Sunday 

Disturbing dreams last night; so much so that when I remember bits of them, my stomach tightens and I will myself to think of something else.  I've been feeling invisible lately, hovering around the edges of my life, and today isn't helping.  I'm home alone, it's stopped raining and the sun is out, I should be at least cheerful about that, no?  But I'm lost in grey mists, looking through drifting veils, experiencing the world through a haze.  

It's a frightening feeling when depression creeps up on me like this, not situational, not really caused by anything at all.  There's no real reason for it, and yet there it is.  I'm exhausted, even good food is bland and eating is a chore...or else something I do too much of, blindly and mechanically.  I drink too much, smoke too many cigarettes, even as I tell myself that I shouldn't be doing so.  

It doesn't make me feel any better.  Nothing gives me the slightest bit of pleasure right now - not books or music or movies, not friends or family or food or drink or sex.  I'm reminded (and no, I'm not at this point) of when suicide stopped being an abstract, a payback, a raincheck, a last resort - and started being something that I didn't want to do, but felt like I had to do.  

I got very angry with a very dear friend the other night.  (Silently, but probably glaring daggers at him as a small group of us had this conversation.)  He was dismissive and contemptuous of people who are medicated for mental health problems; he himself had seen therapists when he was younger for what he termed "behavioral issues," and he was fine.  He didn't understand why anyone would need medication.  Yes, I'm simplifying a bit - but that was the gist of it.  I'm furious thinking about it even now, sick that I thought I could confide in him, feeling betrayed by his opinions.  Especially when, for me, medication has been a last resort, something I've turned to when nothing else works.  

I didn't know how to explain this to him at the time: when depression is a result of fucked-up brain chemistry, sometimes a shift is necessary - and if that shift can be accomplished by medication or therapy or a combination of the two, all the better.  I know that everyone gets depressed sometimes, and most people flirt with the idea of suicide at least once.  But when the depression returns again and again, clouding your mind, your personality, your life - and worse, when it seems to happen for no reason at all - it's difficult to make anyone who's never experienced this understand.

I have fought the idea that something was "wrong" with me since I was twelve, believing it to be a terrible stigma.  I've since stopped thinking that way (but every once in a while I do, all over again, usually as a result of a conversation like the one I mentioned.)  I've harmed myself and come very close to killing myself, and sometimes medication was the only thing that would change that course of action.  And I'm grateful for that.  But I loathe being dismissed as an hysteric or a hypochondriac because my friend has never experienced clinical depression.  

Are people overmedicated, or possbily medicated when they don't need to be?  Of course.   But I've been struggling with clincal depression for nearly twenty years now, and I've learned not to question what works for anyone.  Being on antidepressants is (sort of) working for me right now; at the very least, I'm still mostly functioning and able to get up in the morning.  The specter of suicide isn't hovering at the edge of my consciousness day and night.  And for now, I'll take what I can get on that score.