Day 154: Breakdown, Breakthrough, Break Dance

I joke about depression a lot, dropping one-liners and innuendos, calling myself a mood swinger, calling myself crazy. I joke about it because a relapse of depression is my greatest fear. It’s with me almost every single day and the jokes help me make it seem smaller than it is.

The really scary thing about depression is there is no bottom. The black hole just keeps on going, so falling back into it is about the worst thing I can imagine. Think about what it would feel like to plunge down a hole that never ended – that constant loose-guts feeling of free-fall. If there’s a hell, that’s what it would be for me.

I was on medication for six years, starting a drug called Celexa one week before my husband left. I started feeling better immediately, and I’ll never know if it was the meds or him leaving that helped me come out of four years of almost-constant horror and pain.

Whatever it was took that free-fall feeling away. I could function. I could feel happy. I could focus and move forward in my life – get a job, get a boyfriend, set goals like marathons and Ironman and actually have the capacity to complete them. But I always that niggling, uncomfortable feeling that I had to take happy pills to get through a day.

In the six years I was on meds, I tried to get off them several times. Each time, I would gradually decrease the dose until I was down to half a pill every few days. If I took one on Monday, by Wednesday, I’d start to feel lightheaded and a little woozy. By Thursday, I’d feel like I was going to pass out and by Friday, I’d be nauseous, dizzy and barely able to stand. This pass-out brain-damaged feeling was not depression. It was withdrawal symptoms from a medication that my body was addicted to. They don’t tell you this when you start antidepressants.

But beyond the withdrawal, there was a more subtle feeling. The feeling of jumping without a parachute. Or tightrope walking without a safety net. The feeling you could fall at any time. That feeling kept me from going off meds for many years.

Finally, last spring after returning from Paris, I weaned myself down to a quarter of a pill every few days. Then one day, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I took the meds and I guessed that meant I was off them.

The funny thing was, as I was going off my meds, I was slipping into a depression. Common sense would say I should have stayed on them. But I was done. I was through not knowing what was actually happening in my body. Through medicating an illness that I now felt was linked to me not living an authentic life.

Because what Paris did is it told me I am an artist. It told me that living this fake parallel life – where ‘creative’ meant writing hardwood floor ads – was not enough. Living a fake version of your life seemed to be a good way to make yourself depressed, so I tried an experiment. I put the pill bottle away and committed to my creative work. I started writing a memoir of my trip to Paris, a book about being authentic and realizing your dreams.

It was tough going. It seemed like every couple of days I had some kind of panic attack or micro-breakdown. I questioned everything in my life, including my boyfriend who I put through the wringer on a daily basis. He was the only person who saw me every day and who knew what was going on – as much as anyone can know another person’s experience – but every day I considered ending our relationship.

People kept telling me it was the writing – that the creative process is tough and tumultuous. Some blamed my boyfriend for stifling my creativity. Some suggested I should do something else, date someone else, move somewhere else. But I ignored everyone and kept going, enduring bad day after bad day after bad day. Sometimes, I’d cry all day. I’d pull out that pill bottle and stare at it for a very long time. But I never took one.

I was operating on faith. I had no rational reason to believe things would work out – I’d never heard of a clinical study saying creative work increases seratonin levels. But deep in my gut, I had this feeling that if I kept going, kept writing, everything would work out.

In December, I started feeling better. I finished the first draft of my book and I celebrated a feeling of possibility for the first time in months. I also realized I had four months of blog posts about my daily mental breakdown and a two-month period where I very publicly debated breaking up with my boyfriend. I was embarrassed and ashamed. I felt terrible for having dragged him through hell for half a year and documenting the whole process on the Internet.

In mid-January, I spent a couple of days in the mountains with a friend of mine. It was there I realized I’d been off my medication for six months. That, for the first time, I was living my real life as my true self. That I’d freed myself from depression and medication, that I was living my dream of being an artist.

And also that I’d been holding myself to a standard of perfection the whole time.

I had struggled like hell for six months and the whole time, I’d beat myself up for not being perfect. For not being instantly cured and instantly happy. For taking five months to write a first draft instead of two. For not calling people back.

I’m not sure what the lesson is here, to be perfectly honest. Whether it’s about the power of living your dreams or some sad fucking parable about the perils of perfectionism. But here I am. And here it is.

Right now I’m working on a course to help teenagers with depression. It’s rewarding work, but it’s bringing up all kinds of feelings I’ve been packing down and hiding from for years. It’s making me see my own denial – I’ve been studiously ignoring my depression since I took that first pill six and a half years ago.

Writing about it makes it all REAL again. It’s scary and it’s hard and I feel like I’m passing through a kind of portal. Like on the other side of this difficult but necessary work, there is a whole new world waiting for me.

I’m removing a huge heavy coat that I’ve been carrying for ten years and I don’t know what to do once this weight is off me. I feel like I’m fumbling with the buttons, not sure if I even want to take it off. That if I take off this weight, anything is possible, and that wide-open Anything is terrifying. I don’t know why I feel this, but I do. I guess I’m operating on faith...again and still. I guess it’s all I know how to do.