Day Two: The Beginning

Looking back on it, I can see now that it wasn't quite as stealthy as I initially thought when it happened. Everything began on a Sunday in February of 2013. It was an ordinary Sunday and our family was driving home from Mass. The day was cold enough for a jacket and long sleeves, but not freezing. The sun was shining in a clear blue sky with only a few white fluffy clouds scudding along. It could not have been a more lovely, happy looking day. The earth was turning as it always has since creation began, but then everything shifted. I felt the sun dim and the sky fill up with gray clouds. The change happened so dramatically that I was dumbstruck by it and felt very much as though I'd been hit over the head with a sledgehammer of depression.


I fumbled for my phone and opened a notepad app to jot down my thoughts and try to make sense of everything that was now swirling around in my head. You see, one of my tools for dealing with depression has long been writing about it -- journaling, prose, poetry, random snippets of thoughts. Sometimes it helps me express what I'm feeling in a more concrete way and sometimes it's just a way of releasing those emotions and letting them go. In that moment, it was my effort at trying to understand what had happened. A part of the feelings I had was a sudden grumpiness which made no sense to me. I felt like biting the head off of the next person who so much as breathed in my general direction. I also found that I felt suddenly very withdrawn. When I realised this, alarm bells went off in my head because this is a hallmark of depression for me. I tried to analyze possible causes for these feelings and came up with a few things that made sense, but left me still feeling like there was something I was missing. As we arrived home, I put away my notes. After a little bit of lunch and a short afternoon nap, the feeling waned and I felt more like myself. Throughout the next several days, I felt a little bit sad, but nothing quite as intense as that initial moment of sadness -- certainly nothing that I felt qualified as depression. I chalked it up to my hormones and the normal dip in mood that accompanies the changes in my cycle. I wanted to believe that's all it was. It wasn't.

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Had I known that Sunday in the van the agony that lay in store for me, I might have thrown myself out of the van and into the oncoming traffic. I suppose in that way, ignorance is both bliss and salvation inasmuch as nothing about the future is 100% certain. Even when we know all the variables or information about something that lies ahead of us, the future is not set in stone. Believing that we know the future and allowing that belief to influence our emotions, attitudes, and actions is a kind of distorted thinking that is common to the general populace but especially common in depressed thinking. The cognitive behavioural term for it is "fortune-telling." It goes hand in hand with "black and white thinking" and "catastrophizing." I have engaged in all three things over the course of this depressive episode and often all three at one time! It is a very easy trap to fall into, especially as it snares you in a kind of twisted feedback loop that is self-perpetuating. A good therapist who is skilled at cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can really help break certain cycles of distorted thinking. Thankfully, I have an excellent therapist, Pendragon (not his real name, obviously), who both listens to my thoughts and validates them, but challenges me to change them when they are distorted. I'll admit, I don't always appreciate his challenges in the moment, but I know he cares and is trying to help lead me out of this darkness. I am thankful for him, for his God-given gifts in his chosen profession, and for his refusal to give up on me.