Nonexistent

Having anxiety and depression is like being scared and tired at the same time. It's the fear of failure, but no urge to be productive. It's wanting friends but hating to socialize. It's wanting to be alone, but not wanting to be lonely.  

It's feeling everything at once, then feeling paralyzingly numb.

                                        -- Found on Facebook under "Nonexistent"

I ran across this paragraph on Facebook the other day, and I saved it because it resonated with me.

Actually, it rang about 10,000 bells, and I had to stop and admit to myself that this is it. Even though I tell myself all the time that I'm not anxious and I am not depressed, I am.

It's painful to admit but I have always felt this way. Maybe when I was born I did not, but I do not ever remember a time when I was not depressed. Not just sad, but depressed. Not just scared, but hopeless, for the most part.

And always anxious. Always insecure. Always sure that I am the alien who landed on the wrong planet, but I don't know where home is, or how to get back there.

What I feel daily feels like walking through molasses every single minute of every hour of the day. One foot up, plop it back down into the molasses. A big deep hole filled with molasses, one that I can never swim out of, because I can't see a top, or feel a bottom, or see a shoreline.

There is a story that comes to me occasionally about a donkey that fell into a deep hole. The farmer couldn't figure out how to pull the donkey out, so he decided just to bury the donkey alive. The donkey, seeing the dirt fall, climbed atop each pile of dirt as it fell until it hopped out of the hole.

If only it were that easy. If only the hole full of molasses had an end, a beginning, a middle, instead of just being always there.

If only somebody could tell me where to find the dirt that would take away the molasses and leave me on solid ground. But there are no answers. I've had 100s of hours of therapy and read 100s of books, and there are no answers. Not for me, anyway.

People don't see it, I guess. Some do if they're paying close attention. But I've always felt like the person who didn't belong, the unwanted one, the unwelcomed one, the needy, obsolete, imperfect one. The one who couldn't do it right no matter how hard the trying. Always wrong, never correct, never good enough, never perfect enough.

I suspect I know where that comes from. I imagine you know where it comes from, too, because I don't think we're born feeling imperfect, unless maybe you weren't wanted to begin with, and those feelings seeped on into your DNA as you were a fetus being formed in the womb. 

Some days I consider it a win if I get up, dress, do the laundry, the dishes, and make the bed. This, I know, is more than many people with depression can manage. I function, so what am I complaining about? I have always functioned. I have never let this emotional angst take me completely, but it's been a long and tiring fight. A constant struggle to stay above the molasses.

There are days when I feel l'appel du vide - the call of the void - so strongly that it's a wonder I don't get in the car and drive it off a bridge somewhere. But I do not do that. 

Before I had my gallbladder removed and chronic pain in my abdomen took my life away from me, I fought it better. I could fill my days easier, because I didn't also have to account for the pain. I liked deadlines and I needed - and still need - external pushes, like expectations from someone else - to get things accomplished.

The pain brought a different kind of time suck as I maneuvered through the health care system, trusted that eventually physical therapy would fix me (after 10 years I know that's not happening), and hoped up until I was about 55 that my 50s would be better than the rest of my life. That was what I'd been counting on - a good decade. That was all I wanted, was one good decade out of a lifetime.

But my 50s sucked. And now I'm 60, and I don't see how to change things, to make things different, to bring myself out of the hole and send the molasses down the sink drain so that my 60s don't suck. Because right now, they don't look any different and the horizon hasn't changed.

After 60 years of fighting it, I have to wonder if it's simply time to accept that this is how I am, this is my personality trait, this is my failure. I'm simply not capable of anything more. I always thought I was made of sterner stuff, stronger stuff, but I guess not. 

Or maybe I am, in fact, incredibly strong, and the fact that I've survived these 60 years is really a testament to strength, to resiliency, to some inner something that keeps a person still standing up even as the molasses goes over her head.