To Sleep, Perchance to Sleep More
I’m posting a day late and I don’t have a good excuse. I do have a mediocre reason: I didn’t get out of bed until 6pm yesterday. On July 4th, I didn’t get out of bed at all.
For those of us who suffer from chronic clinical depression, “bed” is not a place, but rather a state-of-mind. So, no, I couldn’t write from bed. I couldn’t watch something funny on tv from bed. I couldn’t make phone calls to people who would cheer me on or make me laugh, nor could I answer incoming calls from my sister or my mother or that robot from USAA reminding me that I have a balance due on my credit card. I couldn’t do anything but sleep and fail to come up with reasons to resurrect my lifeless, shitty body to do human things, like eat. Or pee.
Depression is not a new thing for me. It was just difficult to diagnose when I was hungover every day. Before that, my depression was difficult to diagnose because my constant level of anxiety felt like electricity coursing through my veins and laying still was unnerving. I still suffered from depression then, but it was like Travel Scrabble: I could just take it with me everywhere I went.
I’ve written about depression before, and I’ve done my best to dispel the myths that have run amuck of the condition. I have to keep repeating myself, though, because I guarantee that there are people out there right now thinking, “hey Kara, you’re up, you’re writing about it, you’re talking about it, why don’t you just do something about it?” What? You mean like medication, talk therapy, psychiatry, exercise, more medication, meditation, yoga, self-help books, a balanced diet, hydration, monitoring the materials of my mental intake, spot-treating and avoiding toxic triggers, taking supplements of Omega 3s, vitamin D, and probiotics? I am, thank you for politely asking. Depression still wins sometimes.
I was shocked that my sister, who will not accept an excuse for anything, from anyone, for any reason, even said herself that, “antidepressants can only do so much.” She’s right. Everybody wants to think that the powers of body chemistry are overrated, until they need to fight off a mugger, or lift a car off their baby. Then it’s all, “hey, thanks, adrenaline!” Ugh. I can’t stand all of these simpleton “Johnny-come-lately’s.”
Yes, I can joke about it, because (holy shit) I have to. Make no mistake, there is nothing funny about mental disorders. From largest to smallest, they are all terrifying. Nothing is more upsetting than realizing that your mind, the one thing you should be able to control, is operating against you.
If you are like me (which I advise strongly against), you got deep enough into addiction that you kinda forgot about the issues that lead you to a place where you were habitually drinking or using. Cravings aside, early sobriety feels AMAZING. You hear the birds sing, you smell honeysuckle on the breeze, you taste the cherry in your Chapstick, and hot damn, has the sky always been that blue?! That positive awareness will be short-lived. One day, you’ll be sitting comfortably on the couch watching Law and Order with your mother, eating fresh pineapple, fantasizing about what you would do if you had Dick Wolf’s fortune, and it’ll happen…
Your heartrate will rush, to the point that you can feel it in the outer layers of skin on your chest. Your lips will stiffen—can’t talk. Your fingers will stiffen too—can’t make a fist. The muscles of your throat contract and you’ll swear you can’t breathe, even though you are breathing. Legs dissolve to jelly, mind is squandered to a fearful fog, stomach twists into a sailor’s knot… and you’ll suddenly remember, “oh, right. This is why I drink.”
It’s called “radical acceptance,” when something exists in your world that is torturous, yet you cannot do anything to fix or remove it. For me, that’s depression and anxiety. I can help it. I can lessen it. I can improve my methods of dealing with it. But it will always be there. Though alcohol did an excellent job of fortifying me against it, alcohol is no longer an option.
I’ll be honest, not being able to drink is incredibly frustrating in that regard. Some days, I can’t get over the unfairness of it. Some days, I can’t navigate myself out of the “why me’s?”. Or, simply, the “why’s?”. Why do I have to feel anxious all the time? Why isn’t there a medication that works perfectly? Why does facebook exist just to ruin my day? Why am I such a “first pancake” of a person? Why don’t they like me more? Why don’t I like me more? Why do I try, when all I ever do is fail? Why did I work so hard to get sober, just for my life to stay shitty? Why did he leave me, even though he promised to stay forever? Why do I still miss and love the people who willingly left? Why can’t I get a singular part of my life together? Why can’t I get out of bed right now? I have so much more than most people, why isn’t what I have enough to make me happy? I’ve been asleep for 16 hours, why do my eyelids still feel heavy? Why do I keep trying to live better when the world is clearly trying to bump me off—failure after failure after failure? Why do I have to keep living, when being alive is so Goddamn disappointing…?
