On Depression and Redirected Anger

I've been known to use the phrase "getting over" when I refer to my depression, and how it's now in my past. But it's kind of a misnomer. To be over something means that it's in the past, it's done with, and that's that. Depression doesn't really work like that, though.

It's more like a wild animal that I've mostly tamed. Occasionally it bares its fangs, and I have to remind it what happened last time, and it backs away. Most of that is automatic now, requiring little in the way of focus or effort, which is what leads me to use the word "over" to describe it.

Then there are the times - and they are few and far between these days, thankfully - that it sneaks up behind me and body-checks me off a cliff.

I can feel it coming. It doesn't sneak in unnoticed. I can smell it.

Sometimes that weird feeling doesn't actually amount to much. I'll eat a meal, see a friend, go for a drive, distract myself...and it fades away. For that reason, I don't always pay it a lot of attention. I just focus on changing my surroundings and that's usually sufficient to head off disaster.

I tend to get the sneaking weirdness on chemo days, which isn't all that weird; the whole situation is super stressful, and Mom is really good at pushing my buttons, as moms are. There's a limit to just how much of her I can deal with at a time. Small doses, as they say. I hold it together until I get in the car, and then I take a deep breath and listen to some loud music and go back to everyday life.

Tonight I just had some extra bad energy, I guess. It was chemo day, and I started to list a whole bunch of things that were maybe a little bit sub-par about the day, and then realized it was all irrelevant. I got the sneaking weirdness, I left before dinner, and I jumped off the fucking cliff.

The drive home was a battle with myself. Interestingly, the internal battle no longer seems to affect my driving; there was a time when all my aggression came out through the gas pedal, but not anymore. I drove like a sane human being while the inside of my mind melted into a puddle of anger and loathing.

I reached out to a couple of friends to make evening plans, hoping someone had the time to save me from myself, but no one responded. Left to my own devices, I tried to plan some structure into the looming void of the evening.

I talked myself out of cutting. It's been nearly six years. I can't ruin a streak that long.

I talked myself out of driving to another state to set my ex's truck on fire with a gallon of gasoline. Doing things like that in a bad state of mind leads to getting caught.

I have several friends who would demand that I call them if they knew I was in this state right now. My friends are good like that. But I won't do it. This is the only place I'll reach out, and only because I know no one will hear the call until the crisis is over. Tomorrow I can shrug it off as a "bad night." (What a stupid, generic, meaningless phrase that is.)

Dinner is in the oven, I paid the rent on my way home, and I'm holed up with sweat pants and my second margarita. Is this what getting "over" depression means? That I just get more responsible about what I do when my brain is melting?

There were so many things that I wanted to say, and now most of them seem to be gone. When I'm driving and pondering something I'll have strings of little revelations that are really enlightening, and then I don't write them down (because I'm fucking driving) and then they disappear.

There is one that stuck with me.

I'm super angry at Kevin. I don't waste much energy on it, because there are better uses for my time and my thoughts, and dwelling on anger only makes it worse. But when the occasion comes up that I think about it, I actually harbor a lot of rage toward him.

I was mucking around in the anger a bit tonight, and started thinking, was it really him that I should be angry at, or myself? He did a lot of awful things to me, but I let him do those things. And then I wondered, if it's my fault, why would I be angry at him? I directed the anger at myself for a moment and found the answer: accepting all of that coming my own way is destructive. Directing it toward him means that I can learn the lesson and not have to hate myself.

Pattern recognition spotted a parallel. All those years I spent being angry at Aiden, only to realize I'd never hated him at all...same thing. As long as I viewed our relationship as a mistake that only a horrible person could make, I directed that anger away from myself to avoid complete self-destruction.

I was able to re-accept the blame for what I'd always known that I did wrong after I no longer cared about Kevin, because then I could see the bigger reasons for why I'd cheated, and they went beyond just me being an unfaithful slut.