Coming out of depression is great, but it also has a downside: that’s when you start to get scared [FRAGMENT KSI¡¯KI]

Drawers

Nobody wants to be pigeonholed. Shit. We don’t want to be pigeonholed if it has unpleasant consequences: having to explain the real and imagined misconduct of your entire social group, sexist remarks and condescending smirks, telling strangers in the store that no, you don’t work here. We don’t want to be thrown into the box labeled “cute idiot”, “pervert”, “frog chick”, “frustrated woman”, but find someone who demands to be released from the box labeled “up and coming young man” or ” most attractive girl in the office.

The ultimate drawer test is disease. You can be laid back like a Californian surfing along a burning marijuana field, you can be free spirits, perform cocoa ceremonies, dance in five rhythms and eat in five transformations, but I want to see you go to the doctor with a sharp pain in the stomach and say: I am asking for the least precise diagnosis, I hate labels, the complexity of my insides doesn’t fit into the rigid divisions of intestines, gallbladder, lungs, and ovaries. Yes, I’ve met a few people like that in my life. But I’m not sure if they haven’t been killed by cancer treated with millet and palo santo by now. Or a very pissed off doctor.

While in the case of acute abdominal pain there is a procedure to determine what is causing it, things get a bit more complicated in the case of a failing head. Diagnosis is not made on the basis of ultrasound and morphology, but on the basis of the doctor’s observations and the patient’s claims, which can be trusted about as much as a teenager promising his parents away for the weekend that two friends will come and study together. Not that people deliberately lie to doctors – the vast majority have no interest in doing so, and those who do tend to lie very badly. Simply describing your own mental states is an extremely difficult matter, especially after the fact, when a person begins to doubt whether he is not a little hysterical. As a psychiatric patient, I have often and without irony wondered if all this depression wasn’t just happening in my head.

Complicating things further is the fact that the same symptoms can be associated with different diagnoses: ADHD and autism left undiagnosed early leave you depressed; deep enough depression can cause paranoia or delusions of guilt; extreme mood swings may indicate bipolar, but also borderline; most personality disorders increase the risk of depression or trauma, not to mention addiction problems, which can be elegantly called self-medicating; but it can also be drunkenness, junkiness and a general lack of a hound in life. Whatever you call it, it doesn’t help you understand your own emotions and feelings.

The diagnosis is therefore made and modified, among other things, on the basis of how the patient responds to medication. Let me tell you something you’ll want to forget as soon as possible: quite often – or at least a lot more often than you’d like – psychiatrists don’t know how a drug works. Despite years of research, scientists have failed to pin down the exact mechanism that causes a person to click the appropriate switch in the brain. Sounds like a conspiracy theory, but just read the flyer, it’s not secret information. Although in practice it is hidden best in the world. No normal person reads drug leaflets – even if they are treated psychiatrically.

Waiting at the psychiatrist’s door, I dreamed of a drawer. A cozy hiding place where I can finally feel at home. A club where only people like me are accepted, where everyone understands each other and no one is surprised at anything. If you feel like there’s always been something wrong with you, a diagnosis isn’t a problem, it’s a confirmation that you’re not crazy. You’re just mentally ill. It’s just that later you might find that maybe you started a new life with that diagnosis, but sorry, we got new facts and you have to start over, oops, it’s not working, it’s maybe still, oh, a little better, but maybe try going back a little bit past life and try again. Until you finally discover that diagnosis is not finding your place, but parking backwards on a busy street: a lot of stress, a lot of unnecessary movements, a few unparliamentary turns, but you have no choice. And eventually you’ll fit in somewhere. Though it’s unlikely that this place was made to measure.

Signals

“Or sooner if something happens” – my psychiatrist says goodbye to me, setting the date of the next visit. If this sentence sounds reassuring to you, congratulations: you are most likely not depressed.

One of the first things I learned after my diagnosis was to focus on my own mental states. Quite a useful skill. The problem is that it is not enough to feel them, you also need to be able to recognize and interpret them. And when you ask doctors for a manual, they look at you in surprise and say that you have it. My self-awareness work is eighty percent of the time the mental equivalent of buying a used car: I stare inside myself, shoving a flashlight in the dark, trying to find a potentially failing component before someone realizes I have no idea what I’m doing.