With conscious thoughts like those, its no wonder your body is telling you to go back to sleep. Repeatedly. For days.
Why do we have to keep living, when being alive is so Goddamn disappointing? Why do we have to keep living, when we are clearly terrible at being alive? Why do we have to keep living, when living hurts so profoundly, and so very much? I don’t throw questions like that around for fun or for emphasis. I, like many other victims of depression and addiction, have grappled with these questions to the point that I’ve scared myself.
Suicide is a conflicting concept when paired with addiction. I thought I’d have to kill myself to get out of it. It was oddly comforting to learn how many other addicts thought they would have to kill themselves to get out of it. It is shocking; the number of individuals in a church basement on a Tuesday night that know what it feels like to purse their lips around the slide and muzzle of a semi-automatic pistol. Subtract the ones who’ve felt the weight of 60 Dothiepin tablets on their tongue. Minus the people who have used Google or gone to a library to learn how to tie a tight neuse. Very few of us would remain to recite the Serenity Prayer.
The level of frustration between addict and self, and others to addict becomes very high and very fragile. There comes a point in our addiction when we say to ourselves, and other say to us, “if you’re going to kill yourself, just do it already!” Honestly. I’ve said it to my father, I’ve said it to myself, I’ve had people scream it at me. If you or a loved have never struggled with addiction, you won’t understand, but that is a completely normal and understandable dynamic when addiction hits its pinnacle in a person and a family.
In that particular situation, suicide was an option to me, not a threat. I didn’t feel threatened by it until I’d been sober for a long time and realized that, booze aside, chronic depression was going to stay. Additionally, and continually, my clinical depression is compounded with the fact that my life is just plain depressing. Its like pairing white wine with fish: this horrible situation really brings out the flavor of this major depressive disorder.
I may be making light of suicide right now, but at least I’m talking about it. Someone has to. Not talking suicide leads to suicidal people not being able to openly talk about being suicidal which leads to, you guessed it, suicide. Humans are meant to be aware of their own mortality, that’s why blood has a distinct taste and a smell. Our judgements and attempts may have been clouded by alcohol, but us drunks don’t shy away from talking about how close we all came to ending it. Every Tuesday night I look at one man who survived 5 trigger squeezes in a game of Russian Roulette. I see another man who was sitting in his truck at a West Virginia rest stop with a bottle of vodka and a bottle of diazepam, ready to down them both when his wife texted and said, “call your daughter. She’s worried sick about you.”
Sure, maybe they were just drunk an being dramatic. Or just drunk in general. That doesn’t discount the fact that they almost ended their own life. If you know what it feels like to be hopelessly depressed, then you know why drunk seemed like the better alternative for a while. This seems counterintuitive to my constant point of “don’t drink or do drugs in excess,” but my heart bleeds for the people who suffer from depression and can find no solace once-so-ever. At its worst, I still choose depression over drunk… but at least I have the choice.
Why am I spilling all of these juicy depression details if I don’t have a solution to the problem? Didn’t I just say that I spent all of yesterday in bed? Indeed. Here’s the thing… I’m alive. I’m going to stay alive. Even on the days when my brain chemistry tells my body to “shut it down,” I’m going to stay in bed, but I’m going to stay alive. It may be the result of my own poor choices, but I’ve seen and survived a lot of shit for a 30-year-old. I know that depression is forever going to hover over my life like a dark cloud, ready to release a deluge on me at any moment. I also know the lowest moments will go as quickly as they came and life will go on.
Not everyone who suffers from addiction or depression has a case that is as malleable as mine. I want to make it clear that I am not saying that everyone who has committed suicide or has had suicidal thoughts or ideations has or had the simple choice to “just keep living.” I assume that any victim of suicidal thoughts in any capacity is doing their Goddamn best in life until you prove to me otherwise. It is mine and everyone else’s responsibility to fight against the causes of suicide and show respect for those who lost the battle at the same time, regardless of how you feel about suicide as a concept. Part of that is, those of us who can fight their depression, fight with all they have. Even if you have to take a break and give in a little bit from time-to-time.
