Chapter 1: What Depression Feels Like

Before I could deeply address my depression using meditation, I had to acknowledge and examine what the depression looked like and felt like.

Transcript

Chapter 1 December 2012 Come here.

Get in my bed.

I want you to crawl under this blanket with me.

The blanket is too heavy and totally suffocating.

It is called depression.

I apologize for dragging you under with me.

I promise you we won't stay here long.

But we must go here just for a few moments.

Not so much so that you can feel dragged down too.

More so you can feel what it feels like to emerge.

When I am not depressed and trying to describe being depressed,

It's like trying to trot out a second language I was fluent in after years of being out of practice.

So I'm looking back at December 2012 and I'm trying to remember it clearly,

But I simply cannot.

This is notable because when I am not depressed,

I've got the kind of memory that astounds and frightens people,

Especially during lovers' spats,

When I can call up crimes dating back years and be alarming in my specificity.

Remember that time when we were driving to the grocery store and you sneakily turned the AC on even though you know I get really cold and I hate it because it reminds me of a snowstorm when I was five and lost my mittens in the blizzard and felt traumatized by that?

And why do you always trigger me like this?

I can also describe in detail my first day of kindergarten,

My ensemble,

What the crossing guard looked like,

The feel of my paper turtle name tag pinned to the dress my mother made me,

The way Mrs.

Evans,

The teacher,

Came out to greet us.

I can tell you the 1988 phone number of a man I dated for roughly 10 minutes that year.

I can remember the exact spot where my son threw his sippy cup out the car window in 1992,

And yet I cannot remember if I was in bed for a week or three that December.

I do know there were times,

Even when it was darkest,

That I dragged myself out of my bed and out of my house because I had to go to work.

I perform weddings for a living and calling in depressed is not an option.

Regardless of internal or external weather conditions,

I must suit up,

I must show up,

I must put on my game face and engage in all other sports related metaphors to go the whole nine yards and get those brides and grooms hitched.

Love does not wait for me to feel better.

Love demands I smile and say,

You may kiss,

And that I say it with meaning.

The rest of the time I huddled down with the dogs and contemplated how,

If I were to go to sleep and never wake up,

Well,

That wouldn't be so bad now,

Would it?

I know friends came to see me.

I have so much experience with depression that I understand the compulsion to isolate must be battled ferociously.

When depression arrives,

I tell people.

The inner sanctum gets alerted.

They know I don't want to see them.

Nothing personal,

But when I am depressed,

I won't want to see Jesus or Buddha or John Lennon or Louisa May Alcott or Chrissy Hine,

If any or all of them offered to come by with Chinese takeout and give me a back rub and clean my bathroom.

It is just too unbearable to see others and be seen by them.

And yet I know that isolation is just going to make it worse.

So I compromise,

Confess to a handful that I am deep in it,

And allow for short visits or accept little gifts left at my door.

Which is why,

When I think of the Great Depression of 2012,

I think of gourmet s'mores and firewood.

And I very especially think of my friend Kate,

Who took it upon herself to leave these things for me to aid in my healing.

I'd step outside for a few moments to do a mail run or a half-hearted walk with the dogs,

Or just to make sure the earth had continued spinning during my sad hibernation.

There would be some gift from Kate,

A reminder to hang in there,

Put a fire in the fireplace,

Melt some fair trade organic chocolate on some artisan crafted obscenely expensive marshmallows,

And squish it all between graham crackers made from hand-harvested wheat and cinnamon ground by wood gnomes.

One night I came home and found a piece of furniture up against the garage door.

I glanced at it,

Figured it was some pressed wood something a friend had seen curbside and retrieved and left for me.

I walked right past it,

Went inside,

Got back in bed,

Forgot about the thing for hours.

Then I remembered,

Decided to bring it inside to add to my collection of curbside tables and chairs.

But the thing was too heavy to lift.

I propped up the lid.

Inside was a card from Ross,

One of my best friends,

The man who helped me raise my son Henry,

From when he was not quite three and his father,

Big Red,

Left in 1993,

Swept away on a wave of alcoholism that damn near killed him.

I read the card and started to cry.

I am very good at crying,

Especially when I am depressed,

So it was easy enough to just cut loose and ball.

Ages ago I had mentioned to Ross that one day I would love to have a cedar chest to store all of the things I had knitted,

Keep the moths from the wool.

Apparently he decided now was the time to make the dream come true.

He had found the chest at an estate sale.

He hoped I liked it.

Ira helped me carry the cedar chest inside.

Ira,

My boyfriend at the time,

Legally my domestic partner,

A contract we had entered into in 2008,

Just a year into our relationship,

When my screaming five-word-riddled uterus was begging to be yanked and I had no insurance.

