Month: September 2016

Milestones and Making it Through

I had started September fairly flat emotionally but as the first few days passed I found my depression getting pretty heavy. It took a day or so for me to realize what was weighing on me. The tail end of the month would have marked our five year wedding anniversary.

This year it just represents a day on a calendar. It’s sobering as milestones come and go.  First birthday without the spouse, first Christmas, first Valentines. It puts things in perspective. For most folks holidays are a time to be around friends but as I am these days I feel too prickly and too sensitive to be around large groups of friends. Those circles I do still keep in touch with I’d rather just have a nice short conversation with on the day of. Eventually I’ll find ways to get myself to engage w/my friends more but for now there’s a lot of reworking of my own mental state first.

 

The Oatmeal — Being Perfectly Unhappy

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/unhappy

This crossed my news feed recently and while not directed at depression specifically I think it helps illustrate some of the difficulty of anhedonia quite well.

The uplift is there at times but for the most part it’s just sort of that dull flat emotional state. It’s hard to illustrate that to most folks, most folks just figure “you’re happy or you’re sad”. The layers of gray to me are much more varied.

Of Weekends and Idle Hands

For most folks the weekend is that moment of happiness when the work stresses end and the freedom begins. For me it’s been the opposite. Weekends are what I actually dread slightly. No focal point, no direction. Those slow times are the worst for me as I am alone with my thoughts. Motivation to get out and socialize isn’t there for me.

For now at least I’ve focused on projects and things to keep me busy, keep my mind active but the rest of what I do is pretty empty. Truly wish I had better advise to give in this regard but in truth what helps each person is different. I’m hoping through September I’ll be able to form some project ideas that are less cerebral and more engaging but I know it’s going to be hard. Sept 25th would have been our five year wedding anniversary. Instead it’s just a day on a calendar that I’d rather not think about.

As the milestones go away I hope that the dull pain does too.

Divorce and Mental Health

I started to frequent reddit.com more as I looked for things to keep my mind occupied. It’s a fairly interesting way to stave off boredom but it has pitfalls too. One of them being the subreddits intended for discussions about divorce (/r/divorce) and depression (/r/depression). Both forums are not happy places to visit, let’s be honest.  Given the way reddit is by nature it can be a very wild and woolly place. One of the recent threads though hit home for me.

A wife mentioned her struggles in living with a spouse with mental health issues.  Now the specific issues weren’t brought up but anger management aspects and depression certainly would have been my first guesses.  She received a lot of positive urging to leave her situation. The irony for me is I can see things from the flip side of it.

It’s a weird double edged sword. You’re married, you start to suffer from depression/anxiety etc. Your relationship suffers, strains and in a lot of cases is destroyed. For the person who suffers from those issues though it’s just sort of one more thing on the haystack. The irony is family can be both a means to coping with depression and the best support base you can have or it can be trigger to episodes as well.  Caregiver fatigue might be one of the biggest (though more often for women) examples that comes to mind. I can understand making the choice to leave if the anger leads to violence and abuse, I can understand how much of a strain it is for the other spouse to have to be there and trying to support that person. None of that makes the choice to divorce any easier though and it’s usually painful for both parties.

There’s a lot of days I sort of wonder if people suffering from depression are outlying cases that aren’t optimally meant to be in relationships. At times I feel like maybe I’m supposed to do other things and I’m not meant to be someone’s other half, or father. It’s a painful thing to contemplate but it reminds me that if I am to have those things in my life I need to continue to work against depression and find ways to cope.