Depression: Deep Roots and Sleeper Cells.

I’ve had a hard time writing (and functioning) of late.

My depression over the past month has been the worst to date.  Usually I have a bad day, a couple of bad days, or a bad weekend.  I’ve never had consecutive bad days that turn into weeks like this before.  In the past, Mr. Meena being home and with me was usually enough to get me up and functioning, but not this time.  I don’t know why today is better and I am able to be active – yet I’m grateful.

It’s bewildering when you’re not able to get up and do things.  I think this quote from Andrew Solomon’s TED Talk describes my state of mind rather well:

“Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. I would come home and I would see the red light flashing on my answering machine, and instead of being thrilled to hear from my friends, I would think, “What a lot of people that is to have to call back.” Or I would decide I should have lunch, and then I would think, but I’d have to get the food out and put it on a plate and cut it up and chew it and swallow it, and it felt to me like the Stations of the Cross.”

There is another way that I like to describe this aspect of depression thanks to my background in chemistry, and of course I can’t pass up the opportunity to include a nerdy analogy here.  There is this thing called ionization energy in the science world, and, in simple terms, it means that there is a certain amount of energy that an electron must have before it can move from one state to another.  I’ve always seen it in a very black and white way – either you have all of the ionization energy that you need and you can accomplish the task, or you don’t.  If you only have half it doesn’t do anything for you.  So a lot of times when I am unable to do something I find myself thinking, “I just don’t have the ionization energy required for it.”  And I don’t know where to get more.  Ionization energy can be a way to describe one’s internal motivation – and mine is often below the required level for me to function.

And when the time comes that I have to do something, like straighten up for the cleaning ladies or take a shower, I experience a strange flood of anger while doing it.  I don’t know where it comes from or why the act of forcing myself to do things makes me so mad.

I’ve been seeking treatment for depression for over a year now.  I tried traditional depression medication (made me nauseous), alternative supplements (made me dizzy), yoga (until I couldn’t do it anymore and would just sit on the floor and cry), therapy (until I moved out of the country), this supportive subreddit, and the list goes on.  So two weeks ago I decided that when I felt stressed, sad, angry, or otherwise incapable of functioning, I would go on vacation.  I would stop what I was doing and instead read a book, watch a movie, or play with my favorite bird.

Fortunately, I have the freedom to do so as a trailing spouse with a husband on foreign assignment.  I realize that many don’t have such freedom.  Furthermore, my husband is incredibly supportive and able to withstand the hardship of a housewife that is sometimes (a lot of times) unable to cook, clean, or do the laundry.  My emotions teeter between being resentful that I’m not home in America pursuing my much-loved career choice and thankful that I have this time off to really deal with my issues – including my deeply rooted sleeper cell depression.

I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on the progression of depressive episodes in my life.  The symptoms of depression started showing up in earnest about two years ago.  I was finishing up my master’s degree with a thesis where I had done twice the work in half the time (read: overworked and exhausted), planning way too much of my wedding without enough delegation (read: stressed), and dealing with great amounts of uncertainty because there were no real plans about where we would work or live after graduation and our wedding in one month (read: panic).  I can remember very clearly laying on the futon at Mr. Meena’s bachelor pad studio apartment with tears running down my face.  I couldn’t get up and I didn’t know why.  I felt like a deep abyss had opened up inside of me and drained away all of my energy.  This was a very abrupt change in my personality and a strange situation that my soon to be husband didn’t know how to approach.  It only happened a handful of times before my emotions were buoyed as we graduated, married, honeymooned, and moved to Charlotte for a new and exciting life.

My husband started his job and I stayed home to give myself a break before going back into the real world.  We both agreed that I had undergone a stressful time because of grad school and my father being ill and we thought that a break would make me new and shiny, so to speak.  Yet, more red flags of depression started popping up, like how it took me months to unpack all our belongings.  It wasn’t just that the task was intimidating; it was incomprehensibly beyond my mental and physical abilities.  I found myself lying on the couch at 3pm unable to concentrate on anything, even something simple like my Facebook feed.  Eventually I would give up and stare into space or fall asleep until he came home.

Then my father died under especially difficult and traumatic circumstances and I started experiencing depression in earnest.  But we didn’t recognize it as depression, instead we called it a hard time, a sad day, or we both kind of ignored it.  My doctor offered me depression medication and I felt like a fraud.  I knew people who were truly struggling with depression and suicidal tendencies, and I didn’t think that my situation was bad enough to fit into the category of a mental illness.  That was a mistake.  I suppressed my feelings and grief like I was competing for a prize.  I thought it made life easier.

We didn’t recognize it as depression, instead we called it a hard time, a sad day, or ignored it. Share on X

A few months later I landed a job that I truly enjoyed.  It filled my days with the joy of returning to a laboratory and my mind with tasks that were thought provoking and meaningful.  If I experienced a lack of motivation at 3pm I could push through it because my desire to be a good employee was greater than the plummet in my internal energy.  My nights and weekends were filled with chores, errands, and meals with friends and family.  I was rarely alone anymore and that was a weapon that kept my depression at bay.  Looking back, it’s like my job was the wind that set windmill blades to turning – generating motivation that I could hold in reserve and use when I needed it.  So when I lost my job I lost the external force that gave the push that I needed to function.  It had provided me with my ionization energy.

