When I was 11 I started getting migraines. The very first time it happened I had no idea why my head felt like someone was stabbing me and my stomach felt like someone had punched me in the gut. I would end up in excruciating pain until eventually I would throw-up and finally fall asleep someplace dark and cold until the next day when I would feel a little bit better each hour until I was back to normal. This went on once a month for a while until, eventually, my migraines would come only sporadically a few times a year at best. By the time I was in my early twenties I had both the warning signs and remedy routine ready to go. My vision always went first, altering my depth perception just before my hands would start to go numb and 45 minutes before the light around me would feel so excruciating I would be instantly out of commission. If I was lucky I’d be somewhere I could draw the curtains and lay down quickly, but sometimes I wouldn’t be and I would have to figure out a way to get myself home safely with my eyes half way closed. Then, instead of throwing up, I would drink a liter of water, down 4 or 5 Advil, and when it turned legal, consume some sort of cannabis until I would literally pass out. It wasn’t always a fool proof plan but I was no longer confused by what was happening, I knew when things were about to get bad, and I also knew how to handle the unfortunate few days a year where I was all but useless through no fault of my own.
Before I was diagnosed with depression I never knew the signs of when I was about to go into an episode. I would go from perfectly fine to, “I’m not getting out of bed” without much lead time and then would proceed to sink into it without any idea how I was going to feel better. I couldn’t hedge it off like my migraines, there was no checklist of items I knew would temper the side effects of pure pain and, without medication, it could be months before I felt better. The severity only escalated from manageable, to completely unhinged, just from the emotional pain of it all.
After my fair share of hospitalizations I was finally put on a mix of medications that seemed to help with creating a solid baseline. For the first time the cloud of uncertainty of how long, and to what extent I would sink into a depressive episode was a little more predictable. Steadily, with consistency and a firm commitment to the emotional work that goes hand and hand with medication, I developed my own sense of when things were getting bad and how to cope when they did.
This is the part of the article where I would usually spend a paragraph going on about the benefits of “self-care” and how knowing what that means for you can make all the difference between mental competence and complete disaster, but instead I’ll just say that, like anything else it takes practice to know what you need and how to constructively make it from one day to the next. The harder thing still is knowing what you need to implement and when your self-care is actually just learned coping mechanism for functional depression.
Functional depression, like functional alcoholism is the ability to go through the motions so well that someone would have to be really paying attention in order to see that you’re not okay. The auto pilot that runs most of daily lives can hide the reality of distress even from those who are intimately involved in our lives. For some, the ruse of “everything is fine” is a performative way to distract those very same people from stepping in and shattering the illusion of functionality, but for others it is the only way they know to keep from feeling the pain of despair and unhappiness so deeply it stops them in their tracks. For those who are like me this “functionality” can look like a lot of different things and comes with its own red flags for knowing that things are not going as well as we’d like to believe.
After 11 years of living with depression I’m still learning the signs of when my mental health is a bit anemic; made even harder still by the pure amount of numbing we’ve all been doing for months as we struggle to stay afloat while the world feels like it’s burning all around us. We’re a nation in a functional depression, doom scrolling and meme-ing our way through the reality of unrelenting tragedy and indefinite pain. We know that if we even admitted to ourselves for a moment that everything is not okay many of us would fall so hard into hopelessness that it just makes the most sense to keep moving, keep pushing, try to let it out a little at a time so as not to sideline us from all the other bullshit that still somehow has to be accomplished in our day to day lives (not to mention distract us from the action needed to change the direction of our country so we’re not all fucked up permanently).
Still, over the past few weeks the signs that I’m slipping closer and closer to my baseline are interwoven with attempts at self-regulation in order to remain just above functional. The moments when I seem to be holding on too tightly to my need for control, desire for connection, and survival mode of proactivity that are more visible and less comforting as I realize my “coping” has become borderline obsessive. It’s like I’m holding a gun to my own head threatening to shoot and somewhere in my chemically balanced brain a voice is saying, “you don’t need to do this Chelsea, put down the weapon and walk slowly back towards sanity.” The positive self-care works marginally, but it’s the default coping mechanism that quickly turn towards unhealthy fixation that make me feel like I’m in the Bad Place of my own making, slowly torturing myself into full meltdown mode. That’s when I know I can’t handle the “functioning” part anymore, that’s when I know I need to unfurl my death grip from around the things I use in place of disassociating and ask for the one thing I never want to – help.
I realize of course that not everyone has a support system or other safety net to fall back on when things get rough; and, in this time of unparalleled disconnection, we find ourselves more isolated from those supports even if we are lucky enough to have them. We are in the middle of the migraine, defenseless and vulnerable, with no way out but through the inevitable pain that has rendered us here. That fact is uncomfortable and makes the situation worse for so many, including myself, but it is part of the process. Confronting the fact that we’re not okay may seem trivial, but it’s not. Admitting that we’re in pain, that we’re in the darkness so deep we don’t know when we’ll be okay again is the most important thing any of us could do right now, and if that makes you feel alone, I assure you, you are not. I’m currently physically and mentally at a wall, feeling cornered by my own mental instability and I’m sure how I’ll get out of it. I’ve held it together throughout this – this being the external demise of democracy, civil unrest, failing systems, mass death, and climate change, all while dealing with a host of personal things that seem to be going on in the foreground, and I am tapped out. We all are.
So today, if you see all these shoutouts for #mentalhealthawarenessday and you’re rolling your eyes because you know if you admit you’re living in your own bout of functional depression you might not get off the couch know that YOU ARE NOT ALONE, and it is okay to not at all be okay because trust me, I’m not okay either.
God, I Hate My 20's 