by Band Back Together | Sep 15, 2010 | Depression, Loneliness, Major Depressive Disorder |
I really don’t know where to begin, so I’ll start with a question.
When does it stop being a funk and become depression?
This year has been a doozy. My personal maelstrom hasn’t been nearly as bad as so many of you here, but it’s rocked my little world to the core. Up until recently my view on life has been pretty optimistic, but I can feel bitterness and cynicism in everything I say and do now. My job has put me through the ringer, but I don’t see any other options at the moment. I’ve been losing the struggle to be positive when it comes to body image. I feel like shit. I’ve had no energy or motivation. I’ve had no desire to be social and whereas I’ve always been fairly outgoing, I find a new and disturbing anxiety at the thought of approaching anyone new. And, to top it all off, the loss of my grandfather last month knocked whatever little wind I had left in my sails fluttering to the depths of the cold, dark sea.
I keep telling myself that I can’t be depressed. That I’m just being a baby. I’m too strong and too independent for that. That things will get better on their own… Yet, here I sit, the beginnings of tears burning the backs of my eyes and that now familiar lump rising in my throat. I don’t think it’s going to go away. I’m terrified it won’t. I feel helpless and powerless and I haven’t the slightest idea where to start, what to do.
I’m lost.
by Band Back Together | Sep 14, 2010 | Coping With Depression, Healing From A Rape or Sexual Asault, Major Depressive Disorder, Rape/Sexual Assault |
Last year, my youngest daughter got a strange rash the day before my birthday. I took her to the ER that day because her doctor was “too busy to deal with a rash.” She was diagnosed with shingles *ewww* and I called my mom and arranged for her to take my two oldest so that they didn’t get sick. Also I wanted to catch up on my Netflix and I knew the baby would be sleeping. (Woot!)
My birthday came and went, and my husband and I decided not to celebrate.
Five days later my husband decided he was going to go out with some of his buddies. I admit to being a little upset about it, since I hadn’t been out in months. I picked up a good bottle of wine, put the baby to sleep, and got a little tipsy, before passing out in bed. I woke up sometime later to hear banging on the door. My husband habitually lost his keys while drinking so I stumbled down the stairs and pulled the door open to let him in so I could go back to sleep.
It wasn’t my husband.
I was sprayed in the face with what I believe was Lysol and got a good bash to my head. Luckily,I don’t remember much of the whole incident. When my husband came home he found the door open and I was lying on the floor in the living room with my clothes ripped off and a vacuum cord wrapped around my neck, thankfully unconscious.
Our then three year old was sleeping in an upstairs room, blessedly undisturbed. My mom came over and an ambulance took me to the hospital. I don’t remember much of this either because they had to sedate me since I wouldn’t stop screaming. After a lot of persuasion, I agreed to letting the police do a rape kit. At that point, I didn’t understand what was happening but I was scared and HURT. I felt violated and I didn’t want anyone to touch me.
They sent me home with ice packs, Valium, and a drug called Combivir, just in case my attacker had HIV. On top of the physical and mental stresses my body was already going through, the Comibivir would give me the same symptoms as someone undergoing chemo. I would be sick, and lose my hair, among many other side effects. My mom and sister decided that they would take the kids for the two months that I would have to take the medicine.
My husband and I banded together for the first time ever. He found us a new apartment because I didn’t feel safe in ours. His parents came up to help us move.
I spiraled into a depression. I soaked in it. Two months turned into my mom taking the kids for almost a year. We moved again because I couldn’t stand being in our city anymore. I still had problems getting out of bed. My husband didn’t want me to take anti-depressants because he wanted me to get better on my own and he saw the meds as a crutch. We fought. He cheated. I became more depressed. It hurt to talk to my kids, to let them see me because I’d lost a lot of weight and I looked like shit – to put it bluntly.
I contemplated suicide, and I finally found rainn.org, and their virtual counselors. I talked to someone every day, sometimes several times a day. I stopped taking two Valium an hour and started eating without the fight from my husband.
