Dooce has a post up today that for me was timely:
Oh, hey. Hi there! Remember last week when I wrote on my Internet Website Blog Thing about suicidal ideations? Yeah. Those were fun times. No? Not really? What, did my mom call you? MOMS. We really know how to ruin a good party.
I had someone write to tell me to stop whining, and I'm not going to complain about that criticism. Because I get it. I understand it…
… I own two cars, a large home, and a business in a free market economy. My family enjoys excellent access to healthcare. My daughter goes to school. I get paid to write about my feelings on the Internet. Am I seriously going to whine about aimlessness?
Yes, I am…
And why shouldn't she?
I do not suffer from chronic or recurring depression, but I woke up this morning feeling remarkably blue for no apparent reason at all. Actually it started last night, on our way home from a fun family activity. No reason that I could see at all to be sad.
You know, I don't have a clotting disorder, but occasionally I find a bruise on my knee or arm, from some trauma I don't remember. I don't have chronic joint pain either, but sometimes I wake up with a stiff neck for no good reason. So I figure it has got to be possible to wake up with something — just off — in my mental health, something that will pass and leave me normal in a day or so, if a little frazzled from trying to catch up from a day in a mild fog.
I am practiced at compartmentalizing. I stand a little aside from myself and examine the heavy feeling in the chest and the sense of being a bit out of control, and run down a checklist of sorts. I haven't had a disagreement with my husband. The house isn't bringing me down with any particular messiness vibe. The children are in ordinary temperaments. I didn't generate the dark mood by reading a bunch of political blogs before I could finish my coffee. I *have* coffee. I have not recently been forced to confront any feelings of inadequacy. All is, objectively, well. Thus reassured, I am mostly able to get on with my day, without letting the sad feeling *worry* me. The way I could get on with a stiff neck, once (by looking for other symptoms and finding none) I satisfy myself it isn't the onset of meningitis or a heart attack. I am confident that, like a run-of-the-mill stiff neck, the blue feeling will pass and leave me healthy again soon.
But I still have to *endure* it until it has run its course.
I give myself a little extra leeway on days like this. I take it for granted that I will not be able to summon the energy for a full day of school. I do something different. Today instead of spelling and music, we attempted to make peanut brittle all morning, an excuse for me to talk about boiling point elevation. The peanut brittle failed miserably: crystals nucleated and grew before my eyes after forty minutes of watching a hot sugar syrup bubble away. "Quick, throw the peanuts in before it all hardens!" exhorted my eleven-year-old, so I did, and we wound up with stuff that looked like freezer-burned corn niblets. It tasted pretty good though, so maybe I will use it for an ice cream topping. I can't really be sure, but it is tempting to diagnose the problem. Maybe if I had oiled the pan better, or scrubbed it harder, the syrup wouldn't have crystallized.
Is there a point to these recriminations? I learned what I wanted to learn: it is not feasible for the kids and I to make pounds of peanut brittle for Christmas presents this year.
The same with my mental state. Do I feel like this today because I ate too much junk food yesterday? Does it have something to do with that migraine in the early afternoon? Hard to say. But again, it doesn't matter much.
This much is true: even if everything is fine, no amount of reminding myself that it is fine will make the sad feeling go away any faster. It is still there, and it takes time to fade, just as bruises and stiff muscles do. It just is. Most likely I will feel better tomorrow, but that does not change the feeling of today.
Perhaps the compartmentalizing leads to that belief. I really think of this occasional sadness as a brief disruption of brain chemistry, kind of like my migraines. It isn't my fault, and the feelings don't necessarily reflect the reality outside myself, but they are part of the reality inside me. Thus it is best to deal with them as a piece of reality.
Heather of Dooce, writing about those who would accuse her of "whining" when she writes candidly about depression:
…and that's where I invite anyone who agrees with the valid criticism above to sit here with me and let me have it. I will listen to you curse me. I'll nod and offer you a tissue when things really heat up. I'll let you talk about your friend who died or the job you lost or the meals you've had to skip, and then I'll fix you dinner and invite you to stay the night.
Like I said, even if you know everything is fine, even if it is utterly obvious that your feelings are irrational…. The rational thing to do is to accept that irrational feelings exist and that they cannot be rationalized away.
Heather:
Sometimes the only way to quantify our own suffering is to compare it to what we think is the happiness of others. It's human. As human as reflexively wincing when hearing the chorus of a song you once played over and over in your bedroom because of two blue eyes.
So I offer up my humanness if, instead of a place to stay for the night, you need to hear that even with everything in its right place it's okay if you still don't know why it doesn't feel that way.
Note, in that last paragraph, the usage of the term "to offer up." She means it differently from the Catholic jargon… but maybe, on second thought, not so differently.
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