Day Six

Today is my sixth day on new medicine. I feel foggy and not like myself, although I'm not sure I remember what it means to feel like myself to know that I don't feel like myself, if that makes any sense at all. Sometimes it feels hard to breathe. I have a cough and I think I might be forgetting things, but maybe that's all in my head. I bought Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression and so far it's amazing. He puts words to experiences I have never known how to describe, while simultaneously communicating that the magnitude of the pain experienced by a depressive is, in fact, far too enormous to be fully characterized with language. He writes, "Depression? It's like trying to come up with clinical parameters for hunger, which affects us all several times a day, but which in its extreme version is a tragedy that kills its victims." He introduces the categorical view of depression, which states that depression is not on the "continuum with sadness," but is unquestionably an entirely different creature. This line seems to be blurred in some social settings. I often hear people say they are depressed when they mean they're sad or down or upset or just having a weird day. The term "depressed" is trivialized in the same way that "bipolar" or "schizo" or "psycho" are used to characterize people's behaviors that others think resemble these diseases. They don't mean any harm, but nonetheless it does further damage to the already negative public perception of these very real illnesses. It's exhausting and lonely to have an illness so stigmatized.