Ira was employed then,

And his company offered benefits to domestic partners.

This was a great thing seeing as we were both personally opposed to marriage,

But we were also both tired of me spending four days each month wrapped around the base of the toilet,

Needing to be close to the bowl because I felt like puking constantly and the pain ripped through me and I wolfed down every squirrel away from past dental procedures Vicodin I could find.

Ira had been an incredible nurse to me through the whole uterus ordeal.

Once he stood in the bathroom loudly singing a Phil Collins tune as I writhed in agony.

What the hell are you doing,

I demanded,

And he cheerfully explained that,

Seeing as I felt like I needed to hurl,

He thought conjuring Phil Collins might hasten the process.

When the decision was made to deuterus me,

Ira was right there,

Rock steady,

Through the hospital mess ups,

Through my morphine saturated demands for more popsicles,

My additional demands that he get me Henry on the phone immediately even after I just spoken to him,

And my long recovery back at my place.

He mostly moved in with me then for my long recovery,

Despite our agreement to never live together.

I like to joke that the most romantic thing he ever did was to make a 4am pharmacy run for suppositories when I was so constipated I could barely move.

Then he made me scrambled eggs with ketchup and stayed up watching West Side Story with me as I reveled in the glory of my finally emptied colon.

But our relationship also had more than a few problems.

Ira is from Israel and I am from New Jersey,

And when you put together two people from such notoriously strong cultures in which everyone always needs to be right about everything,

Well let's just say we'd had more than a few arguments over the years.

If you'd asked either of us of that pletudinous question,

Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy,

I assure you we would finally have found something upon which to agree,

Namely the former.

Our arguments over the years were notorious among our friends.

We tried to break up many times.

And yet here we were,

December 2012,

Five and a half years in,

Still together.

Ira did what he could to help me through the depression,

Showing up,

Bringing food,

Cracking jokes,

Putting a handcrafted marshmallow on a stick and pretending to roast it over the image of a crackling fire on the TV screen.

But I know that this latest horrific slump wore on him.

How could it not?

I wanted him there to comfort me.

I wanted him to leave me alone.

In the midst of all this go away come back madness,

I stumbled upon the picture on Facebook.

Had I been in a healthier,

Less fragile state of mind,

I might have dismissed the image,

But I was mired so deeply in my suffering that the picture prompted a snap.

As in I lost it.

Not just a little bit,

Not just a lot,

More like a ton.

I did not see two people goofing off.

I saw my long term boyfriend,

My domestic partner,

Kissing another woman.

Not just any woman,

But a woman young enough to be my daughter.

Worse,

He'd just taken to me to see a performance in which she dangled from long silks suspended from a theater ceiling,

Spinning this way and that,

Flaunting her youth and her physicality and her sexuality.

And now here was a picture of them together.

Granted he was only kissing her cheek,

But there she was scantily clad,

Breast threatening to pop from her little shirt,

Gazing at the camera all sexy,

A post-coital look in her eyes.

Plus,

Besides the fact they'd posed like this,

Someone had taken the picture of this moment,

Then made the decision to post it and tag it for all the world to see.

I felt publicly ridiculed.

My anger radiated out,

Tentacles of fury directed at everyone who had participated,

Feeling like the target of a very mean joke.

Despite distant fuzzy knowledge,

This photo was all just a silly pose.

The implication that he and this scantily clad woman had just gotten it on,

That look in their eyes,

Did not sit well with me.

In my depressed state,

The more I looked at the picture,

Which foolishly I looked at repeatedly,

The more I felt mocked.

I became extremely agitated.

Infuriating me further was knowing that no matter how I might try to explain this rage,

It would be dismissed as garden variety jealousy,

For didn't surface evidence support such a theory?

There I was,

48 years old,

Out of shape,

Depressed,

Holed up in my house,

Belly-aching about my boyfriend in a photograph with a 20-something sex pot.

You don't need Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to rise from the dead and help sort out that mystery now,

Do you?

But what I felt was not simple jealousy.

And yet,

I could not clearly specify for myself,

Let alone anyone else,

What the true source of my pain was.

Simply saying the feeling was not jealousy made me sound as if I were protesting too much.

All I knew is that I wanted to punch this woman's lights out and banish Ira from the kingdom of me forever.

Though I could not yet dig down and grasp the deepest root of my pain,

I did know that the extremity of it meant my post-traumatic stress disorder was being triggered.

More precisely,

I have complex PTSD.

