Not Waving but Drowning

If you’re reading this, hello. It’s good to be here writing for you today. It’s a bit about depression and where I’ve been lately. If you don’t feel like you’re in a place to read about that today, go do something kind for yourself. Come back to this later and I’m going to write something way more fun after while. I love you and I’m here if I can help. Depression is a real jerk.

When someone is actually drowning, it’s said to be remarkably quiet. There’s no thrashing or yelling because the one who is drowning is just trying to find air. There may be rapid climbing movements in the legs and something that looks like waving in the arms, but not noise. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll miss it, and then it’s too late. Depression is like that: it’s a silent drowning in your head.

It’s been a minute since the last update. And I’m sorry for that. I don’t know if you noticed, but I did. I wanted to write. I really did, and in fact, several parts of this were written in little bits over that time and I just couldn’t finish it. But I was underwater somewhere, and it’s hard to put words together when all you hear is roaring in your head.

For the uninitiated into my brain: I use water terms a lot to describe where I am currently in my many decades ongoing battle with depression and anxiety. At times, my mental health is stable. Generally, that’s floating. In my head, I’m the emotional equivalent of bobbing along somewhere, some ups and downs, but I’m able to weather even pretty good size swells depending on the size of my current flotation device, which is represented by my energy/support/”spoons” for people who get Spoon Theory. A good day is “I’m on a boat! and it’s going fast! and I’ve got a nautical themed pashmina afghan!”

And then there’s been the last several weeks. Royal and Hudson had COVID and were recovering. They finally tested negative, the next day I took Huddy to birthday party while Royal went to an event with friends, and the day after that I hustled onto a plane to Orlando to a week-long military health and science conference. While all of this was happening, I was still working, preparing for the conference, writing, taking classes, and got back to play catchup while juggling prep for the next things and not dealing with the building stress and grief of the previous months, including the fear when your loved ones have COVID. I was just pushing, pushing, pushing, and you can’t do that for long without it blowing up. You know that scene in “I Love Lucy” with the chocolates on the conveyer belt? I didn’t have a chance to even make a plan, I’ve just been stuffing tasks in every pocket and trying to do as much as possible while never feeling like it was enough.

This is where things fall apart. Keeping active is not a bad thing for me, but if I’m overwhelmed or I’m using activity to avoid things, my brain starts to become a very unfriendly place rapidly, and before I know it, I’m underwater. Everything feels off. I can’t deal with most things without effort because I’m just trying to survive. The further under I go, the harder it is to get up without help, and sometimes you just hit a depth where it seems futile to try to get up.

Drowning in your head isn’t fun. You wake up in the morning and think, “What’s the point?” even before the first waves come in. Maybe that’s something awful in the news, like kids got hurt (which will trigger both me and Royal, every time). Maybe it’s a complicated work or family email. Maybe I put my dress on backwards. The waves just continue to drag you down. Maybe you get close enough to the surface to get a hand up, try to signal for help, but it’s just enough for people to see and say, “She’s all right, look, she’s waving.”

So at some point I largely stopped waving because it took so much effort. I was doing what I had to do to tread water and survive. I was keeping up with my job, spending time at home, talking to my therapist, getting through.

I wish I could tell you where the turning point happens where things start to look up, because it can be unpredictable. I think I finally just got enough joy in one shot in one day without something cutting my legs out from under me that I finally had the breath to tell someone close to me outside my immediate home circle that I wasn’t okay, and they genuinely heard me. And it helped. I’m still struggling up the embankment, not quite all the way out yet, but I am at least able to take a big enough breath now to say this much. Today, that’s enough. Maybe it’ll help someone else dealing with this, or maybe it’s just a footnote for myself, to remember that sometimes the quiet ones are “much further out than you thought/And not waving but drowning.”

Something nicer coming soon. Thanks for bearing with me.