Yesterday I realised that depression is like traveling to another country. You feel constantly jet-lagged and it becomes difficult to communicate with the people who still live back in your home country. This happens because you now live in a different timezone that shifts back and forth depending on a number of capricious factors ranging from how emotionally draining your day was, to what you decided to eat (or not eat) for lunch.
When you are there long enough, relationships fade with many of your old friends due to the constant missed opportunities to connect. Finally this can create a vicious cycle that keeps your return ticket just out of reach.
The double edged sword
Put yourself in the first person for a moment: You wake up so tired you can barely move, but you know it’s late because of the sunlight streaming in your window. That means you slept through at least three of the five alarms you set to make sure you don’t oversleep. Now you need to get up and get moving on your day or risk letting down the people around you.
Despite knowing it is objectively untrue, you then struggle with feelings of worthlessness so weighty that they feel like they could crush the very air out of your lungs. Eventually all the “have-to’s” are done. It is 9:12pm and you can finally go to sleep…
But something remarkable takes place. The feelings of despair lift, for a moment your head clears, you feel like you can communicate clearly you are able to get things done and finally start to think maybe you are not a useless drain on the people you care about.
Now! Do you:
- Go to bed knowing you are going to toss and turn for hours then have horrible sleep and start the cycle over again or…
- Stay up longer and make use of your momentary reprieve until you pass out from exhaustion and start the cycle over again.
You can see why people take option two and stay in GMT+/-12 for another day.
Ps: I know this may not be true for every single person with depression, but anecdotally I have seen it many times.
The Point
While I have had bouts of what I would call situational depression over the years. I am blessed with reasonably stable brain chemistry, so it is always temporary. but that is not the same for everyone. Some people carry it around with them for years on end.
While this may sound depressing and hopeless, this post was not designed to ‘fix’ anyone. The purpose of this post is simply to shine a light on the experience of some of the people you do life with. Hopefully this will give you language to wrap around their experience so you can dialogue with them in a meaningful way and just maybe give you the inspiration to take the “time difference” into account in your interactions so you can be an even more empathetic and awesome human.
