Emotional Umbrella

I had a blog before this one. It was random, and shared freely with friends and family (well…my sister at least), and patched together in embarrassing HTML that I had learned myself. It had a camel at the bottom. I cannot remember why.

That blog goes pretty much straight through the period of time in which I now figure I probably developed the precursors that led to this bout of depression. I didn’t talk much about how hard things were there. I wrote mostly about amusing thoughts, and undramatic insights, and questions from friends, and things that I had found on the internets (and apparently ninjas. …or so the search stats told me). I just read through some of those posts, looking for something unrelated. At first, I was struck by how jovial I sounded about most things. I was envious of then-me. And then I came across a comment here, and a brief post there, and a little reminder that even though I would never have admitted it then, most days I came home from work and cried.

My therapist asked last week what was going on at this time that might have been stressful. I had identified it as a time of high stress, and one that might have contributed to the issues I’m fighting now. It seemed a likely starting point to look for times that my stress responses could have worn down. I am one of those “somebody’s always got it worse than me” kind of people, so I have a hard time finding the line where I can allow myself to label something as legitimately “stressful,” but I am now recognizing that despite having no missing limbs, or sudden demises, or natural disasters, it is okay to call this time in my life stressful. Legitimately so.

This was the time that my now-husband and I had just completed our respective post-secondary-educations. We had been together for about a year or so. With miniscule job prospects where we were studying, we picked up our lives and moved them to a larger city. We had no money, no jobs, and a whopping pile of student debt. We rationed out how much we allowed ourselves to eat each day, since the rice we purchased was going on the credit card. Once we splurged and each got a 99 cent mini-hamburger at the fast food place down the street and then felt guilty about it. We worried a lot about what would happen if we ran out of credit before we found work. We lived in a friend’s walk-in storage closet for two months.

When it became clear that the job market was such that we could no longer rely on the hope that we would find employment reasonably soon, we left our friend’s place and began renting a room from an aunt of mine. We kept to ourselves. She had a rather lecherous husband. We ate in the room. We slept in the room. We worked in the room. We watched a usually functional small T.V. No one had hired us yet in our chosen fields. No one would hire us at the mall because we were too overqualified. I kept hoping that if we could just find “real” jobs, things would get better. They got worse.

My now-husband’s first career job was CRAZY old-school hellish. They worked incredibly long hours (like sometimes home at 2am and back to work for 6am kind of incredibly. If he had nothing left to do an hour after his workday officially ended, they would find actual MAKEWORK activities for him for another two!), for lower-than-industry-average pay, expected complete perfection/obedience/involvement, and had all kinds of absurd social expectations. We had make sure that we were socializing with the “correct” people at the holiday parties, and that we didn’t talk with any one person or group for too long, and that I didn’t speak too much or too openly (he was REPREMANDED about this once. …I am an INTROVERT.), and he (no joking) got chewed out from his boss once for politely declining to get totally drunk near the end of a gathering where he was the DESIGNATED DRIVER. And to top it off, his coworkers were the most infuriating, misogynistic asshats I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter. And they were that type of asshat that would make my then-husband’s life miserable if he said or did anything that indicated he wasn’t one of them. My husband’s first career job cannot accurately be explained without excessive capital letters.

My job was hellish too at this time. It is apparently widely acknowledged in the industry that the first few years are hellish for just about everyone. Oh good. Top it off with sweeping judgments, a huge age gap between me and any of my coworkers, long hours, unwritten rules and unspoken expectations, an unusually difficult load, and lots of open-ended opportunities for me to run myself ragged (very ragged. I often literally worked through every moment of free time. Including the vast majority of the weekends. …But it always felt like there was just so – much – to – do.). And I was sick. At least every other week. For a year. I only missed two work days, when my eardrum ruptured and they made me stay home. I cried myself to sleep almost every night. Then I got back up and cried myself to work.

We had one vehicle between the two of us, so I would drive him the half hour down to the nearest subway station before work, and then drive back the opposite direction for another hour or so to get myself to work. And pick him up after. Sometimes at 2 or 3 am. We never got a full night’s sleep. We barely interacted with each other. He got testy because I was “willing” to have sex, but not interested enough. We fought often. We had a few interactions that still break my heart.

We never had time to visit our group of friends from out of the city. And since we were working pretty much around the clock, we didn’t really interact with the people we knew in the area either. I was desperately lonely, and desperately sad.

I have been told, by both therapists who have had time to actually know me, that I have a tendency to severely under-represent my symptoms and side effects when talking with other people. This has caused problems in trying to get my medications sorted out. When asked how I am, I will say “I’m okay. Really sleepy,” with a tone of voice that implies that it’s not that big a deal. If someone were to press and ask if a person could live a “quasi-regular” life with that level of fatigue, I will say “absolutely not!” I am honest, at least.

I think this undervaluing habit applies to my life experiences as well. Just because there are other, shittier things out there that have happened to other people, doesn’t mean that things that have happened to me can’t be shitty too. Even as I write this, I am overwhelmingly compelled to qualify that statement by adding that they weren’t entirely shitty, and feel like I should be looking at the positives – I had a place to live even if it was very small, I had my mate even if we weren’t very close at that time, none of my health issues were serious, we both did find jobs, we bought a cheap car. It was fine. I shouldn’t be complaining.

Because that’s how my brain works.

I feel guilty now about even having written this. I feel ashamed of the judgments people may make when they read it. I can see vividly all the mistakes I made. I feel like it shouldn’t have been a problem for me.

Had I known then what I do now, maybe it wouldn’t have been.

Or maybe it just would have taken me longer to crash. As it is, I hung in for another six years after that.

…Which, they tell me, is probably why finding a successful treatment for me has been so hard.

Damned good intentions. Always ruining things.