At Least They're Committed

Very seldom do I desire doughnuts, but today is the exception. I stopped on my way home from dropping D off at work, snagged a couple from the 7-Eleven and downed one. The second is flirting with me but I believe I shall ignore it’s provocation. I will take a walk on my lunch hour today and if I can pull my spirits out of the sewer I’ll avoid a McDonald’s filet of fish sandwich and fries dipped in buffalo sauce. And if I can’t, I won’t. I’m deformed — mentally and physically — and I’m depressed.

A lot has been made of Robin Williams’ suicide* and I’m hoping the attention provides a better understanding of depression. Although every person’s depression is devastatingly unique, I believe that David Foster Wallace, who eventually did kill himself the same fashion Williams did, described it well in this passage:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

The way I’ve described depression is being entombed in a cold, black cloud that hovers around you at all times. You can see the light on the outside and you can see the people reaching for you, but you can feel neither the warmth of the sun nor the love of the people around you. The chill is a part of you, a physical presence that seems to dissect your flesh from your soul, making it literally uncomfortable to live within your own skin. You can mask it, you can pretend it isn’t there and often with help you can even shake it off for a while. But it’s never not there, at least not entirely.

I wonder if you can understand that. When I see people who have fought for their lives I feel ashamed that I’ve ever wished to die. But maybe our battles aren’t so different.

I recognized the symptoms of depression in myself long before I allowed a diagnosis because once it was real, as with a cancer, it would never again be something I could attempt to shrug off, and I knew the fear and the dread would never go away. I doubt there are any survivors of your affliction or mine who ever think, “Phew! Glad that’s over with! Glad I’ll never have to face that again!”

Pastor Jean-Daniel Williams also said it well: “I have spent more than half my life listening to my own body betray me, my own mind telling me that it would be better to die. And while my external life circumstances have varied how tempting those whispers are, nothing has ever gone so well that they have stopped. No saving relationship with my Lord Jesus Christ. No compassionate bride holding my hands at the altar. No giggling twins in my arms. Nothing has made depression go away. . . . If I should ever commit suicide, it will not be because ‘I’ made the choice, but because my depression would have. Because the depression would have won its battle over me, no medically or morally differently than if cancer had won a battle over me.”

I’m not suicidal. I’ve never planned my death even though I’ve often whispered, “I need to die.” I’d like to think I’d get intervention if I found myself slipping down that low. . . But I have been trapped and I have felt flames and I really do understand a terror way beyond falling.

Your fight for life is noble and I hope that one day people can recognize that mine is as well.

In the meantime, at least there’s comfort food.

*In the end, it was determined that Robin Williams ended his life because he had a rare disease called Lewy Body Dementia, which in no way diminishes the importance or the tragic consequences of depression.