Not Satisfactory to Others

Posted on April 26, 2005 in Compassion Depression

Someone today tried to argue me out of my current low mood and succeeded in pressing it down even farther. It was one of those “Just get up and do something great with yourself” speeches that add to your sense of failure. When I didn’t jump up on the table and say “Yes, that’s it. That’s the cure,” she grew disgusted with me and turned away to talk to another friend.

That’s the life you lead when depression overwhelms you. It doesn’t matter how kind you have been towards others, how gentle. When you find yourself in the same state, they will rough you about, insist that you feel better right this instant.

I don’t have it in me to feel better right now. Next week I am undergoing surgery. Whether I come out of anesthesia or find my spirit scattered about the operating room, waiting for a door to open so that it can float down the hall and into the ether doesn’t matter to me today. I’m not going to make the operation fail. It has been tempting to file a “Do not resuscitate” order, but I doubt that the hospital will pay it much heed given my mental health history. I could take aspirin to provoke spectacular hemorrhaging, but that, too, would be recognized as suicide. So I am just turning myself over to the doctors and to the Universe. If I die, then it shall be a natural death and if I live, I shall ask for my assigned millstone and go on with life.

The world is confusing. Supposedly I have all it takes to succeed in it. But here I sit, in my bed, feeling no great desire to achieve, to sing the mad tapping song of hubris. I just want people around me to comfort me, to take me out before my three week long convalescence. No one will come to see me in this condominium as I slump on the couch with a bandage around the back part of my jaw. I’ll be just too ugly. And alone. Alone. Alone. Alone. That word: like water drops in a tunnel.

When will people learn that a depression wants a soft voice, not a pep talk?

The paradox is that I don’t want to live and I do want to live. And there’s no way of having both. Hence, my surrender to whatever.