sadness and sensibility
Sadness has come back and it’s stayed for a while. Probably since April - right about when I moved into my new place. There is a sense of helplessness and dread that I feel most days on my drive into work. I’ve been crying everyday - I’m sitting under a velvety blanket of sadness and disconnection.
I have felt very disconnected. Like I’m not present in my own life. I’m going through the motions of being a person, but I don’t feel like I’m myself. I’ll blink and the day is over. I’ll walk into a room and forget why I was there in the first place. Responding to text messages takes an immense amount of energy. Being in conversation requires all of my focus.
I have been out of town the past few weekends, and I’ve told myself that that is the reason I have not posted in nearly three weeks. If I’m being honest, I have felt very little urge to write. Sometimes writing feels cumbersome, clunky. Especially when I’m walking through my life like a zombie, the notion of putting words to how I’m feeling begins to look like a fruitless task.
Thankfully, I went back to therapy yesterday. It had been about three weeks. I was telling my therapist about how I was feeling and she suggested I do a depression PHQ - patient health questionnaire - to quantify my symptoms and compare it to where I was when I started with her in February. On the scale, my depression “points” went from 8 to 13.5. If I was being completely honest on the form, my number probably would have been a 16.
It is incredibly helpful for me to see a number, a scale on paper. Otherwise, I will not zoom out enough to evaluate if these symptoms are indicative of a larger problem - and I will certainly not validate these experiences of mine unless a chart tells me they are certifiable.
We talked more about my most prominent symptom: a pervasive sense of helplessness. It is currently present at work, both the material of my work day, but also the lack of freedom I feel from having a job that takes up so much of my time. As I sat with this helplessness, I began to trace it back to my earliest memory.
My father is being arrested for a domestic. I’m three or four standing in our entry way. The red and blue lights are flashing through our wooden slatted blinds and creating patterns on our porch beams. There are two officers with my dad by the door and my mom is by the dining room table. And I am there, but no one knows. Or no one is paying attention to me. I see the whole scene unfold. I had followed my mom out of the bedroom as they were fighting, watched her dial 911 on our huge house phone. And I watch him walk out the door with the two police. I feel invisible throughout it all. I feel like I’m outside of my body. I feel like I am on a ride that I want to get off, but I can’t.
I have been through enough trauma recovery to know that most lasting, low moods can be connected back to an early experience I’ve had. Nonetheless, it still remains helpful to know that there are dots to be connected. There is a sensibility to this sadness.
I am playing with the idea of going on medication. I have done thought about this for years - because what if an easier day-to-day is possible for me through such a simple solution? But why does it feel like such a defeat? Why does it feel like it’s my fault?