I still dream about it most nights. I still get horrible feelings whenever I smell Lysol. I still don’t feel sexy, but since then it’s almost like I crave sex. I want it more than ever. I’m sure if my husband knew that my new found randiness was due to the fact that I wanted to erase everything else, he would stop having sex with me.
I know that rape happens to millions of women but I still feel alone; I still feel like damaged goods.
by Band Back Together | Sep 7, 2010 | Codpendence, Loss, Major Depressive Disorder |
I’d do anything for my wife. It’s a running joke between us that I’d even die for her—take a bullet, a knife, name your poison. The joke part is that for as long as we’ve known each other, she’s said she’d never return the favor.
What makes this funny now (and when I say funny, I really mean sad) is that after 22 years together, we’ve never felt more apart. She wants to end it. She says she loves me, but isn’t in love with me, and she’s not sure if she ever truly was. She says I’m her best friend but she no longer feels comfortable being naked with me. She wants to move on with her life.
I know the way we’ve been living is unhealthy, codependent and whatever else Dr. Phil is talking about these days. I know that the reasons we first got married—my mom was dying of cancer, I needed someone to take care of me, and Caryn needed someone to take care of—are no longer reasons to stay together. Christ, I’ve been in and out of therapy half a dozen times since we first met. But I also know that, unhealthy or not, this is the only love I’ve ever known.
Caryn says I’m too intense, that I’m critical, that I’m sarcastic, that I’m depressed, that I’ll never enjoy going out dancing with her. What she’s really saying is that I’ll never be the person she truly wants, and she’ll never be the fantasy woman in my head.
For the last five years, we’ve been going through the zombie suburban motions for the sake of the kids, or because our hands were tied financially, or whatever other excuses we made for hanging on to the status quo. Six months ago, during one of our typical Sunday-morning arguments with the bedroom door shut and the kids downstairs, Caryn said, “no mas”—and since then, our everyday life has been like a rehearsal for death.
I picture myself growing old and being alone, and I get that sick jolt in the pit of my stomach when it hits me that I’m done, it’s over. I’ve always been the type of guy who, given the choice between a straight line and a more circuitous path, would choose . . . the path Caryn chose for me. Heartbreak and grief—ping-ponging between numb and angry—I have to do alone.
Caryn’s laugh has always been the biggest turn-on for me, and we’ve laughed together a lot, from the first time she showed up at my apartment more than 20 years ago wearing a pair of Minnie Mouse sunglasses. But during our zombie years, she slowly turned her back on me. The worst of it was lying in bed knowing I couldn’t touch her. It sent me back to our first few dates when, in a foreshadowing of her future ambivalence, she wanted to break up. I’d worked hard to change her mind then, bombarding her with late-night calls. Now I was determined to do it again. My plan was simple, really: I’d find a way to change myself. Caryn would fall in love with me all over again and we wouldn’t have to have this stupid conversation for another 20 years.
So I shaved off my beard.
I know that doesn’t sound like much, but to me it was a symbolic gesture signaling more significant changes to come. I’d worn a beard for more than 30 years, and I told everyone I’d finally shaved it off because it was getting gray and making me look old. But the truth is that I did it because I wanted Caryn to see me differently.
“Did you get a hair . . . OH. MY. GOD!” she howled when I came home clean shaven, feeling like a new man. She said I looked younger, but really not all that different, and a few minutes later she went back to the Sunday Times crossword puzzle.
It was sort of the same deal when we both got tattoos a few summers ago. I got a large Chinese symbol on my left arm that roughly means “to live,” and Caryn got a smaller version on her ankle that means “freedom.” We said these would be constant reminders of what we want out of life. We also thought they looked cool. What I didn’t understand at the time was that although I wanted “to live” with her, she wanted “freedom” from me.
When my close shave failed to get her attention, I tried something really scary: yelling at our kids. Caryn was always on my case for ceding the responsibility of disciplining our two sons, because it meant she was always the bad guy. She was the one who told them “No!” or yelled at them for fighting or leaving empty Cheez Doodles bags under their beds, and then I’d waltz in from work, plop down in front of the big-screen TV and hang with my homeboys.
