I’ve written a few posts before on my experience with dysthymia and therapy, and managing my tendency to depression. I haven’t written on this topic in several years, and I was reminded by the flood of posts about Robin Williams that hearing other people speak about the difficulties they have can help.

One thing that strikes me about those older posts is their optimism. Funny thing to say about posts about depression, but both of them are about solutions. Those solutions have really helped me; the optimism is in that sense justified. I don’t usually spend extended periods of time depressed anymore, in part because of the work I’ve done in the past on the emotional side and the physical side of my mental state, and in part because longer experience with managed (versus unmanaged) depression, and a better understanding of what works for me, means I’m more likely to notice and to do the necessary work when things get out of whack.

But there is a relentlessness about the tendency to become depressed, and the need to constantly manage it and deal with it, that I find wearing in a way that I didn’t five years ago, or even two or three years ago. Based on my experiences with recurrence, dysthymia for me seems to be something that I’m nearly always resisting, and that I don’t always successfully stave off.  Getting into that mode is revisiting familiar mental territory, even if I try to make it less so.

It’s honestly scary to have recurrent thoughts that say, as one of my articulate friends put it, “that you’re a cancer on the world that must be excised.” The notion that that will never end for me, that there will never be a day when happiness can’t be capriciously stolen by my jerkbrain (thanks Captain Awkward for that term), is exhausting. I don’t know how other people who live with depression feel, but it’s not hard for me to imagine the possibility that someday that exhaustion might pile up to the point where I start to feel like I can’t do it anymore, can’t keep wrestling myself for every scrap of goodness and happiness that I can find.

To quote this lovely piece:

depression is not, in point of fact, you at all, but a malicious program that’s taken up residence in your brain that runs alongside your you-ness, and turns your brain into a zero-sum landgrab between malware and firmware. Not only does the depression chip away at your energy and focus and clarity, but what you do retain is so exhausted from the nonstop defense of its resources that at times you just want to give in, give up, sink all the way into the warm, quiet darkness.

Even though I feel like I’m far away from that point now, I don’t really have a happy ending to this part of the story, only an intention for it to someday have one; an intention to use all the mental, emotional, physical, financial, and fellow-human resources that I have to stay far away from that point, to remember that most of the time I’m pretty happy, and the effort to keep my jerkbrain from stealing the spotlight is worth it. If you, too, feel relentlessly sucked down in the mire, I hope you also believe that you deserve the spotlight, and not your jerkbrain. And that if nothing else, the notion of a dancing, singing brain in the spotlight made you chuckle.

Edit: Or, you know, I could let Erika Moen say it for me, and better.