Hopefully you've already read part one of this train of thought, Inspiration Porn. Here's where it was going...
I started to write about this topic because I realized I was struggling to not get depressed. Mental illness is no stranger to me. I have very real anxiety, probably caused by being a sickly, awkward, introverted kid. I also have been told by doctors most of my life that most of my symptoms were simply anxiety. While I now know the physiological reasons for these symptoms, it's not a simple thing to undo 15 years of being told something else. I also have super weird hormones which can cause anything from freaky dreams to periods that are six weeks late, and also mood swings. I've had times in my life where I suddenly felt depressed out of nowhere. Some of this was probably just not understanding my fatigue and other symptoms, and misinterpreting them as depression, but sometimes it really was deep, heavy, crushing chemical depression. No matter how happy my day-to-day existence was, there was this hollow pit in my chest that just couldn't feel anything other than despair.
I am incredibly fortunate that these depressed periods of my life were short-lived and infrequent. It is scary, though, to know what it feels like. This depression that I feel now, lingering in the outskirts of my mind, is quite different. I feel chemically balanced (relatively). When I have a good day, I feel great. The problem is that I keep having days that are exhausting, frustrating, painful, scary... It takes massive amounts of hard work and energy just to not let it crush me. I spent the first half of last week with a massive mast cell flare. As soon as that started to feel better, I got a nasty cold. In the process of dealing with the nasty cold, my neck got tweaked, so my vagus nerve became irritated, causing a slew of new symptoms. On top of all of that, I had to figure out how to work, when to take time off, if at all, got a bill for three appointments that my insurance should have paid in 2017 (for hundreds of dollars), had to switch primaries in order to get someone who was able to call in my prescriptions before they run out, finally got a prescription with a few days to spare and then was charged $950... It was a rough week.
So yeah, I started to feel a bit depressed. Sometimes I look around and can't figure out if I'm actually improving at all. I look at my $950 bill and wonder if the meds are even helping. I finally expel the green acid out of my gut to get a two day migraine followed by aches, chills, cough, and sinus pain. Where am I supposed to feel hope, in all of this? And on top of it all, I had to completely shut out my friends and even my spouse just to get enough quiet time to recover, so feeling "better" also came with repairing strained relationships. My husband recounted that he'd had to listen to me saying "I'm never going to feel better" over and over this weekend. That's honestly how it feels sometimes; sure, it'll get better. It always does. But if I crash again three days later, did it really do much good? When you have 72 different possible symptoms, it's hard to get a day without a single one.
Here's the funny thing -- I have become more comfortable talking about diarrhea, vomit, farting, weird personality quirks... yet as soon as I mentioned depression in this post, I immediately had voices in my head warning me that people will pull away; people won't want to read this; people won't believe it's as real as my physical symptoms; people will think it's somehow my fault. Herein lies a massive problem. The good news is I'm not the only one trying to combat the stigmas shrouding mental illness, but it still feels pretty darn vulnerable to be on the forefront of that. The thousands of damaging reactions I've faced throughout my life don't just stop haunting me simply because I've decided they aren't justified.
To tie things back to the first post in this train of thought, I hope you'll be just as inspired by my struggle with depression as with my physical symptoms. I hope you'll want to read about it even when it doesn't have a happy ending or hasn't resolved right away. I personally know it will resolve and I will find ways to be happy and positive again, but I want you to listen despite that foresight. Acknowledge the struggle because it's universal and fosters empathy. Love it because it's raw and honest and sublime -- the way Beethoven exemplified sublimity. Don't just bask in it because it gives you a way to pretend that anything in life can be easily overcome. Sometimes, life sucks. Sometimes it's unbearably hard. But knowing and saying and writing that doesn't depress me. That feels real and workable. I can see that as a challenge, a goal to work towards. To ignore those bad days doesn't do justice to the incredible resiliency of the human spirit. You want inspiration? Find someone who's willing to open up about what really deeply hurts, to be vulnerable, and then keep fighting for themselves and others, despite every day not being idyllic and positive.