So no more Mr. Nice Guy. The next time Rob, 14, and Zach, 13, went at it, I swung into action. “What the hell is up with you guys? When are you gonna grow up and stop this stupid crap?” I screamed, making sure Caryn heard every syllable. I took away Robbie’s laptop and Zach’s cell phone. They shrugged if off, since they knew they’d get it all back in a matter of days, if not hours.
“Why are you yelling at them like that?” Caryn asked, and for the life of me, I didn’t have an answer.
I’d always let Caryn make the major decisions in our life. She was the one who said let’s get married, the one who said let’s have kids, the one who said let’s adopt when we couldn’t. As I saw it, this was about love—it made her happy, so she’d love me even more. In fact, she complained for years about the burden of having to make all these decisions, and now she wanted out. Well, I’d show her.
“I want Chinese food tonight, goddamn it!”
“I want to see City of God!”
“I want to build a new deck in the backyard.”
“I want to have sex—now!”
To all of which Caryn pretty much said, “Okay.” Things were finally changing around here, I thought, but for some strange reason I pictured George Costanza saying it.
When I wasn’t barking orders, I shut the hell up. Caryn and I had always been great talkers. We’d go on about everything, pick it to pieces and then start all over again. You can avoid a lot of stuff by talking. The truth is, when one of us talked, the other didn’t always hear it. We took in what we wanted and interpreted it to fit our own rationalizations and arguments. So I decided to try the tough-guy silent treatment (which, not coincidentally, was both our moms’ favorite form of punishment). I also gave her more space. I’d go downstairs to watch TV instead of lying silently in bed next to her. If she was in the kitchen, I’d go into the living room. On weekends, we’d go our separate ways and meet up for dinner. I never felt more disconnected in my life. It was as if blood had stopped flowing to my heart.
My friend Doug, the art director for the Web sites I’m in charge of, would listen sympathetically and share whatever emotion I was tangled up in. If I was pissed at Caryn, he’d call her “that bitch,” and if I was feeling the least bit hopeful, he’d egg me on. He told me one day he thought I was being incredibly selfless, and went on to say how men, in general, are all too willing to twist themselves into pretzels. I nodded absently, but knew that he couldn’t be more wrong. It was all about fear. I was scared to be alone. I was scared of the unfamiliar. I was scared of opening up. And (damn you to hell, Dr. Phil!), deep down I was scared to be happy—with or without Caryn.
After a month or so, my Kafka-esque transformation just stopped. As I looked at myself in the mirror while shaving, it hit me that, other than my beard, there was no growth attached to any of my so-called life changes. Transforming myself into someone I thought Caryn would want me to be was exactly what she had always wanted me not to do.
The real tough stuff was still locked away because I didn’t have the courage to go there. The deeper truth of our marriage, the stuff we’re not proud of but that connects us on the most basic level—fears, judgments, evasions—that’s what we both needed to face if our marriage were to have any chance in hell.
So for the past few months, we’ve been doing the therapy thing. And when we walk out of each session, Caryn says it feels like she’s just taken a bullet, a knife, name your poison.
Under a heart-shaped magnet on our refrigerator, there’s a New Yorker cartoon I knew Caryn would get a kick out of, a picture of two women immersed in serious conversation. The caption reads, “It’s easy. The first step is to entirely change who you are.”
It’s the second step that’s a bitch: figuring out what we really want. I keep asking myself the same questions over and over. Why do I still want to be with someone who no longer wants to be with me? Am I really in love with her, or do I just need to be loved? I could give you the usual psychological mumbo-jumbo—my need to stay with the familiar rather than explore the unknown, how Caryn reminds me of my mother and vice versa—but I think it’s simpler than that. There’s a place in my heart that is Caryn’s, and no matter what happens between us, that place will always be hers.
Sometimes I imagine how it would be if we went our separate ways. I see myself sitting alone in an empty apartment and there’s a knock on the door. It’s Caryn, and she’s wearing those ridiculous Minnie Mouse sunglasses again. She’s standing there, crying softly, and between sobs she says, “I’ve been such an idiot!” I hold her tightly in my arms, and as she takes a deep breath, I feel her holding onto me.
And then I let go.
