This is going to be a difficult post to write, and likely a difficult one to read. Fair warning. I won't hold it against you if you stop reading now.
There has been a lot in the news lately about people committing suicide. There have been a lot of suicides this year, as there are every year. And every time someone takes their own life, the battle cry seems to be, "Why didn't they just reach out?" Frank Turner wrote a song for one of his friends who took his own life, called "A Song for Josh” that starts out "Why didn't you call? My phone's always on." And honestly, as much as I love Frank Turner (I would follow that man to the ends of the earth), I hate him for asking that question. It feels like a logical question to ask - if you're hurting, why don't you get help? I get that. The thing is this:
Depression is not logical.
I know this from personal experience. I have battled depression since I was about fourteen years old, off and on. Each time it's on is different than the other times it's been on. Each time it turns off, it's because of something different. The one thread that I can find that ties each bout of depression together, that I learned in my most recent experience with it, is that it is never logical. So trying to fight it by drawing logical conclusions doesn't really work. It's like trying to have an ethical discussion with a psychopath - if you're not both coming from the place that murder is a bad thing, you're not going to be able to find much common ground in the course of a conversation about the death penalty.
My most recent bout was bad. Worse than it has been in a decade? And while I know that some of the people around me noticed that something was a bit off, I don't know that any of them knew that I was trying to pick the least inconvenient day for me to die. So why didn't I reach out? Why didn't I call someone and talk about it? Bear with me on this because it's not going to sound logical to those of you who believe in logic, who are not struggling with depression. But like I said, depression is not logical.
My depression manifested this time as a sense of complete disconnectedness. I felt as though I couldn't hold a thought in my head. The idea of trying to memorize my lines for the play I'm in was extraordinarily daunting because I couldn't find the train of thought in the words. My cat, typically my best friend and my favorite part of every day, looked just like any other cat to me - he wasn't my companion anymore, he was a strange cat sharing my living space. My friends would be talking about their lives, their problems, their joys and dramas, and all I could think was that none of it really matters in the long run because most of what we were talking about would change in a day anyway so why bother getting invested? I felt disconnected from my body, as I was trying to take really good care of it - eating right, exercising regularly - but it continued to be the same lump of flesh and hair and fat and bone that it has always been. I was disconnected from my own sexuality, having no drive or desire to try to connect with other human beings, nor any drive or desire to be attractive. The idea of me being at all attractive was laughable at best. I thought about trying to make myself more comfortable in my own space, but realized that it probably wasn't worth it to buy an actual bed because I wouldn't be around long enough to get a worthwhile return on investment out of it.
That was the thought that scared me. The complete and utter surrender of the desire to make future plans. I thought about all of the things I had/have going on - projects at work, the play that I'm in, concert tickets I had purchased a long time ago - and I started thinking through when they would all be over so that I could make my exit from this life without leaving anyone in the lurch, so to speak. Trying to find the least inconvenient day to die, so that hopefully it wouldn't be too much of a fuss for the people around me.
Now, this was not the first time in my life I have wished that I could just stop existing. I spent most of high school in that place, some of college, and the thoughts come back from time to time as whispers of "what if you just cross the road anyway, even though that car is coming really fast?" And when I'm not in a full-on depression, I can keep those thoughts at bay. I've gotten used to these dark little thoughts that exist in my brain and I lovingly put them into a little box that gets filed away in a drawer. They are part of who I am. And in this last bout, I pulled out some of my normal tricks to try to help pack the thoughts away - reminding myself that my mother would be devastated if I took my life. Reminding myself that my cat would be left with no one to care for him, and really confused as to why his person wasn't around anymore. Reminding myself that I do have friends who love me.
But the illogical side of this depression countered with the fact that someone else would take care of Owen if something happened to me.
The illogical side of this depression reminded me of how many family members we've lost in the past few years and that despite their losses, my mother is still alive and well. Meaning she would probably survive my loss, too.
