The Personal Struggle: Depression

According to the journalist Andrew Sullivan, “a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms [a diary] into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before.”   http://www.thealtantic.com/doc/200811/andrew-sullivan-why-i-blog

Certainly, I wish not to become self-indulgent loading my blog with self-pity and regret on the limitations life has and is placing on me.  But, if I am to give a full account of the pursuit of the dream of opening an alternative school, I am required to let the personal struggle tell itself, along side the professional one.  So, disclosure is important to the story, but I will promise not to create such a melodrama, although done correctly I would think melodrama an excellent marketing device.  But I will worry over marketing at some future time.  This individual post sets the scene upon which I will report and comment from time to time as issues arise.

I have a four day beard which itches as much as the athletes foot I had when a teen-ager.  Looking in the bathroom mirror at the salt and pepper on the face and the severe red blotches underneath I make a vow that now will be the time to clean up, to rid myself of the maddening itch.  I turn on the hot water mixing it with enough cold in the stoppered sink to get the right temperature.  I pick up the soap. But then I feel sick, a wave of sadness crashes over the entire body just as the waves use to do when I was able to swim, and have fun, in the ocean.  I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror anymore. I drain the water from the sink and slink off to return to bed, slumber and hiding.

Depression is the way of my life.  Intellectually I’ve known it for decades, but emotionally I have been in deep denial.  I continue convincing myself that as I am a good person, someone of fine character, strong of muscle, thought and opinion, I need no help, either through therapy or medication to overcome the debilitating sadness which prevents movement to accomplish even the smallest of tasks.  And, you know, it is the smallest of personal tasks, like shaving, or brushing ones teeth or changing from sleepwear to street wear or making an American cheese sandwich, which cannot be done.  Of course, the larger things like job hunting, or writing for publication, or participating in community activities go by the board just as easily.  Indeed, going outside the house is impossible when under this tsunami of remorse.

It is interesting to think that as I’ve been told insomnia is a symptom of Depression.  But when I am fully under its spell I sleep upwards of twelve to fourteen hours.  Yes, sleep is one way of hiding from everything which works very well for me.

There are levers I use to work my way out of the deep hole in which Depression puts me.  But, it takes a whole lot of being at an emotional bottom before I get the psychic energy to take steps to work a lever.  The best lever is exercise.  In fact, a little exercise followed almost immediately by a shave and a shower works to temporarily bring me up, sufficiently that I can build on it.  However, now circumstances are conspiring to “feed the beast”. 

My 94 year old mother has turned into a nearly helpless creature.  In her senility she wants to be dependent on me, and my wife, for everything, just about every single life activity including wiping her bottom after going to the bathroom.  She still can feed herself, and does, but we prepare meals and clean up after her.  She only minimally takes care of her personal hygiene: My wife has to bath her.  She needs help getting in and out of bed and into and out of chairs:  It has gotten to the point where increasingly I’ve had to lift her from bed to wheel chair and from wheel chair onto living room chair, from bed to wheel chair and from wheel chair to bed!  She moves about the house in a wheel chair which she refuses to self-propel, although we have rearranged enough household stuff for her to unobstructively move herself about, with the exception of going into the bathroom whose doorway the wheel chair does not fit.  Yes, there is pain in movement and that has driven her to engage in less and less activity:  And you know the saying, the less one does the less one can do.  And she has moved less and less over the years until she can hardly move any muscle group without some assistance and without pain.  Her lower body has completely atrophied and her upper is not that far behind.  I understand the desire to avoid pain which almost all movement presents, but her lower body debilitation, which precipitated all the rest, could have been greatly lessened thirty years ago with knee replacements.  But, she refused to do anything to remedy her increasingly arthritic knees and now she and we are paying the price.  Mentally she has regressed into a child-like state where she either balks or squawks about helping herself in areas where she remains physically capable.

Depression runs in the family.  My father was authentically Depressed and coped with it with prescription drugs and alcohol abuse.  My father died at age 57 refusing to acknowledge his need for mental or physical health services. 

My mother like so many dutiful wives and mothers kept her Depression to herself and with all the contradictions in her relationship with my father seems to me to have kept an even-keel.  Still, with the onset of the infirmity of arthritis her coping broke and the Depression asserted itself big time.  She really knew the destructive force of Depression as her mother, another authentic Depressive, essentially committed suicide by starving herself to death when recovering from a broken hip.  Nonetheless, it seems to me the illness finally took over and my mother, in her own way, has been dieing since.  Yet, her instinct for life and her fear of being like her mother has been keeping her from taking her mother’s route.  

The price to me of my mother’s infirmity causing Depression is substantial.  My world has shrunk to the walls of my house as I cannot go beyond them since I am her main care-giver and need to attend her at whatever time she is in need of it!  This is a 24/7 job with which my wife is helping when she is at home in the weekday evenings and on the weekends.  Still, all those hopes and dreams I’ve been having, all the work on the school and my political/legislative advocacy over the years (of which I will tell in subsequent blogs) are being put in jeopardy, on hold or potentially being forsaken, as I slide deeper and deeper into my own Depression.

I know I practice a range of psychological avoidances with my “projects”, but they, especially the school and the politics, have been the way by which I confirm my self-worth to myself.  (I intellectually understand a reframing can transpose my intimate care-giving into a self-worth confirmation but I am finding that just as impossible as I’ve found it over the years when a house-husband between employment:  I cannot see any of this as demonstrating my intellect and, it seems, there is a huge need for me to confirm myself as being learnedly intelligent.)

Indeed, I’m having trouble continuing to work on the school and thus my self-worth is being challenged. There are ways by which to continue working.  The key is in setting up my sleep routine which would create evenings and weekends relatively free for whatever activities required.  This is becoming difficult in that my mother wakes up once, sometimes two or three times during the night to go to the bathroom.  And that means I must awake and get her out of bed to the bathroom and back from the bathroom and into bed.  She is spending more and more time in the bathroom, so I can be up for an hour and a half each time!  This does not lend itself to a comfortable, or consistent, sleep period, nor to a suitable routine. 

Working when I can, postponing or forsaking my the school project for the duration of my mother’s remaining days requires both a reframing of what constitutes a self-validation of worth and a reforming of schedule to get me out of the house and back into the larger community “doing the politics” and the library research in the evenings and on weekends.  But I have to have both the physical and psychic energy to reframe and to create the routine and then to work what I’ve created.  Depression and much interrupted sleep have sapped those energies for now.