Tag: relationships

Depression, Relationships and Being Equals or Being Complementary

My ex-wife liked to believe that spouses should be evenly yoked. Three years out from our divorce and I’ve realized that I don’t ascribe to the same viewpoint. Living with clinical depression poses a number of problems to such thinking and in retrospect gave me a different perspective as to why my marriage failed.

One of the biggest fears anyone within the depression spectrum faces is feeling like a burden. In a relationship, be it dating or marriage you worry about dragging your partner down. In the view of being yoked you cease to keep pace with your partner. Eventually that can harm a relationship. In many ways I feel like that’s what happened to me. Eventually my spouse could no longer be happy with a sense that as I was no longer at her pace and I was in fact no longer a benefit while yoked. I think for her I was constantly dragging her down, be it intentional or not. I don’t fault her choice in ending the marriage. I don’t think I was a particularly easy person to live with during the last two years we were wed.

I’ve come to view a different type of relationship, particularly for people suffering from depression. Two beasts of burden joined at the neck isn’t the metaphor that I believe works. Instead it’s a pack, like sled dogs. I know, initially this sounds like the exact same thing right? There’s a subtle difference. With dog sleds it isn’t necessarily that they are paired and side by side, they are grouped by a role that complements the others. There’s the lead dogs, the swing dogs, the team dogs and wheel dogs. The lead dog keeps the whole group on path, the swing dogs help turn, the team dogs carry the main burden of sustaining speed while the wheel dogs bear the weight and the initial forward movement. Here’s the thing with this metaphor though. At times the lead dog changes depending on the conditions. They work as a pack together. (Sled dogs positions) Thinking this way I feel is more true to the fluid needs of a relationship.

Living with a significant other battling depression has similarities. There are times they may lead, while in other circumstances they’ll be just trying to bear the load and maintain. When things are different they may be a swing dog following their partner’s lead instead. Yet other times perhaps they’ll be at the back, just helping to get forward momentum going. The metaphor isn’t perfect, I’ll grant that. Real life is far from a linear thing, and partners won’t always be moving in the same direction, but I think the idea of changing positions and roles to suite the conditions is a more encompassing representation than the yoked pair that my ex reference.

I suppose it’s ironic then that one of the morale patches I keep on my shooting gear is one of a lone wolf. Where I am today, I have no pack, but I still try to get out there. Someday maybe someone will want to run with me, but until then, all I can do is move forward in my own way.

Caliber or Quantity – Friendships and Clinical Depression

Shortly after my divorce one of the first things I did was shut off social media. Besides the usual barrage of questions I realized that most of my circle were really tied to my ex-wife and the stress of contact was too much for me to deal with.

As I’ve slowly reached back out to some of the people I felt close to I realized that there’s a trend towards quantity of friends versus the caliber of friends. As a target shooter I prefer using caliber than quality, so bear with me. Social media conceptually is a neat idea, I get that. Reconnecting, staying informed about distant friends is all well and good. Somewhere down the line though social media shifted and it became more about the idea of followers or a sense of external validation. Just about every social media structure is about who liked your post or how many re-shares or views you garnered. That’s never appealed to me. The idea that a post is worthy or unworthy of attention or comment has always seemed weird. While these days my social media foot print is extremely small and very curated. I’d like to think that now in my forties I’ve come to believe that it’s the degree of closeness with my circle that’s been more important.

Caliber of friends, not quantity matters more to me. It’s one thing to have 20 friends give you a one word “Nice” to a post and quite a different thing to have someone talk to you about what you wrote or what you re-shared. We’ve lost a bit of that in the social networking world of today. It’s rather ironic for me as I work in a tech related field. When it comes to friendships however even a two sentence followup to me feels better than having any actual number of likes. Don’t get me wrong, in Reddit i almost never down vote anything. If something is genuinely interesting and I think someone else might want to see it, I’ll up vote. Call me karma indiscriminate if you want but if that up vote makes someone else that I don’t know happy, then hey what’s the harm.

Navigating any social networking space with depression feels like a game of minesweeper.  There was a time that I enjoyed reading about anime, photography etc, then I realized those environments would trigger negative thinking and memories of my married life. Things I had no want to revisit. These days I don’t think of just random people who engage me online as ‘friends’, they are contacts, acquaintances . Like minded they may be but we don’t have any deeper degree of interaction. This change in how I treat the online community has made a world of difference for me. I choose to engage people and it lets me focus on the content and sincerity of the conversations.

Life is hard enough juggling mental health in any form. While the online world can be a useful resource and sometimes an escape hatch, it’s also full of potential hazards. Finding an efficient way to navigate it will always be a challenge. If you’re finding those types of communities are pushing you into a dark place, take that step back, look at filtering the information you subject yourself to. Here’s hoping you are able to find a good corner of the net to call your own.