The vise grip on my heart has been unrelenting for several hours, and I find myself once again waiting expectantly for sleep so that I can escape into oblivion, leaving this sudden pain behind until it’s next resurgence. Until that time, I wait, bathed in waves unfocused grief and regret, touching what has been, what may be, and what is not now.
I’ve been sick for a very long time. What started as a slow burn violently culminated in a psychological breakdown one and a half years prior, leading to hospitalization, medication, and the dissolution of a nearly three year relationship. I was no stranger to this imbalance; prior to this catalyzing event, I had fought and won a battle with persistent anxiety and depression that had a sudden onset in my early 20s. Through counseling, pharmaceuticals, but above all, resolve, I managed to press this illness into submission, and maintain this balance, for the better part of 8 years. Through this time, the specter of my imperfection always hovered, but it could not — because I would not allow it to — seize control again.
Things have changed for the worse. After over a year of supervision and a host of medications, I have decided that it’s time to live free of intervention once more. My depression was always what I would consider “low-level,” nearly to the point of background noise, with very infrequent and entirely manageable spikes that were always short-lived and of minimal severity. After a little over a month of living drug-free, however, I find myself living with a beast that is wholly unfamiliar and terrifying.
On a seemingly random interval, with no discernible triggers, I find myself thrust into intense and inescapable despair for anywhere from a few hours to a half day. I cannot liken this sensation to anything other than the loss of a loved one: it is all-consuming, immune to reason or suppression, and disabling. All of the tools in my arsenal are worthless in the face of this darkness, and every instance overwhelms as if it is the first time I have ever had the displeasure of the encounter. I cannot prepare; I cannot fight; and I cannot see the end, despite my desperate attempts to do so. Most frightening to me is that these episodes are increasing in frequency and intensity, and try as I might, I cannot prepare for or predict them. As such, I spend the balance of my life besieged by these demons, for even when not manifest, I find myself second-guessing the next arrival with frustration and fear.
In the face of this terror, the obvious question looms: why not return to medicated life? I grapple with this possibility daily, and all the more so during the storms. I know that the right mix of pills are able to fully eliminate them, and I can live my life without the fear and the pain they bring. Psychopharmaceuticals are a fascinating thing to me; I remain amazed that a few milligrams of this or that can target something as ephemeral and ill-defined as depression, or anxiety, or psychosis. As remarkable as this is, however, this path is not without consequence.
A drugged life is just what it sounds like. Cage the beast, and become caged yourself. When I find myself removed from all sadness and anxiety, I am simultaneously cut off from the very things that make my existence, for lack of a better term, human. In the intervening years between my first acute episode and the most recent, I was able to self-medicate, through denial, distance, and distraction. By suppressing all strong emotion, turning my back on love, hate, joy, grief, passion, and the remaining array of human experience, I maintained my sanity, and my visible life, for nearly a decade. In doing so, however, I gained only hollow time, such that when my barrier was breached and I found myself unable to leave my own bed, I resolved myself to no longer suppress and control, but to understand, embrace, and eventually appreciate the violence and beauty of my emotions.
It is intense. When it comes, I find myself facing an angry lifetime of mistreated memories, augmented by my imbalanced brain. Childhood, loneliness, loss, distance, inadequacy, missed opportunities: I am flooded with all of these at once, with an intensity that I have never encountered or imagined. With the gates open all at once, I was able to fall in love for the first time, and now when the dark comes, the fact that he did not reciprocate this love is unbearable. In these times, the realization that I was not enough for him, and the thought that someone else inevitably will be, brings me to my knees.
I sit, and wait, and hope for the end. In the time it has taken me to write this passage, I have detected a faint ebb in the waters, and for the moment, I can breathe again, but not too deeply or freely. This fiend will be back soon, and he will be worse than before. For the time, all I know to do is to record, and weep, and maintain some degree of faith that this curse might eventually help me find the emotional redemption that I’ve fled for so long.