lamotrigine and taking that for a month, my mood has improved, I have more energy and I’m suddenly interested in pursuits that I simply stopped more than two years ago — like writing stories on Medium.
At the time, I chalked up my abandonment of activities to disenchantment. I was pissed off at Medium for erecting a pay-wall that kept me from ready great content from my favorite writers without subscribing. I stopped tweeting or even looking at my twitter account and blamed it on a hostile political environment. I gave up pursuing my advocacy efforts related to child welfare and most of my efforts with mental health when I ran into obstacles. I had excuses in each case that seemed valid, but in retrospect, the underlying cause for my disaffection with what I’d previously embraced passionately was a steadily worsening level of depression. Over time, it felt like I was slipping underwater and just bobbing to the surface from time to time for a gasp of air. It felt less like drowning than asphyxiating from just the lack of breath.
For me, depression rarely presents as sadness. What comes over me is a deep seated conviction that I am worthless, life is hopeless and any efforts for improvement are pointless. When that gets bad, I’m able to recognize it and log it as a depressive episode in my mood journal. But the gradual erosion of my perception of “normal” is insidious. It’s like the old story about the frog that boils to death because the water became hot gradually so that he never jumped out of the pot. Now looking back, I see all kinds of signs that I was slipping under the waterline into chronic low-level depression simply punctuated by the more acute episodes I recognized at the time.
Hopefully my newly rediscovered awareness that giving up on important activities is a sign of depression will help me recognize the trend in less than two years. Hopefully next time I stop writing regularly I’ll notice, think about this last hiatus, and get help sooner.
The good new is that on the first try of a medication addition I’m feeling more like my old self again. I was prepared for multiple trials of different additions or adjustments to find something that worked. That said, I’m only a month in so maybe it’s too soon to declare victory — but I can at least enjoy today because I can breathe again.