Several years ago when I had just graduated high school I remember asking a friend of mine about her choice to attend a rigorous military school for college.  I had a hard time understanding how she could give up so much of her freedom.  She told me that she needed the structure.  She needed to know that if she stayed in bed instead of attending class fellow cadets would show up in her dorm room to fix that problem.  She confided in me that she suffered from depression and that she didn’t believe that she would be able to succeed at a traditional college without such reinforcements.  I was very confused at her choice and couldn’t understand why she would choose such a tough solution when surely there were other options.  Now I understand.

I’ve been unemployed for nine months now, and I’ve been living in Germany for almost three of them.  While my depression was a difficult to handle while I was unemployed at home, I had no idea the monster that it would become when I left my friends, family, culture, and a general population of English speaking people.  I’ve never been as isolated as I am now.  Even something that should be simple, like finding a doctor or therapist to help me continue in fighting this battle, is thwarted by the intimidating thought of trying to communicate with a German speaking receptionist to make an appointment.  Furthermore, how am I supposed to get dressed, board a train, and travel 30 minutes to the next town over that’s big enough to have specialists (because Schweinfurt is tiny, y’all) when I can barely work up the internal motivation needed to shower?

So I’ve had this time alone in this forsaken extended stay hotel to reflect on this illness that we call depression.  And I can now see that it has been part of me for my whole life.  It was lying dormant, just waiting for a time when I no longer had external forces of any kind helping me along.  No job, no support system, nothing but me and my husband trying to find happiness in a foreign country.

My first external motivator was school, of course.  At a young age my life was full of play dates with friends, roller skating, trading Pokémon cards in my garage on rainy days, and so on.  In high school it was full of homework, team practices, part-time jobs, and boyfriends.  My schedule was overfull in college, which many students relate to when they quote this popular saying: “Good grades, friends, sleep: pick two”.

I worked two jobs almost every summer during college, took way too many hours when I was as school, and had an active social life.  I had less than a week off between my college graduation and the start of my masters.  I’m still not sure how I had time to meet and later marry Mr. Meena while I was in grad school, because my advisor didn’t think highly of taking evenings or weekends off and frowned on most vacations.

Do you see the common denominator here?  Until I was 23 years old my life was incredibly full.  There was no room for depression to rear its ugly head.  It had no space to call its own or way to push into my life.  When I lost my external motivators, that’s when depression saw its opportunity and pounced like a hungry lion.  Now that I know depression so well I can see how it was there in the background all along.  I remember my constant need for distraction, my inability to load the dishwasher no matter how many times my Mom yelled at me (although laziness was a partner in crime there), feeling dread at having to leave the house or go to work, self-harm in my teens, my food addiction, heavy drinking, and more.   My early depression lacked a foothold, though, because there was always something externally meaningful that would take its place.  Only in my isolation was it able to erupt and begin to destroy parts of my life.

There was no room for depression to rear its ugly head. It had no space to call its own. Share on X

While I greatly miss the ability to do things that I used to enjoy with ease, I am grateful that I have this opportunity to acknowledge my depression.  Well, I’m mostly grateful.  On a large scale I understand that it’s for the best, but often I really hate it and I want my external energy back.

It makes me question why some people have this river of internal energy and I don’t.  I remember the responses I got when I told people that I was moving to Germany with my husband and that I wouldn’t be working: “You will have time to exercise every day!” “You can become fluent in German!” “You can solo travel so much!” “You’ll have time to finish everything on your to-do list!”  I would cringe inwardly every time because I knew those scenarios were very unlikely.  I would love to go to the gym every day or go walk around another city by myself.  But I currently don’t have the ability to do those things or to enjoy it even if I manage to force myself to.  I’m not saying it’s impossible for it to happen; rather I just don’t have the ionization energy to jump over those hurdles and I don’t know where to find it.

I can’t help but think of Thoreau and how he lived a simple life in the woods for two years.  When I read Walden as a high school summer reading assignment I never imagined the implications it would have on my life now.  Thoreau was more isolated than I am (and by his own desire to be) and yet he spent those years thinking and learning about his life.  He seemed happy and inspired.  I can’t help but wonder why he was able to flourish on his self-reliance while I languish when left to my own devices.  I’ve observed many people on both sides of this boundary; those that are effortlessly productive and active and those that don’t know how to get out of bed on their day off.

I’m not sure where I will be by the time I get to return home to America and embrace some of my external motivators again.  I’d like to think that this year will be a success story and that I will have triumph and advice to share on the other side.  I can’t know what will happen.  I rather dislike writing about situations that are not yet resolved; I prefer to talk about a hardship that I have already won so that I can share my advice or wisdom.  It’s strangely vulnerable to say, “Hi, my name is Ava, and I’m in the midst of a menacing depression and I don’t know the way out.”  But what else can I say?  That is the truth, and the truth is the only thing that I’m interested in writing about.  I learned from my church that being vulnerable and transparent will get you further and help people more than platitudes and vague summaries about life ever will.  This blog is about my life (hence the name) and depression is a large part of my life right now.  It would be false for me to try to write about anything other than what I am experiencing.

One of my big reasons for starting this blog was my hope that it would serve as an external motivator for me.  I want to be motivated to go out and have experiences (like this one) in Germany so that I can write about them.  I want to really think about what has happened in my life and find a way to make the challenges and tragedies have a purpose.  I want to grow as a writer and a person that does things because I want to, not because I have to.

So if you read something here that you like, please share it, comment, or follow me on one of my social media sites.  Sign up for my email list.  Tweet at me.  Help me to grow this site and as a result grow myself.  I may not have a lot of options over here in Germany, but I certainly have a computer and time to make something of myself.  Here’s hoping that I can do it.

 

Featured photo by Thomas licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.