At this point in my depression, I had friends inviting me out to do things, be social, hang out, and I politely declined the offers knowing that I was not in a good mindset to be hanging out with other people. Nobody wants to go out for a casual night of drinks and dancing with someone who knows for a fact that nothing matters, no one cares, and the only thing left to do is wait to die.
So why didn't I reach out?
First of all, if you can tell me how to start a conversation with, "So, I'm thinking I might not be alive anymore in about a month," without causing a panic, I'm all ears. If you can tell me how to segue to that part of the conversation while you're out for margaritas with your friends, I'm all ears. Allie Brosh makes some points in her Depression #2 post that resonate really strongly with me about how these sorts of conversations tend to turn into the depressed person comforting the person to whom they reached out for help in the first place. People, in general, are not prepared to deal with it when a loved one comes to us and says, rather out of the blue, "I want to be dead." I know when I have told some people about my depressions in the past, it hasn't gone well. So I don't reach out to them in these moments because I know that my pain and my disconnectedness hurts them and a) I don't want to hurt them and b) I don't have the means to comfort them in those moments after I have just hurt them.
So what about talking to someone who isn't quite so invested?
I told a friend (not a super close friend, but a friend nonetheless) about two months ago, after my great aunt passed away in her sleep, that while I was sad that she was gone, I also found myself jealous that she was able to just stop existing. I had wished for that so many times myself, I was jealous that she was able to do it. For a bit more context, this friend and I had been talking about the general funks we were in, the lack of motivation we had, the tiredness we felt in life and dealing with things, so it wasn't an out of the blue comment - it flowed naturally in the course of the conversation. We also talked in that conversation about how this particular friend is typically not well received when being emotionally vulnerable with other people. So I tried being emotionally vulnerable to show that our friendship could have that. Since that conversation, I have not seen this person, despite inviting them to hang out a few times. We've talked a little bit via text, but in very short sentences and short replies, becoming less and less frequent.
I went to a therapist once, many years ago during another bout of depression when I thought I should get some help. I prefaced the conversation with the therapist with the fact that my grandmother died of depression and dementia, as the anti-depressants she had been on for decades eventually started eating her brain, so I had no desire to be medicated, and specifically no desire to take Lithium. She let me talk for about 30 minutes, and then spent the second 30 minutes of my session trying to get me to agree to start taking Lithium.
So my experiences with reaching out for help have not yielded positive results. I know of at least one instance with each of my dearest friends when I called in a moment of crisis and either got voice mail, or interrupted a dinner or something, and they asked if they could call me back, or something along those lines. Which is NOT THEIR FAULT. I'm not blaming them for having lives and living them. Please, if you're reading this and you think I'm angry or hurt because you had to call me back, please know that I know that there are things in your life that have to take precedence and I do not begrudge you those things in the slightest. But in the illogical brain space of depression, when you have convinced yourself that the world will keep turning and everyone will be okay eventually, even if you remove yourself from the world, the promise of a return phone call at a later date does little to allay those thoughts.
Today, I am okay. My depression broke about two weeks ago. I felt it break, the way a fever breaks, and I wanted to spend that day laughing and crying for the relief of being able to think about the future again. I'm not fully "healed" - there's still a lot of scar tissue - and I don't know that I ever will be. Depression, like many diseases, is something that can be managed, but it never really goes away. I think, with this post, I wanted to try to share some insight into why people don't always reach out. Into why telling your depressed loved ones that you love them isn't always going to be the magical cure-all we all wish it could be. Into why I stopped hanging out with my friends for a couple of months and why I hope those friendships are not damaged beyond repair, but why I am having a hard time finding the right way to apologize for not hanging out. Depression is not logical. I can't pinpoint exactly what started this one, and I think the day I got out of it was the day I made a tiny bit of incremental progress on a project at work that felt, on that day, like a huge win. I don't know what is going to break each of my depressions, any more than I know what is going to kick them off. If I did, I'd avoid going through another one for the rest of my life.
Depression is not logical. It sounds easy to say "get help" when someone is depressed, but it's not always that simple. Please know that. And please don't give up on those of us who are hanging on by a thread if we need to find other ways to keep holding on.