Colder Weather

When I was about a year old I lived for destruction. In the apartment over the variety store where I lived with my parents there wasn't much place for storage and the little space that was there was used for things like ski equipment or out of season clothes. So where else could you put books, diapers and other things a mother needs when she has a toddler but a regular shelf. The only problem was that the bottom three shelves were constantly relieved of whatever was put there by the decor critic that was me. My parents didn't seem to mind too much. I've seen pictures of myself amid strewn Pampers and dog-eared Dickens. They would come into a mess like it was a natural part of the day and pick up everything and put it back. How often they did this I couldn't say but the photographs are many. But like I said, it didn't discourage them. They thought it was funny.

Now, sixteen years later I love to read and I am glad to say that diapers are not an issue. However, I am constantly picking up the pieces of my life and putting them back on the shelf and unlike my parents I don't find it amusing and I do get discouraged.

I sometimes wonder, as I am sure many of my acquaintances do, why I was diagnosed with clinical depression. I always thought people who were depressed had a traumatic childhood. They were raped or abused and lived in gang-ridden neighbourhoods. To the best of my knowledge I have never been raped and with the exception of a smack or two that I must rely on my parents word I received, I was never hit.

And yet here I sit during school hours at home with one hand dialling my psychologist and the other reaching for the Prozac. I have been out of school for seven months now and have been taking anti-depressants for eight. I can't put a time line on how long I have been depressed. I was a cry-baby since childhood but I'll skip that since it probably is irrelevant. The first time an illness disrupted my life was when I was twelve. It started with a sore throat and incessant coughing. I remember it was a Thursday at four in the morning. My mother came in and felt my forehead and told me I would have to stay home for a few days. Those few days turned into a few months.

I went to doctors and specialists and no one could understand why I felt sick. After the sore throat had gone away and the fever had gone down a splitting head ache hit me along with stomach aches and dizziness. This went on for weeks; getting ultrasounds, exploring this possibility and that, but nary a diagnosis was made. Finally, in the middle of my third month I went to a child psychologist. After a few visits with her asking me questions about my feelings I decided that I hated this person and I was convinced she was calling me a liar. Nothing materialized so she sent me to the hospital. I refused to go at first but she said it was either that or I go to school.

I won't go into the details of my eight day hospital stay or my sessions with social workers. All I'll say is that four days after I was released they forced me back into school and almost the same day I returned to my ABCs I felt miraculously better. Whenever the family or my friends brought it up it was referred to "that virus" or "that time I was away from school". Life picked up again, if you can call the days of a twelve year old life. My grades were good and despite my extended absence I received all As that term. Things were relatively normal and as peaceful as things can be for an adolescent until I was fifteen.

In history class when we studied war I always wondered what would happen if someone walked out on the battlefield and asked the soldiers why they were fighting. But no one ever did that because after awhile the question of "why" ceased to be an issue. So the same it was with me. I never asked myself why I hated everyone around me. Why I yelled at everyone who talked to me. Why I screamed at anyone who touched me. I figured I must have a good reason. If someone looked at my report card for grade ten and saw a first semester of As and one B and then Cs and one D for the second semester that person would probably say they were two different people. That person would have been right. I simply didn't care when my teacher of my beloved subject English told me I was getting a 42%. I didn't notice the decline in the number of my friends and the only reason I noticed the pain I was causing my family was because I took such pleasure out of it. I figured it was "who I was". I just wasn't a people person not to mention a happy one. In June I barely passed my exams and entered the summer so bitter that I thought it was funny.

That summer was when things got worse instead of better. That summer was when I decided I would run away as soon as I had enough money. How would I get this money? I didn't care. Why was I running away? What difference did it make? And in the last couple of weeks of summer my mother bit the bullet and took the risk of dodging some by sitting me down and talking to me. She asked me why I was so hostile towards everyone. She asked what she had done. She asked if I wanted to "talk to someone". I laughed without meaning to. A new story to relate to my very few friends. I'm so cool my mom wants me to go to a shrink. But it wasn't cool. And after I was left alone at the dining room table, it wasn't funny either. My mother had dug up something I had worked very hard to bury and I hated her for it. I hated everyone.

Work eventually became intolerable. A cashier with no attention span makes for a lousy living. School was even worse. An hour was like a month. A day was like a year. I don't know what finally made me go to my mother, whether it was my nightmares which averaged about four a night, that is when I slept at all, or if it was my constant thoughts of death. Maybe I was just starting to feel the lonely side of solitude. Whatever it was, I found myself calling to her one morning while I was getting ready for school and she was making up for work. She came into my room in her white uniform and knelt down to where I sat. I don't think all the hypnosis in the world could make me remember what I said, but whatever it was I found myself doctor. I found coloured pills down my throat. I found things getting much worse.

