Depression: The Shitty Kitty You Need to Put Down

Depression is a tide that has risen and sunk through the seasons of my life since I was fourteen years old. Along with loose joints, swarthy eyebrows, and a coal black sense of humour, it is a family trait that I have come by honestly, passed down through generations of moody working-class northerners. Given how many of my ancestors attempted or died by suicide, it's a miracle I am here at all. (There's that gallows humour I warned you about.)

While reflecting on this dubious birthright recently, I have come to realise that living with a long-term mental illness is akin to living with a fragile cat. We have all met (or been) someone whose life is contorted around the ever-escalating needs of a pet who is tethered to this mortal coil by a thread so thin, it must be treated like a trip wire. These creatures were not made for this world; sensitive beings attacked by constant allergies and afflictions, without prolonged, scientifically advanced human intervention, they would have shuffled off to the afterlife years ago. As someone who frequently has to explain why they look like a hot-house tomato after a brief walk ("No, I didn't run here, I'm just this sweaty because my body forgets to regulate its own temperature and just emergency-dumps coolant when it finally registers I'm overheating"), I relate. I get palpitations while going through airport security, because my overnight bag resembles a pop-up pharmacy. My hips have been spontaneously dislocating since childhood. I once had such bad anxiety-induced constipation, I had to be hospitalised. Hospitalised! Because my bowels had gone on strike.  I would not have survived an earlier century, which makes me reluctantly grateful for our present time. By the extension of this metaphor, I am herding a coterie of needy cats that represent the varied and specific dysfunctions of my charmingly dilapidated body, but today, I want to focus on just one: depression.

When I personify my depression, I picture my first boyfriend's cat, Roger. Roger was a miracle of survival; an abandoned three-legged Tom, that ginger scragglepuss confounded vets, who noted with confusion that his feline AIDS somehow stymied the advance of his other chronic diseases. He had green eyes, one of which one was glued shut by gummy infected eyelash follicles, leaving him with a permanent wink. His facial muscles constantly pulled towards his closed left eye, Roger wandered around with an open-mouthed grimace, proudly exposing his two remaining teeth. His food had to be macerated into a smooth, medication-riddled paste to prevent choking, and he could never meow—only able to cough up a weak "mo." 

Unfortunately, my metaphor is actually a bit of a jalopy, as at this point in the road, right as I'm revving up to the good stuff, it falls apart completely. Of course depression isn't a cat, even if caring for a semi-feral furball with insistent demands feels similar. Assuming a certain degree of negligence or sociopathy on my part, a fragile cat left to its own devices will die, thus technically ceasing to be a problem. If I ignore my depression, it won't just slink off into a dark corner and become a bad smell. Untended, at best it will overtake me—and at worse, I will become the stink the neighbours complain about. 

What to Expect When You're Expecting to be Terminally Sad

(based on personal experience)

Far from a static period of sadness, depression is a series of difficult feelings that demand satisfaction in strange and unpredictable ways. Some days nothing but rotting in bed will make sense; others are spent mourning the time lost to sleep and strange dreams. Some friends will intuit your moods, plan for them as ancient priests once scheduled around lunar cycles. Others will quietly abandon you. Among fellow sads, your moods may sync up like a mental health menstrual cycle, as you listlessly crash together, sending sporadic texts between shifts of sleep and Netflix binging. Alone, you will start to recognise the distinct voices of your psyche as they engage in family drama. You don't want to steep in your sweatpants until you smell like an overripe durian, the sensible Ego will implore. But the goblin Id, baring its unbrushed teeth and demanding to be fed a jar of Nutella with Twizzler spoons will grimace back, revelling in the awful fuzzy-mouth feel of defiant self-flagellation, I don't fucking want to, before finding a waylaid Oreo near your belly-button and cramming it down your throat. Meanwhile, the Super Ego will whip up a fresh batch of guilt to swallow, haughty and disappointed that you are enslaved to your own emotions.

(I am sorry to have brought Freud into this. Forgive me; I have an English degree). 

You will fight, of course. Over time, you will gather data points—what movies are comforting, what music triggers tears, what foods you can bring yourself to eat when the world is made of wet cardboard. And yet despite it all, there will be days when you will look at your depression and suddenly experience the enormous weight of guilt drop on your shoulders, because you have spent so much of your life bathed in sadness. It may manifest as a sense of ingratitude for life, or the feeling of burden on others. It may be regret for all that wasn't accomplished in the face of managing your emotions, the time lost, the days wasted, the dreams put out to pasture. It may even be the sensation that you didn't try hard enough—that instead of writing profound poetry, madness-fuelled and chasing the dragon of your deepest, most incredulous desires, you cocooned yourself in flannel and isolated with a family bag of Cheetos. These days of reflective melancholy may be the hardest to navigate, and the quickest to send you swirling back down the toilet into the misery sewer.  

So that's depression, in a hopefully-not-too-dispiriting nutshell. Now is the time to ask: prithee dear writer, do tell: what is your fucking point?

The right answer would be to offer some profound wisdom on the ephemeral nature of sadness that shifts like seasons, tying it back to the lessons taught by an ancient street cat who limped through life right along the boundary of death. But I am the same person who just admitted to dealing with lifelong depression by eating chocolate paste with candy straws, so, lower your expectations. The real answer is I have found myself wrestling with sadness again, and found a glimmer of hope that I could satirise the bastard into the ground. They say "punch up"; I can think of no more powerful, insidious object of attack than a disease that sucks the life out of the vibrant, directly from the heart. 

I started this essay trapped in self-imposed isolation, trying to keep my depression from infecting others. In its closing paragraph, and the knowledge that I will be sharing this (and hoping at least one of you will read it), I realise I am not alone, in this feeling or this moment. Whenever or wherever you read this, I am reaching out to you. My hand is forever stretching across the emptiness in the hope of touching yours, and binding us together for just a moment, through a scattering of sentences sown in the vast soil of the internet.