The unwelcome visitor

Things in my flat have been quite stressful recently. In the last few weeks it’s become increasingly clear that my flatmate F, who is one of my best friends, may be clinically depressed as opposed to just grumpy after a difficult internship. It’s been pretty hard, seeing her struggle and we finally had a big talk this week about what we’ll do about it. It’s been hard, these last few weeks; while my personal brand of depression just had me emotionally labile and dangerously introspective, F gets grumpier and angrier by the day. I kind of feel like I’m taking the blows for it. She’s my main ‘person’ – I don’t have family members I can phone after a hard day, really. When she’s off with me, I’m off with myself. Such is the nature of true friendship.

I guess this is where my ‘patient experience’ comes into its own. Most of our conversation revolved around her not wanting to go to the GP (to which I say, what do you have to lose? And – no one LIKES going to the doctors. It’s not a playground, after all), or wanting to wait a bit (to which I say, what do you gain from waiting? There’s a reason that they use a 2-week cut-off for treatment, as once you’ve been low for a fortnight, you’re unlikely to perk up without a boost from somewhere else. The drugs, if that’s the right option, take a few weeks to work – what do you gain from waiting?). I understand all of this – I understand not wanting to go, I understand wanting to just wait it out, to ‘man-up’. Depression isn’t about manning up, however, and thinking you can just get a stiffer upper lip and be fine, is an insult to anyone who’s ever been there. As Sylvia Plath wrote, I have seen the bottom and I know it. I’ve said before that I’m not sure I could last another year like this one. But neither could I bear to see F go through that either. It drove me crazy at times that neither of my flatmates really understood what having depression is like (the perennial, ‘can’t you just cheer up’ line was infuriating to the extreme), but now, I’m desperate that it stays that way. I don’t want her, to know what it’s like. I don’t want her to know what it is to feel disconnected and blank, to feel alone and beyond reach and under water. I don’t want her to hurt the way it made me hurt.

This has thrown me a bit; on the one hand, I’m glad I’m here to insist she gets help if she needs it, but I’m also worried, or a little bereft, that just as my own depression finally seemed to fade, it’s wormed its way back into my life in full force once again. Part of me is also, secretly, a little angry – I never had anyone pushing me to go and get help until I was so far gone that I gave even a seasoned GP a bit of a shock. I never had anyone who really knew how to manage someone with depression to make sure I was on track and who knew how to check in properly. Like the patient at the GP’s, once again I’m thinking about why it was that my own ‘journey’ took so long, why the drugs didn’t work despite all the praying and the crying and the changing. Was I less deserving of recovery? Was I in need of so great a lesson that it would take twelve months to learn? Am I less of a priority, more of a liability?

Ahh, depression, you are such an unwelcome visitor in my home! Like a stubborn houseguest that wreaks havoc with your thermostat settings and leaves trails of crumbs for the mice to follow, it turns our lives upside down. It permeates the air and dampens our spirits. It sands us down to fragments of what we were. This is no smoothing of rough edges or honing of souls; it just destroys. It moved in and now won’t let me move its feet from under the table. It’s made me feel quite emotional, these last few days – not quite wringing hands and yelling ‘WHY GOD, WHY?’ but also not desperately far from that. Although I know that this is not really something I am ‘in charge’ of, it still kind of feels like that. It just makes me feel a bit vulnerable. I know that life is all about the mountains and the canyons and the highs and the lows and whatever – but at the moment, I’d be willing to give up a few mountains, just to be on an even keel (or, by extension, a prairie) for a while. I’ve had a year now of feeling tied to depression, quite literally – tied down, tied out of, tied up – and this kind of makes me think it’s never going to stop. It’s always going to be stuck to my shadow. It’s always going to be under my roof. It’s one pernicious, unwelcome visitor.