Unlike soldiers who witness unspeakable acts of war and suffer the variation of PTSD once known as shell shock,

And unlike car crash victims suffering from a horrific one-time event,

CPTSD is a result of repetitive emotional stress,

In my case from childhood abuse.

Long before I knew what CPTSD was,

And even once I'd been diagnosed,

I had unwittingly and repeatedly put myself in situations that emulated the very situation that had caused the disorder in the first place.

Time and again I'd involve myself in some drama that echoed the terror of my father and the legacy of his rage.

In the 90s,

This took the form of an abusive husband who punctuated constant psychological torture with physical threats,

Some of which he acted on.

Many other times I'd involve myself with one man or another whose entire family eventually cast me out,

As had my own family of origin.

Every time I stepped into a new variation of my childhood trauma,

My symptoms flared.

My hypervigilance would go into extreme overdrive as I remained on high alert,

Waiting for the next attack,

Which might be physical,

But more often was emotional.

My exaggerated startle response increased.

If someone came up behind me quietly without warning,

Or a door closed too loudly,

Or a book fell to the floor in my vicinity,

I would jump and scream in terror,

Sometimes even crouch down on the floor.

I was in a constant state of anxiety,

Swimming in a river of cortisol.

My symptoms calmed to a very low-level background noise the more years I'd put between myself and my second failed marriage,

Which immediately preceded my relationship with Ira.

Now,

With the surfacing of this photograph,

Unfortunately discovered in the middle of my depression,

The symptoms return,

Accelerating from near zero to off the charts instantaneously.

Perspective escaped me.

I drowned in negative emotions.

I consulted friends and showed them the picture over and over again.

Look at this,

Look at this,

Look at this.

My mind went totally haywire.

Close friends tried to calm me and console me.

One friend said,

Very quietly,

In a voice that momentarily got through,

I truly don't think Ira did this maliciously.

I'm certain he didn't mean to hurt you.

These words,

Such a gift,

Slowed my rage and pain and confusion because I knew they were true.

But the relief was only temporary.

I'd wake up in the morning,

Still sick with depression,

And the photo would appear.

By now it was etched deeply in my mind and I had no need to open the copy I'd saved to my hard drive.

I would cry all over again.

What was so wrong with me that I could not ever find a partner who respected me?

I would think this,

Immersed in self-pity and unable to call up memories of the many good times Ira and I had had,

The countless kindnesses he'd offered me.

Somewhere in all that mess,

A small voice,

But a steady one,

As hard to hear as a church mouse with vocal cord nodules,

Vied for my attention.

Psst,

It would say,

Psst,

Over here,

Listen to me.

You will get through this.

You will,

You will,

You will.

The fleeting moments I could still my mind enough to listen to the little voice.

I would remind myself that depression is akin to food poisoning.

When the initial pain is so bad,

Dying seems like the only common sense thing to do.

But who kills themselves over a case of diarrhea they know with certainty will go away in 48 hours?

No one.

You just do what you have to do to get through it.

Sit on the toilet with a burning butt,

Astonished at the copious flow of liquid brown,

Wondering if your colon really is on fire.

Until the squirts recede,

The cramps subside,

And to your amazement,

You find yourself once again not only loving being alive,

But also willing to order muscles again.

Part of the reason I could have this awareness,

That the excruciating pain would in fact yield to something better,

Came from decades of experience with the beast.

Such an odd silver lining that having survived so many previous bouts of depression over time and taking note when it passed that it had in fact passed would be the thing to get me through the next round.

Yet at this moment,

My mind was a volcanic sphincter spewing stinky shit over the feelings that photograph triggered.

No,

This would continue forever,

I thought.

Also,

Lending me a great assist in coping with my mental state was the clear knowledge,

The tiny calm in the eye of the massive storm,

That when I am not depressed,

I enjoy the heck out of my life.

In the pie chart that is my mind,

Honestly the bright,

Shiny optimistic part accounts for maybe 75%,

And the miserable accounts for maybe 7%,

And the anxious part,

Dare I estimate it so positively,

Dwindles all my better days to,

Let's say,

8%.

That leaves a mere 10% for the darkness.

Of course,

These parts of me do not act like individual pie slices.

It's much more like a Venn diagram in there with a lot of overlap.

So I might be whistling a happy tune one minute while in the back of my mind I'm worried about a client meeting that didn't go well,

Or I might be feeling like punching some driver who cut me off,

But I won't let this anger dampen some other happiness I might be experiencing knowing I'm on my way to meet a good friend for dinner.

It is a rare thing then for me to suffer full on depression pie mind,

But when this does occur,

I am consumed fully.

You know how every summer there are always a few days when they have to shut the public pool down because a toddler took a tiny poop in it,

But still that itty bitty poop contaminated the entire pool?

