I find myself trying on and shedding myriad metaphors for depression.
Last week, I flirted with the metaphor of puppet theater in an attempt to convey the strategies one uses to function through depression: you as the puppet master, dancing numerous wooden, yet smiling marionettes, in front of an audience to tell them a story that they want to hear. You scramble to juggle numerous roles and remember the lines and to speak with the correct voice for the correct character in an endless, near Sisyphean story, all the while trembling from exhaustion behind the curtain. Your feelings are not present, the characters are so far removed from you that you don’t store detailed memories of the interactions your players have with the audiences, potentially jeopardizing those relationships in the future. And so on goes the metaphor.
For most people, when you say “I am depressed,” they envision what they themselves have felt when they have grieved or dealt with some loss. They may understand the difficulty in moving forward or or keeping up appearances. What they don’t understand is that it isn’t loss. It isn’t sadness. You don’t just get better.
So you fling various metaphors at them. You describe it as a pervasive darkness that tempers and makes everything seem hopeless. Or you cast it as a hurricane of emotions that blur your vision and blow you backward and wear you down until you find yourself in the frightening still of the eye as you slowly disassociate yourself from everyone you know and love.
But still, they don’t get it.
As a result, of recent, I have been heavily reliant upon the one local friend who gets it, who has been struggling to keep his head above water for a while now. He described depression as not grief because grief or loss means you recognize how something was good before, and now it is gone. Eventually, you work through the tunnel until you see something good again on the other side. I agree. Depression is more of a cave-in, when you went out spelunking alone and no one expects you back.
To have a friend like this is a powerful and scary thing – a Godzilla in a movie where you don’t yet know if this time he’s the good guy or the bad guy. A friend with whom you could completely obliterate the world around you. Yet a friend who can come at you at 400km/hr and grasp hold of you with all of their strength, as you are falling into the sea. Who can both admire the underwater landscape at the same time as slow down the descent.
But it is perilous to rely upon exclusively upon someone so fragile themselves. Anchors are stabilizing, but also by their nature sink. So today, I reached out to three persons from my past, whose friendships I have let wilt over time, for the sole and selfish reason to spread this blackhole that I am among more people who need no metaphor. I have no right to their support, but I will hope that they can provide it.