A question of tomorrows

You may be sitting reading this now in the place I’ve been many times. You’re simultaneously assuring yourself that tomorrow your mind will be better while planning how and what you’ll do if it is not. This may be day 1 of that cycle, this may be day 100 of that cycle – but regardless where you are it is a frightening tight rope to walk.

We’ve all had days, months and even full years where the universe seems unkind to us and nothing seems to go right. Someone you love dearly dies, the basement floods, the car breaks down repeatedly, it rains more than the sun shines, you seem unable to rid yourself of being accident prone, etc. etc. But, at the end of the day those are all external “things” which while unfortunate and perhaps sad, do warrant a certain amount of lamenting what’s to come the next day. That’s just being a human being and being alive. That’s not what I’m talking about here.

If you’re not coming at this from a place of experience with chronic, relapsing depression (or whatever fancy term they want to assign to it in the psychiatric community), then let me digress for a moment. Imagine if you will that every day  the “things” that sink you into despair are completely invisible and unexplained. There’s no getting through them or around them since they’re unseen. There’s no rationalizing them because they’re irrational. There’s no describing them because they are just…there…and have no words you can figure to assign to adequately describe them. Sadness is not a word to describe it. Sadness is never a word I’d use to describe the illness depression.

Perhaps the most accurate description of depression I’ve ever heard is that it is like being homesick longing for a place you’re not sure even exists in a location you have no idea how to find. It is a constant state of disorientation within your own mind. It is feeling perpetually lost. It is a constant state of detachment from your own mind and body. It is completely invisible to most of the world except those attuned to a glimpse of a telling facial expression or attuned to the exhale of hopelessness.

Recently a dear friend posted about her brother’s suicide and a conversation had just weeks before he took his life. He adamantly stated he could never do such a thing yet somewhere in those weeks, even if only for a minute, the tide changed on that thought process. That is, perhaps, the scariest thing about battling depression – knowing that momentary shift could happen at any minute and that the consequences of it could be permanent and devastating when that minute ends.

Right now that minute seems at a distance for me, after hundreds of days where it walked uncomfortably closely behind me with every step I took. I’m not naive, I still know it hasn’t gone far and some days I get glimpses of the familiar indescribable sensations that come with its presence. I’ve walked with it long enough to know that should the words I speak ever state adamantly that I could never leave this world of my own accord, I would almost certainly be lying. I remember vividly the moment my friend screamed at me through tears on the phone “don’t you dare ever do this to me!” in the hours that followed her brother’s dead and my empty assurances to her at that time that I never would. Even she has come to realize, having lost both her brother and mother to their minds, that I may not be able to control that minute any more than a person can will their blood sugar to lower. Up until now though, I have retained that control – sometimes by the tiniest threads – but it remains.

So if you find yourself sitting with that minute nearby, just breathe and hold tightly to knowing that tomorrow may be the day that minute passes safely by and you become grounded again. If you find yourself sitting in today’s mental space tomorrow as well keep hoping for it to be the next. Never try to think about the day after tomorrow. You just need to make it through one more day.