I was especially bad at first – people who feel normal don’t think about how they feel, just like they don’t wonder if their kidneys are filtering fluids fast enough, or if their hair grows faster or slower than usual. The more I thought about whether I was feeling a little weird, the weirder I was starting to feel; the more energy I used to monitor my usually unconscious mental life, the less was left for things like holding a conversation, choosing clothes that matched relatively well, or remembering a blown light bulb in the bathroom. After a few weeks of in-depth introspection, I probably looked a lot crazier than usual. And I still wasn’t sure. Once my meds kicked in, I acted like a drugged-up teenager, pestering my friends with “Can you see me?” Do I look better? Am I less sad? Do they think my condition is getting better? How would I judge it myself, since, firstly, I’m not objective, and secondly, I’m officially mentally ill.

Over time, my internal sensors calibrated, the alarm system stopped beeping at every bad day or every stressful situation. Which does not mean that I do not register vibrations.

I was going through my first major depressive episode. I do not recommend this solution. Not only because it doesn’t always work out – also because no one will tell you: “It’s done, it’s done”. Even when I felt better, for many months I was convinced that a wrong step would be enough and I would return to the start. Coming out of depression is great, but it also has a downside: only then do you see how bad you’ve been and you start to get scared. I didn’t have the time or energy for this before. Most of my resources were consumed by such exciting challenges as getting out of bed, looking for that one thing in the supermarket that I wanted to eat despite my lack of appetite, or painting my eyelashes combined with praying that I wouldn’t cry because I really have to go to work.

I was lucky – in my industry, the level of neurosis per square meter is high, and not only do I have the luxury of a full-time job, but I also found superiors who did not intend to fire me. Even when I told my boss I couldn’t work, but I’d rather not take time off because I’m afraid I’ll stop leaving the house. Not when I started making grammatical errors in the lyrics. Not even when asked if I could do anything, I said “no” and burst into tears. The malice of my depression is that I can’t talk to people, and at the same time only the company of people can keep me relatively upright. In practice, it came down to wearing a hood to work, then maneuvering through the corridors in such a way as not to bump into anyone I knew, much less end up in the same elevator with them. I smelled the upcoming small talk, disappeared behind the office dracaena like Rambo in the jungle.

And still, despite everything, I didn’t feel like there was anything wrong with my perspective. On the contrary, from my point of view, it was a healthy and rational reaction to the fact that life is a constant torment compounded by pointless work that I will have to do until I die, probably alone and far too late.

The mornings were the worst. In the evening, it’s hopeless, but at least you can get into the bath and watch TV for two hours, then close your eyes and disappear. Waking up is a horror because there is a whole day ahead of you; a pool filled with a greyish milky sheepskin in which you struggle to stay afloat. You can’t really say why, except to avoid bothering anyone. It’s enough that you have nothing to offer your loved ones, burdening them with taking care of you really would be overkill. You’ll get through this day, all you have to do is get out of bed.

How to get out of bed in ten steps

1. Open your eyes. Sorry, it won’t work without it.

2. Raise your upper body with a quick, firm movement. It’s best to do it all at once, like pulling a loose tooth.

3. Sitting on the bed, lower your feet to the floor. Rest your elbows on your knees. Rest your head on your hands. take a breath. Pause.

4. You’re cold, but don’t go back under the covers. Take a breath once more. Don’t worry about a sore back.

5. Place your hands on the bed and straighten your elbows. Get up.

6. You can lean against the wall to wait out the dizziness. breathe.

7. Wrap yourself in a sweater. Put the coffee on. If you drink enough, your head will stop hurting for a while.

8. While waiting for coffee, you can sit at the table and rest your head on your hand. Don’t put your head on the counter, because all the fun will start from the beginning. breathe.

9. After your first cup of coffee, it’s time to get dressed. As a reward, you will pour yourself a second cup.

10. Close your eyes, breathe. Don’t poke around in the void in your head. Open your eyes. It worked.

“How to Cry in Public” by Emilia Dłużewska will be released on February 22, 2023 by Znak Literanova

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