life collection

"The most I can do is shower." I tell my therapist, sitting on that corner of that brown couch I've known for eight years. We've been through this depression. Years through the burrows and dark-dank caves. He changes my medication. He says we're moving forward, always moving forward, even when my illness isn't responding to shit. It's a stubborn depression, they call it treatment resistant. I call it hell.

I wasn't depressed for awhile. After ten years of being depressed, suicidal, paranoid-anxious constantly. When it lifted, it was amazing. Then this year came around like a slick sailor (the month of March to be specific) and took me back under. I've been depressed ever since. Face in the mud, sucking in shreds of air through worm carcasses and pebbles.

It's slimy down here. It's real dark. No one is here but me. I'm in a filmy membrane and the world is outside, moving and chugga-chugga-choo-choo. I can't function. I'm no train. I am bedridden. Our couch turned into a second bed so I can change my view. Agoraphobia is finally here. I can't leave the house unless R is with me. I can't sleep, but I do but I don't feel it just like in The Bell Jar.

I'm a nightmare fighter and we have plans. This new medication, my doctor says, "give it some time.". I'm giving it time and the time is unbearable because I want to die and my brain won't think of anything but darkness. Then if this doesn't work we have Lithium to go to (again). I hate that drug, it gave me the shakes, I have to get lab needles stuck in my wobbly veins, people ask what's wrong with me when they see me tremble and I don't want to tell them "I'm on a medication that is keeping me from killing myself." so I don't.

The next option is ECT. Yeah, that shocky thing. The thing Sylvia Plath got that didn't save her. Her tender temples, her brain scattered. I know it's different now but she is my baby and I live in her life and she in mine. I don't want to end up head-in-the-oven. If you want to know what depression is like, read her journals, it's all you ever need to know of the pain, and I hope you never experience this labyrinth of hell.

ECT is so much more effective and safer now. A small electrical pulse gives you a seizure and you are asleep and don't feel a thing. Doctors don't even know how it works, but it does so they use it. The only thing that shakes is your foot just a bit so they know when the seizure has ended, none of the out of control seizing with bruises and broken arms like in the past. ECT is extremely safe. It can even be done during pregnancy.

The thing is...stigma. If I get ECT I think "That does it. I am really crazy.". Even in the mental illness community being on meds means you are weak, therapy is "oh good girl, get that help", but meds are a crutch, try the green smoothie and exercise instead. And I am on so many meds. And I know it is bullshit. If I had cancer (and depression can be as deadly) no one would doubt me taking meds, actually they write articles in Time Magazine about cancer patients who don't, because it is so unbelievable. That's how normal it is. No one would doubt chemo. But ECT. A potentially life-saving treatment, "well fuck it all you are crazy!" You are Sylvia, and ice baths, and ready to be handed over to an institution. Stigma makes me angry. And I care what people think.

I wanted to talk about this because maybe it will help someone reading to know they aren't alone. I'm going through the same things and I don't know if I'll get through. I can't give up though and if ECT helps then I'll do it. Stigma hurts. Depression hurts. But fuck it, I'm not letting it kill me.