the Village Knittiot

You know how you are going along in life, and maybe there are a few bumps in the road, but in general you are pretty sure that you are managing and everything is okay? Then, one morning after realizing that you haven’t done much or really even moved in a few days you start to wonder if that’s really true? After all, how does one identify that they have become depressed?

Depression is pretty much a fact of life in my family. Not to mention anxiety and other threats to one’s mental well being. One of my family members is fairly regularly hospitalized for her bipolar disorder. This is just on my mother’s side of the family. I don’t really know my father’s family, but lets just say they have “issues.” And really, who doesn’t? I am under no delusions that I am special or unique — at least not in relation to how I feel. Everyone gets sad. Everyone has problems. Everyone has hurdles they need to jump over. The severity, I have discovered, is really and truly relative. If it feels bad, it feels bad. There are no contests about who has the most dire situation.

Anyway, despite all my training, all my tools, this particular ghost had been slowly creeping back into my life for awhile, until one day a week or two ago I said to myself, “Self, you are exhibiting signs of depression. You lack motivation. You cry. All the time. About everything. The critic is throwing a party in your brain pretty much 24 hours a day. You are overwhelmed at the thought of dealing with people and returning e-mails and phone calls seems a Sissyphaen task.” “Hmmm,” I thought. “I guess I must be depressed.” I told Mr. Knittiot about my new discovery and suddenly I saw the lines of strain around his eyes, the exhaustion, the concern. Apparantly I wasn’t the only one to have noticed.

One of the things I commonly do (as do most people dealing with depression) is hide. There is this feeling that what you are experiencing is a shameful thing. A secret. Not something you want everyone to know, or at least not just anyone. I suppose the rationale behind such behavior is that depression is something I have done wrong, something that is my fault. I have failed at being happy. Tell me, why does blame so insistently shove its weasely little head in any corner it can find? And, of course, this game of hide the elephant only serves to reinforce these destructive emotions.

So, I decided to tell people. Just a few people. People who would understand. And the response has been surprising. They don’t react to me as if I have the plague or as though I were a great big whiney baby. They listen, toss out a few bits of advice they have found helpful and in general just accept me as I am. There is concern. There is understanding. This forces me to a point where I must admit that I am fortunate to be loved and cared for by a great many people. A tender, healing balm if ever there was one.

A friend (to whom I am eternally grateful, not just for this, but for many other moments of inspiration) recommended a book she had recently discovered. I immediately went out and picked up a copy. At the beginning of the book is a self-evaluation that rates the severity of your depression on a scale of 0 to 100. I have taken this thing I can’t tell you how many times. And yet I was shocked at the end to tally up the score and discover this — 77.

After the initial jolt of seeing that number staring back at me from the page, I felt an immediate and tremendous wave of relief. Relief because I thought what was going on with me was fairly mild, and I had come to the conclustion that if this was mild discomfort, I didn’t know how I was going to keep going on with this life, because it was just too much. Yeah, self-awareness, perspective, these things pretty much flew out the window at some point along the way.

77, it turns out, is quite the magical number. Now there are plans and actions and steps to be taken and performed. Some of them I am already working on. Others may take time, but are nevertheless in progress on some level. I am comforted by the approaching autumn. Such a hopeful time of year for me.

I realize that for the last couple of months I have very nearly dropped off the face of the planet as far as my blog is concerned. While I am not sure how regular I will be about posting, I do know that I have missed writing for the blog and want it to be a regular part of my life again. I suspect it may be one of those things that keeps me tethered to the ground. I also want you all to know that I really appreciate the kind notes and comments I have received from people who want to keep reading whether I’m writing about knitting or not. Anyway, that is my life in a nutshell. Hope you all are faring well.