The other night I had a horrible night. I don't even know why. I think I was overwhelmed with work, not understanding the technology I needed to understand in order to set up for my next class. The house was a wreck. Everyone was needing everything from me. I was in a bad place. I just went to my room with a couple of beers, cried, and then binge watched all of The Jinx*, I was just so SAD. I am often in a mixed state which, to me, means I'm angry and irritable and short-tempered and generally unhappy. But lately I've been very, very sad. I just felt horrible. At one point I left my room to get something and saw that my entire family was watching Jeopardy (my 10, 8, and 6-year olds - WHAT? But whatever). It made me a million times more sad. I was missing it. It was 50 feet away and I was missing it. I wasn't even busy doing something that needed to be done. But I couldn't bring myself to be out there with them. I just couldn't, well... I just couldn't live.
The next night, I was supposed to get together with the girls who are arguably my closest friends. We have been friends since elementary school. We've been through it all together. But I feel a bit of a void has developed between us over the years for several reasons. First, I've gotten worse and worse, emotionally, and that's what happens because people don't know how to respond to me when I'm obviously out of sorts and they don't know that they even need to respond to me at all when I'm in my good actress frame of mine. Also, children. Children wreak havoc on friendships. We have kids either at different schools or in different grades or with different friends or activities and we have less time to spend with anyone outside of the new kid-centric groups. In the beginning, there was the need to make a very quick adjustment to each other's parenting styles. Who knew that a particular friend was down with using dessert as a bribe for eating dinner (I am not)? Who knew that a particular friend would have easy kids and could be laid back about everything and they would take issue with the fact that I was such a horrible mom because I couldn't handle my soon-to-be diagnosed as mentally ill child. But finally, I've made a couple of very huge mistakes in recent years of which I am unbelievably ashamed. Most of my friends don't know. Some know. I think one who knows has distanced herself because of it. But the bottom line of that is that I feel like I carry some huge dark secrets that I can't share. I know that I'd lose some friends over it and I'd easily say good riddance to those friends. But I'm afraid of the grapevine and I don't want my kids' peers parents to know. I dread the day that I have to talk to my kids about it. So I keep quiet and I feel like there's an elephant in the room. My psychiatrist and psychologist insist that I made these mistakes while I was acutely manic, undiagnosed and untreated (undertreated for the 2nd extremely less serious episode). It's easier for me to think I'm an asshole.**
Anyway, back to going out with friends... I barely felt up to it but I dragged myself there. In the end, I had an okay time. I'm glad I went though I don't know that I would've regretted not going. But the relevant part is this: One of my friends wrote a facebook post earlier that day about how grateful she was for her family and her life and how she was reassessing what mattered and what didn't and was trying to focus on what did. It is not like her to even post on facebook at all so the girls asked about it. She said that the night before, she felt like she was in a huge "pit of despair."
She said she felt like her children were the spawn of the devil, that her husband ignores her, that her house is a wreck, that nothing is going right, that she can't even run away because she has no where to go. She said her sister called and tried to cheer her up to no avail. Eventually she went to sleep and when she woke up...
SHE WAS HAPPY!!
She said that she realized she had a great life and that she just needed to pull her head out of her ass and realize she had a fucking awesome life.
The end.
I'll say it again: Wait...What? It sounds like she and I may have had relatively similar evenings the night before but we have clearly had very different days following that. I cannot remember a time in my life when I thought, "I realized I have a great life and I shouldn't be so upset." I would give ANYTHING for that epiphany. If I thought it would stick, I might give LITERALLY ANYTHING for that epiphany. It must be nice to just do a little depression drive-by and not hunker down, plant roots, and build a big ol' brick fortress solidly in the center of Miseryville.
It gave me a bit of insight into the people who say that happiness is a choice or that depressed people could just stop focusing on the negative and all would be good. My stock response to that is 1) how fortunate you to not know how wrong you are and 2) happiness not a choice. It is a neurobiochemical state of the brain.
Sometimes I try to imagine what life would be like if I were happy or if I hadn't fucked my life up with bad decisions that I've made while not feeling good. I can hardly imagine it. I look at childhood photos and I think, "That girl has no idea what shit is coming her way and I don't know how I'd prepare her for it even if there were such a thing as time travel." I'm sure many people feel like their lives didn't turn out as good as they'd hoped. But I really feel like mine is a bit of a disaster. Truly.
I promise to not be such a downer next time. I have a lot to say about Steven Avery (and his attorneys), Brendan Dassey, and, mostly about the legal system. I have a lot to say about Michael Peterson & that "investigation." I have a few things to say about Robert Durst as well. Oh, and Adnan Syed. At least my life isn't that type of trainwreck but the thing about depression, especially for a depressed person who has worked in the criminal "justice" system, I have no delusions about my security from getting pulled into such a thing. They call it "depressed realism."
* Robert Durst is one creepy fuck. Cah-reepy. I was about to wax poetic on that but I think I'll write a separate entry about this whole genre. More later.
** I don't believe I've discussed my theory of the differential diagnosis of "asshole" yet. I'll get there.
