I've been saying for a while I wanted a real blog, where I wrote real articles about my life. So here I am, and this is the plan. This is the space where I am going to get real with myself and the Universe once a week and talk honestly about my job (psychologist), my other job (raising three kids), my hobbies (crochet and cooking), my religion (I'm a Unitarian Universalist), and my depressive disorder (it's a chronic pain in my ass and a never ending source of learning and insight).
Today's topic is why I like my life bittersweet. Two reasons really. One, major depression means I don't really get to have it any other way. Two, because without those bitter moments we can't appreciate the sweet ones. They are inseparable really, each defined in some way as the absence of the other.
So, what's with the depression, and why am I talking about it? Because it's time to get real with myself and maybe one or two people who stumble on this blog about what depression is, and how I cope with it. It will be a reoccurring theme.
Why does MDD (Major Depressive Disorder) mean that I can't have my life as anything other than bittersweet? Because so often having MDD means having fog colored glasses. It means feeling tired, cranky, achy, and pissy most of the time. It means struggling not to lose my temper. It means fighting to have energy. It means most often I'll see the negative things first. And it means the internal critic inside of my head is something of a sadistic drill sergeant telling me everything I am doing wrong. All. The. Damn. Time. She's a big beefy MoFo and hard to shut up. At another point we'll look at the DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria for depression and what they mean. For right now, we'll leave this here.
I've also come to realize that somewhere in all this, I've come to appreciate the melancholy, the bittersweet, the chiaroscuro in life. Sweet and bitter, light and shadow, sorrow and joy are each defined someway, as the absence of the other, and thus they are inextricably twined together. If there were no bitterness how would we know sweetness? Without sorrow, how could we really appreciate joy?
The image for me that comes to mind is laying with my son at night, as he goes to sleep. Right now, he's just 22 months, and still gets cuddled to sleep in his bed. As we there lay, and he's drifting off, there are a few precious moments of quiet cuddling, where he'd not fussing, and I'm not fussing, and we're curled together in pleasant symbiosis. At those moments, this quiet sense of joy diffuses through me, and for a short time, a precious time, all the frustrations of the day are paid for. Holding my son, while he's snuggled so trustingly into my side, holding onto me like I'm some giant teddy bear, it's all worth it.
