Time Doesn’t Necessarily Heal all Wounds

This is written with some friends in mind who I hope will drop by because I want them to know me better. But it’s really for anyone who happens upon it who is coping with depression. It’s for me; it’s for you; it’s for us—a reminder that we aren’t alone.

I've coped with clinical depression for 15 years, now. My Navy psychiatrist in Charleston said if there was an ICU for affective disorders, I'd have been in it. It’s a disease without abnormal lab values, no spots on an x-ray, no abnormal EKG, no wound oozing pus and blood, nothing to cut out, suture up, or palpate. You hurt, but you can’t tell them where it hurts, because it hurts in a place that no medical instrument can reach. And it doesn’t always heal from the bottom up, as wounds should; sometimes, it doesn’t heal. I’m lucky; mine did heal, not as wounds should but enough that I’m here and can recount the experience.

It's been several years since I've had a severe acute depressive episode, but that wasn't always the case. It started in Puerto Rico, and I'll not go into causation, but there were days when I quite literally could not get out of bed; it wasn't that I didn't want to; I couldn't, and when I did, I just sat in my office and looked out at the Caribbean without deriving any joy from it. Death would have been welcomed relief from a pain that had no physical manifestation but was palpable to me and a constant companion. I don't have an analogy that can adequately describe the feeling. Looking back, I guess I didn't commit suicide, even though I contemplated it, because in the back of mind, somewhere, I kept hearing "this too shall pass." I clung to that and the support of family and several remarkable Navy physicians. "This too shall pass" is what gets me through episodes now. I hunker down and ride it out. If you haven't experienced it, it's hard to explain. Many people think you should just grit your teeth and pull yourself up by the bootstraps, but it doesn't necessarily work that way. I still have dreams about the situation that precipitated my depression, but not as frequently as I did. I’ve always been a bit introspective, and my experience with depression has made me more so. That and some subsequent missteps have led me to try to look at life through a different lens, to try and appreciate small things more. Lord knows, I don’t always succeed. Right now, I feel weary and for no apparent reason. I have a good life, yet I still feel weary.

I share this for anyone who is depressed and for people I consider friends and whom I want to know more of the me that I am. While you are in the midst of a depressive episode, you feel like the only person who has ever felt that way. It's only later that you learn that you aren't alone. I'll end with a book recommendation and something I wrote during a really dark moment. The book is Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron. It's short and captures better than anything else I've read what true clinical depression is like. Here is what I felt:

Final Hymn of Darkness
I grow weary,
weary to the soul of my existence;

weary of the world’s cacophony,
harsh, strident voices railing,
each trying to shout the other down;

weary of wounds that will not heal,
of writing lines
dredged
from depression’s cold, dark depths;

weary of clinging to a hope for healing;

weary of believing the wounds have closed
only to see them erupt,
spewing purulent lava,
destroying all vestiges of beauty and serenity’s new growth.

If there is to be no healing,
then I pray for release;
an enveloping sleep,
fading to blessed oblivion
then nothing