Why We Stop Talking about Our Depression

 After a point, with depression, you just stop talking about it.

After all, there’s no new information. You don’t want to remind family and coworkers that you are unhappy and you struggle to function. There’s little, if anything, they can do, so why burden them?

So when you return from possibly the most difficult vacation of your life, you say, when asked, that it was wonderful, and you show them the beautiful photos that represent the better 50-60 percent of what actually happened. You don’t tell them that you cried—rather, sobbed—nearly every day, or that the pristine forest around your cabin felt oppressive, or that most afternoons you hid in your room and alternated between sleep and panic.

You don’t want the people who shared the time with you to understand how difficult it was because then they would feel responsible somehow, or they would wonder why you took a vacation in the first place, if things were that bad. You don’t want to belabor the point that you scheduled events so that you would be on this new medication a few weeks prior to the trip, so that it would have time to take effect and thus allow a lighter, better you to step off the plane and into an enjoyable few days with loved ones.

How could you know that the medication would not work, that it would in fact backfire, making you jittery, robbing you of sleep, and turning mild habits into moderate compulsions? You did not plan to be so fidgety that you hoped no one at dinner would notice your legs bouncing rapidly, out of sight under the table. You did not plan to be exhausted by noon and then again by 8 p.m., even after spending most of the afternoon lying in bed and struggling for moments of calm. 

And you could not help that these days included events you could not control, such as the two military guys driving on the mountain illegally in an off-road vehicle and scraping the side of your rental car, even though you had pulled all the way over and come to a complete stop to let them pass—and then they had an attitude about it and made it difficult for you to get information, all the while claiming that it was a no-fault state and, well, they were the military so they had no insurance. Even in more normal circumstances, that would put a damper on the trip. But add to it your current state of mind, and then try to think of anything but that and try not to worry that you will end up stuck with a huge bill even though it was absolutely no fault of yours. Try not to spend the hour or two before you finally sleep obsessing over how you’d like to tell them off or track down their commanding officer (they refused to give you a name or the commander’s contact information) or even post photos of them and the accident on Facebook and Twitter and hope it will go viral and cause them decades of misery.

And the road itself—that narrow, winding mountain road with minimal grading and no guard rails—on this trip it becomes the focus of all your fear. The Road becomes a menacing archetype that might have been living inside your kinspeople for centuries but just now revealed its dark power to you, on this trip. Such a mountain road would likely make you nervous and extra cautious under “normal” circumstances, but people drive it all the time—mothers with carloads of small children drive it, delivery trucks traverse it numerous times a year—and if you were someone other than who you are right now, the Road would not possess you as it did for that entire week. Your imagination was on a loop the whole time, spinning images of every possible disaster, of every way the car could skid or slide or stall or get crashed off the mountain, killing all of you. Your breathing grew rapid hours before all of you made the trip down to the town to give the children an excursion into town. By the time you made the final descent, to a day somewhere else and then the airport to home, you huddled on the back seat, eyes squeezed shut, hands clutching as if you had already fallen over the cliff but found a tree limb to grab, and trying not to whimper with every bump or every sensation of turning. You cannot remember ever being as terrified as on that one twenty-minute drive. To be so overwhelmed by the situation has unhinged your sense of who you are.

In fact, you don’t even know who the real you is. Well, you do know, in that chemically disrupted part of your brain. You know that, really, you are weak and cannot manage your life, that you need to grow up and develop better coping skills. You need to pray more and trust God. However, you have tried to pray, and every sense you have tells you that God has gone away, ultimately and finally and with no regard for you or your suffering. You feel God slipping into absence and yourself slipping off the divine radar. You try various prayers and methods, hoping that something will break through that wretched barrier of desperation and despair. But nothing breaks through, and no relief comes. And you know the truth about yourself: you have failed at life and at faith.

You don’t tell friends or colleagues any of this, because you don’t want them to find out now, after all these years, that your spirituality and your life skills are variations of fraudulence. You would rather they not know the fragility of your belief or the depth of your emotional disability. You can still do your job; this is often true of someone who has reached a certain level of accomplishment and competence. You go to work and do your job well, and people may pick up on a strange vibe, but they see you functioning and leave it alone. You know that you function but at a great price. You do the same work you have done for years, only the energy around it is weakened and your passion for it muted.

Also, you do not reveal to others the horrible secret that your life is over, that you are sailing in a giddy fall to the floor of the world and just waiting to feel the impact of the crash. How would you communicate such a profound truth to people as they sit with you at lunch or share jokes during a meeting? You simply can’t. At least you finally understand that such things are impossible and should not be attempted.

We stop talking about our depression because talking uses up the power it takes to get out of bed and get dressed and walk, step by step and moment by moment, through a frighteningly ordinary day. We stop talking about our depression because we have nothing revolutionary or insightful to say about it. And we know that healthy people have low tolerance for this kind of truth telling. They stay close for a while but then feel the pull of negativity as they would discern an undertow and then hurriedly swim away.

I enjoyed spending time with family. I was able to enjoy good food. I hiked a mountain trail and got an infant to stop crying and smile at me. I read books and played electronic solitaire (another never-ending loop of compulsion). And I slid through an immense, deep gorge by train, focusing my gaze upon rocks and fissures and wildflowers and foamy river water. You see, much of what we call depression is not total. It is merely debilitating.

I publish this blog post knowing it is a risk. Who will find out this unattractive truth about me? Who will pass it on to others? Who, learning of it, will have it in their power to deprive me of respect or job security? Who will judge me as weak or hysterical and dismiss as self-indulgent these words upon words that I have drawn out of myself as though they were sharp threads twined and tangled up in my intestines and blood vessels?

But I draw out the words because, although I might stop talking about my depression because it seems to me completely useless, I will perhaps create, with this post, a place in which other depressed people can pause. Perhaps they will recognize this experience and understand that they are not alone and that the experience—even at its most delusional—is painfully and empirically real. Many of us stop talking about it, but the phrases are always there, however silent or invisible.