That's my depression.

One little turd of temporary insanity and the whole rest of the sparkly blue me is gone until the decontamination can be carried out.

This reminds me of my dog Dante,

100 pounds of grinning Labrador,

Joyful nearly always,

But the minute he hears thunder,

He turns into a cartoon character.

You know the cartoon when the gigantic guy sees a mouse and screams and leaps into the arms of the little guy?

One thunder rumble and Dante comes undone,

Hurling himself on the bed,

Trying to curl up to teacup chihuahua size and get on top of me,

Trembling and panting ceaselessly.

No amount of soothing helps.

Technically,

He can see that here we are,

We are safe,

But on some cellular level he is tuned into some place far away from the dog.

Somewhere far away where the thunder is out to get him.

So it goes with my episodes of depression and my PTSD flashbacks.

Once I am triggered,

That is my thunder.

As I had done so many times for Dante,

Ira now tried to do the same for me.

He apologized for the photo,

He held me,

He told me I was as safe as the tiniest Russian nesting doll nestled inside of all the rest.

Some moments I almost believed him,

Most I could not.

And then came Christmas,

Forever my worst day of the year.

There is nothing I like about that holiday,

From the religious trappings to the crass capitalism that drives it.

I know my underlying hatred for the holiday also hinges on my PTSD,

Unshakable memories of my mentally ill father growing more tense,

More mean,

More unpredictable perhaps in the face of the shorter days,

And surely under the pressure of trying to provide gifts for nine children on his meager truck driver salary.

Every December as the 25th approaches,

I must steel myself just to get through the day,

Hide from it as best as I can.

Still,

I wind up weeping over memories of how horrifying it was for me as a child,

And then weeping some more over all the times I screwed up the holiday for my own kid in my own way as I tried unsuccessfully to eradicate my ghost of Christmas past.

December 2012 I inched through the day,

Moment by moment,

Paralyzed by layers of sadness and an eternal chemistry set that threatened to explode any second.

Good Lord I was a miserable mess that December,

And it was messy me that made a simple yet daunting pledge.

I would dismantle the mess and dispense with depression in 2013,

Eradicate it so completely,

It would never be allowed to return.

And the little voice said unto me,

You will meditate more,

You will do it right.

This will banish the affliction.

Never again.

Reviews

The candor, honesty, vulnerability and humor of this talk is so precious. It felt good to feel validated in my depression by the detailed and tender story of hers. Feeling a little less crazy, a few good laughs and a call to not stay under the covers for too long.

That just changed my day, week, month, life. Beautiful writing and so relatable. Thank you!

What a great opening chapter! Very compelling. Sad but also hopeful. Thank you for sharing the story. Great writing!

Sooo resonated with me. Thank You for sharing your story 🙏🙏🙏💛💜✨

Thank you for making me feel seen. I needed this today more than ever. Looking forward to listening to more of your talks! 💜

Oh my gosh! I just discovered your talks ( chapters one and two) and I am SO, SO glad I did!!! Thank you so much for sharing your personal life and expressing it so well. Will listen to the rest and definitely follow you❣️🙏😊

after listening to the first one I realize that you have several if not all of the chapters on here. Cannot thank you enough for sharing this with us. I love some of the metaphors used in here, the turd in the pool and food poisoning I can't wait to keep listening. 🙏

thank you, I will keep listening to your stories, as you understand what I'm feeling

Thank you for sharing your journey. I've had 3 major back surgeries & both rotator cuffs surgically repaired in less than 3 yrs. I co-exist with depression, ADHD & PTSD as well. Meditation & mindfulness practices have changed & saved my life. I will follow your discussions as inspirations to light my own path🙏Namaste

Wow what a story, I can relate from days gone by & meditation does heal. Yay! ❤

Thank you for your beautiful, fierce, funny writing!

👍😢🙏. Thank you.. For sharing. I am depressed right now. I can relate to it.

Thank you so much

Wow!!! Thank you so much

As a longtime secular Buddhist I find it useful to revisit the”tools” that are so helpful in dealing with depression. I know they work but sometimes need to be reminded to actually use them. And it is particularly helpful to hear stories of depression in others to know I am not alone.

Will keep listening. Can relate and love that you are so down to earth. I will be sonrisas de México

Wow, Powerful! Very funny because it's so truthful. Freeing, because it's shame shared openly, and so shame vanishes. Insightful, it helps me understand what I'm going through, and have gone through. Also inspiring and hope-giving. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us ❤️🙏

LOVE this... She speaks to me on so many levels. Very helpful. <3

Brilliant. I totally understand what you are talking about. Thank you