I am imagining what it would be like to have a badly-behaved celebrity-style meltdown, smashing chairs and windows, my blood stream coursing with destructive chemicals. Only not the artificially introduced kind. Rather, the kind that my own disordered brain produces. I imagine how satisfying it might momentarily feel to give into the feelings of rage, and to see my frustration manifest in shards of glass and broken furniture. Because that’s how my mind sometimes feels. Frequently not, but sometimes, and lately yes.
My brother used to say it would be a lot easier on him if he had cancer, because cancer is a disease we can identify and feel properly empathetic about. Depression, or mental illness of any kind, is anathema to our understanding. But depression is not unlike cancer of our emotions. There may be a day when a damaging thought arises, and our usual defenses to that kind of thinking are insufficient to crowd it out, so it festers, and it self-generates more such thoughts, until they have overwhelmed those usual defenses.
There is no one thing to point to. Not always. It may be circumstances of fatigue, stress, worry. It is feeling angry and sad and frustrated and helpless all at once. It is feeling like I can never quite break through, never quite achieve. I live my life in versions of the same concentric circles. I am weary of the feeling of endlessly trying. I want to get out of the circle but there is such a pull to the middle; simple physics, really.
I am, ultimately, unlikely to smash the furniture. I may yell in frustration, and then feel vile and shameful for scaring the cat. He is a useful scale, as energetically absorbent as he is. But I do need to get off this particular circle. It may be a gradual change. I’ll feel a shift in my weight and the light and I’ll still be circling the same center but from a slightly nearer or more distant perspective, which can be enough to sustain me for a time, while I dream of launching into an entirely new orbit.
And then, as life sometimes does, shining synchronicities appear, in the form of unexpected interactions that create their own glow and heat. Briefly, I exhale, and tell myself to remember those moments, and that the light is always much closer than it sometimes feels.
caroline ridgway 