A day after I saw my doctor I woke up in a panic. I cried and babbled so much that I scared my mom to death. And I scared us both to the crisis centre. I don't think I cried so much on the morning I was born. The receptionist at the desk of the ER handed me kleenex after kleenex as I told her I wished I didn't have to wake up in the morning. The crisis team leader was called and as I explained in a matter-of-fact way that my dad takes medication for epilepsy and it's in the kitchen cupboard and I knew exactly how many pills were left, I was handing my mother a kleenex. I talked to the crisis leader alone for awhile and she referred me to a psychiatrist who referred me to a therapist. We went in at 8:30 and left at 2:00. A lot of the time was spent waiting for the doctor on call to let us go. He was fairly cold and asked what I did when I got urges to "destroy myself". Funny, I thought that destroying myself was what I had been doing all along.

I went to half days of school after recommendations by the specialists who handed me around like a joint. But soon half days were too much to get through so I took it upon myself to relieve myself of all but one class a day. Sometimes I wouldn't even make it to my first class. The five minute warning bell would sound and I would leave the school and go home before classes even started.

One morning I had been sitting on the edge of my bed for God knows how long staring into space when the phone rang. I had gotten into the habit of not answering the phone but I found myself demanding to myself to pick up the phone. When I heard my mom's voice on the other end telling me that my school counsellor had called asking why my English teacher had no idea who I was and couldn't recall having ever seen me, something snapped. I suddenly began crying and everything flooded down. All I could keep saying was "I can't keep doing this. I just can't do it." The pills in the cupboard had been removed and even Tylenol was no longer attainable for me. But that didn't keep my mom from asking if I had hurt myself. But all I could do was keep telling her I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it anymore.

My mother found me sitting on the floor in my bedroom with the lights off and the blinds down. Once again she guided me down the stairs to take me to the hospital. When I reached the front door and I saw the sunlight and I thought of all the people I would have to face before I got to the crisis team I couldn't bear it. I didn't know what else to do so I sat on the floor again crying. If my mother hadn't dragged me out to the car I think I might still be sitting there today.

It was a relief to end that day but it still wasn't the end of the depression. I found different ways of coping with the black days. It wasn't until I accidentally cut myself shaving my legs that I even thought about physical pain as a release. But next time I felt frustrated or angry or sick with despair and there was some foreign object near by, a pair of scissors, a nail file, a screw driver, a razor or even a steak knife, I would carve up my arm like it was Thanksgiving turkey. Since it was getting to be colder weather nobody questioned why I always wore long sleeved shirts. Nobody wondered where all the band-aids went to.

Then one night I was reopening a wound that had almost slipped by the healing process and I got a phone call. It was a relative, I couldn't tell you who, but when the conversation as over a pool of blood had formed on the floor. I think cleaning up my own blood must have made me stop shredding up my arms.

I still once in awhile needed a release from the mental anguish so I began piercing my ears, with a sewing needle. I got up to ten earrings when I ran out of room and studs and when the last one ripped out I stopped that too. Eventually I took them all out and they closed up except the two in each ear I had professionally done when I was ten, but it was one more way of coping while it lasted. But nothing really ever lasts, good things or bad.

I get frustrated dealing with ups and downs so frequently, but it's better than before when I was always low, always on the floor. I've heard so many analogies for depression but I think the best one was bringing something heavy up from the basement to the attic. You start with the first step... but the little poetic piece didn't mention that you fall down the stairs-a lot. Get on that horse again is what the old saying says. I think this horse may die of old age before I ever get into a canter, so I've decided to take up walking. Walking back towards school, towards a social life, towards things I love. Every day is a struggle. Some days are easier than others so it's those easier days I live for. It's that time of day when the sun is neither up nor down and the breeze is neither hot or cold. It's that smell of birthday candles on the cake after they've been blown out by a friend. It's picking up the phone and recognizing the voice on the other end, and being glad that you do. I've been told that this may be something that stays with me at some degree for the rest of my life, but I just think that others have to live with cancer or AIDS, and I've decided that I may die with depression, but I refuse to die because of it.

Thinking that no matter how many times I stand up I'll end up on the ground will be the end of me, not the end of the depression. I just try to think that no matter how many times I fall, I'll always end up standing again.

I know now that there are so many others afflicted with this disease, but no two cases are the same. You can call it a depression but I suppose each person calls it something different. An undertow, a flight of stairs, but anyone with depression knows that there are no words to describe it.

So maybe I'll always have a mess of books and Huggies at my feet, maybe not, but either way it's time this toddler grew up.