Can you ever run out of emotion? In trying to explain Depression the other day I said imagine that one day you found you’d run out of fun and pleasure. You woke up and those emotions had disappeared – your tank was empty and the car wouldn’t start. It just sputtered and spluttered until you finally gave up on it as a lost cause and kicked the tyres till you’d run out of energy too.
I said, somewhat jokingly -
Depression takes away the adjectives in life. It’s a constant state of subtraction because nothing is anything anymore, and there can’t be words for that. Can there?
We have technical terms for the states of being one experiences in clinical depression but we don’t have many real words, not everyday words. Even the word Depression itself is used as this half-way token, a marker that you exist somewhere between the medical world and all the rest.
But seriously, could you run out of joy? Enquiring minds want to know. Alright, a few people from the department of stupid questions, too. Just because I can, or near enough, doesn’t mean that’s the state of play for everybody.
Maybe some people are born with the totally unlimited, spend all you like kind of emotions. Sure, energy might run out, focus might run out but the emotion itself? Where does that go in Depression?
When I’m Depressed it’s not just that I don’t have access to my feelings anymore but that my mental landscape is reduced to a bleak wilderness populated only by small pockets of shrubbery and strange beasts of unknown origin. There is plenty of room for emotion but if it comes then the desert floor soaks it up and I can’t see or feel or know it more than briefly.
‘Rain down, rain down.
Come on, rain down on me.
From a great height,
From a great height.”
Depression becomes your constant because when you run out of emotion there’s no petrol station down the road to get a top up. I can’t go to my local pharmacist and demand my emotions back. I can ask for more pills but that won’t necessarily populate my mind and soul.
When I’m Depressed I’m a cast party without the cast. My list of characters is very short – there’s Negative and No One. Occasionally they invite Paranoid along for the ride because he’s good value so long as he stays in the back.
OK, so sometimes Happy shows up for a while but it’s a brief stay, as if to the bedside of a sick patient, timing her visit so as not to make it anymore uncomfortable for anyone. Happiness is a girl, to me. A delirious girl who sometimes takes my hand and smiles.
But just as my emotions can disappear, equally they can reappear. It’s a magic trick I do sometimes. I don’t just wake up happy one day. There’s no just about it.
It happens slowly at first, in little pockets of almost joy and nearly satisfaction, here and there. A dash of clarity in my days until I am, suddenly, human again. Not an android anymore but full of all the things I knew I was missing but had lost the words for. So that I can see with all my senses, and experience things vital and present once again.
But you always live with the fear that what was given might be taken because what you never know is why emotion took a vacation. You hear it’s all about the serotonin, or it’s trauma or the head injury you had when you were 12 but none of those answers satisfy because they don’t show you where the feelings went…
‘But I haven’t seen Barbados so I must get out of this.’
Another great post.
I feel so detached from the world around me…That’s the best way I can describe it. I feel like there is a piece of thick glass between me and everything else. I might be able to observe other things going on, but I cannot access the energy, emotion, or skills it takes to participate. I cannot break that pane of glass. I get overwhelmed by this and then emotions do come to me – but they’re all bad ones: sadness, guilt, anxiety, frustration. Then I almost have to erect more glass in order to be able to cope…It’s a terrible cycle.
I guess, I think of depression as a suppression or defense against feeling rage, pain, terror, etc. However depression doesn’t differentiate it from the other emotions, so it suppresses or defends against feeling anything. They are still their just harder to or beyond our access. Depression has its own set of feelings especially hopelessness and pain, but that actually defends against what is the core emotions that we have shoved underground. But knowing this doesn’t make depression feel any better, just gives it a different perspective. I am hopeful that live will return…soon, I hope!!
Sometimes when I’ve just had too much, I go numb and detached. I think it’s just a state of not being able to handle any more, at least for me.
When the late Ambrose Bierce, the famed curmudgeon and one of my favorite authors, lost his 16 year old son in a gunfight, he said “nothing matters.” It wasn’t because he didn’t care about his son, it was because he was too overwhelmed to be able to feel anything at all.
It’s a natural thing, I think. And it sucks.
I think it’s an excellent analogy.
It’s negative or nothing.
There’s no opposite, no inbetween available.
hm. i’m going to try this again before i retype the comment that i just had.
okay now.
so.
this is a wonderful post! beautiful!
can i try an idea on you?
you describe the landscape of depression as being full of shrubbery and strange beasts and dryness. is it possible that THAT is the language of depression? is it possible that there ARE words and emotions, we just can’t identify them (yet?), and/or don’t like them so we refuse to give them names?
I really think you do an excellent job of explaining what depression is all about.
To me it feels like flatness. Deflation. Like not only all the emotion, but all the air, ran out and I’m just suffocating. I always did relate to Sylvia Plath’s description of being trapped inside the bell jar, stopped and dead.
More recently I’ve been questioning that. I think I didn’t consider flatness a feeling. But maybe it is. It is not a nice feeling or one I like to have but if I know it’s flatness then something must be happening that I can call a feeling. Now, what one does with that knowledge I do not know, but at least it seems possible that I am somewhat, minimally alive.
The relative value of such a life is a philosophical question that any more I don’t let myself even think about when I’m depressed. I do whatever it takes to not let that chain get started because it leads to nowhere nice. In working with people who suffer from so much sadness I see that many of us suffer most from the feeling that our life has no meaning and no purpose. That everything that happens is for naught and we are just a waste of space. And yet these are some of the funniest and most truly creative people I have met in my life.
it’s easy to see it in others–hard to see it in yourself, but it’s definitely there in you
wily
Great analogies. I remember going through a haunted house at Halloween and the floor went from wood to foam stuff and you sort of couldn’t move. That is depression to me.
Kate Millet wrote, “In a depression, the world disappears. There is no language. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?”
Wow, it’s great to come home to find such powerful responses from all of you. Thank you all! I could go on in reply to each of you – you raise some really interesting ideas but I will try not to make this thread impossibly long…
@Coyote – Thanks! Yes, I very much know what you mean about that sense of detachment. A keen observation, and I definitely think Depression has cyclical elements to it. One episode tends to lead more easily to another, and so on. Not always but for a lot of people.
@CC – I hope so too!! =) It is suppression but perhaps finding it, expressing it somehow, or at least beginning can help. Sometimes it’s just driven too far underground though, by nature and nurture.
@Cheesemeister – Yes, it is a natural thing. A protective mechanism, in some ways as Coyote and CC were talking about. We go into a shell, retreat from whatever causes us most pain – sometimes, with Depression, it’s everything. It’s all too much, and we are more easily overloaded. More sensitive to the vicissitudes of life by predisposition or life events. That sensitivity can also be our salvation, though, I think.
@Mariah. Thanks! Yes, it’s very black and white – a world divided.
@isabella – Thank you! Yes, I think that arid land is perhaps not as stark as it seems. There’s a theme here, in most of these comments, that Depression drives things underground. Perhaps that’s where those words are, if we could but dig deep enough or see passed the outward nature of things and into the heart of darkness, so to speak.
@Dina – Thanks much!
@Wily – I’m glad you think it’s there in me. I certainly see it in you. No doubt. You’re right about the link with creativity – it is something I’ve noticed too. Interesting.
@Damien – I like that image, particularly. I love haunted houses, though. Always have.
@Susan – Fantastic quote! That has got me really thinking. Thank you for that =)
Nothing is permanent i suppose that include emotions and depression. You have a keen sense of observation.
I can realte deeply to your post…Thanks for sharing.
@Novice101 – Thanks!
@Terri – I’m happy to hear that. Cheers!