I’m spending too much time trying to figure out if I’m depressed, or if it’s just a normal response to this COVID-infected half-life we are all living. Lord, how it does crawl on and on, with no end in sight.
Depression – isn’t that what you call having little energy or motivation, brain fog, dragging yourself through the most minor of tasks, no excitement for anything? If I’m depressed, then how do I get through the slog of daily life: trying to figure out how to bring in more money, moving my family life along when everything is broken and takes at least twice as long as it used to, day after day? Is it this “high-functioning depression” I keep hearing about?
If this is the definition of high-functioning depression, you could say I was a high-functioning depressive throughout childhood, so I must be familiar with this state. I certainly felt bad nearly every day. I was a parentified child who, most of the time, took care of my mentally ill mother and alcoholic father more than they took care of me. It was pretty clear by the age of six that their ability to parent me was shaky, and if I didn’t fill in those gaps, we would be separated. Which did eventually happen, but not until I was 15. By then, there was so much abuse and contempt within my family, much of it directed at me, that nothing I could do on my own could heal it, and I left home forever.
The relentlessness of emotional survival had scrambled my center. Once I left home, the work of hiding being homeless, and by 16, earning a living at a factory while retaining my position as a high school achiever, was physically and emotionally exhausting. I became clinically depressed, according to my therapist at the time.
By mid-college, with my life evened out to a bearable routine, and I no longer suffered from consistent depression. Even now, I have a lot of difficulty characterizing myself as someone who is depressed.
Depression is an illness, a dark hole that people fall into and can’t get out of. Life seems ugly, daily routines hollow and pointless and difficult to do at all. Vitality has exited. There is no one you want to see, nothing you want to do. Antidepressants are often the only way to the other side, and there are many reasons why one wouldn’t want to take them. What I have right now must just be tiredness from weekly panic attacks – anxiety is my real problem.
Yet aren’t depression and anxiety two sides of the same coin? And aren’t both of these emotional responses logical, given that our external circumstances are actually really nerve-wracking and depressing? How do we treat a high-functioning depression that will continue as long as governments cannot guide a path forward out of a pandemic, or out of the collapse of society jogging along with it? How can we feel good when it is impossible to direct toward one’s own future, when nothing seems in our control? When one constantly sows, but never reaps?
What are the things you do to stave off COVID depression and anxiety?