Flat-Out Friday: Your Depression is Special

To be clear, the following rant is not applicable to those of you/us that have an on-going working relationship with our mental disabilities. This is for those people who aren't actually depressed at all but think their online self-diagnosis means they are most likely suffering from the most rare and deadly brain tumour possible, or that their depression is so fathomless and unique, when they actually grieving/pissed off/misanthropic.

You know the people. The ones that you want to pat on the head and say, "Yes, your depression is special, just like everyone elses". The ones that, in most cases, walk into the office and say "I'm feeling sad today" while it's pouring rain outside. (Duh. Weather affects your mood. Happens to all of us.) The ones that claim to everyone who will listen, "I'm so depressed", and then spend hours telling you about how depressed they are.

THOSE people.

Since long before all this accident hoopla, I have suffered from migraines, which are (from Wikipedia): typically [the headache is] unilateral (affecting one half of the head) and pulsating in nature, lasting from 2 to 72 hours. Associated symptoms may include nausea, vomiting, photophobia (increased sensitivity to light), phonophobia (increased sensitivity to sound) and the pain is generally aggravated by physical activity.^[3] Up to one-third of people with migraine headaches perceive an aura: a transient visual, sensory, language, or motor disturbance which signals that the headache will soon occur.^[3]

If you've ever had one, you know that the paragraph above doesn't do them justice. I have gotten them since I was a little girl. My teachers used to tell my mother that I couldn't possibly have a headache all the times I said I did and accused me of lying about it to get out of school. I have spent cumulative months of my life in bed with a cold cloth over my eyes trying desperately not to vomit again. You don't understand them until you've really actually had one. In my case, they're a familial inheritance. More than once I've suddenly lost half the vision in one eye - a real hassle while in the middle of a retail shift. But I deal. It's what we do.

And yet, I have met so many people who claim they have them as well but in reality have no blithering idea how to tell migraines from plain old headaches. I detest people who arbitrarily announce, "Oh my head! I'm having a migraine". Please. You might be able to fool the masses, but for people who know the stages you're not passing muster. If you actually had one and were into the third stage (the phase where it begins to cause pain), you'd be prone on the floor, blinded by the light, unable to move in case the world suddenly shifted its axis thereby making you terribly vomitous, NOT walking around, hand on forehead, proclaiming loudly that you were experiencing one.

To bring this back around to the original topic, I equate people who are all, "Woe is me, I'm so depressed" to migraine fakers. You know that The Princess Bride quote? "That word you are using. I do not think it means what you think it means."

That.

Again, those of us who have experienced real depression are not fooled. Real depression would never let you out in public to proclaim your suffering to the world. Real depression is what makes you hide in a corner behind the furniture because you can only deal with the small, tidy space under the bed right now. It makes you cry, uncontrolled and unstoppable, for hours on end, unable to explain why in words even if you knew why, and you never know why. It makes you barely able to open your eyes, and when you do everything is so chaotic and impossible that even if you're sleeping in your own bed all you can do is close those eyes again and fall back to sleep. You cannot:

• Log onto your favourite social media site and soliloquise about your sadness;
• Go back to said site every two minutes to read the comments people have made, proceeding to then make your own comments on those comments;
• Leave the house and attend a social function only to spend the whole time sighing, "I don't know why I bothered coming. I'm so depressed".

Depression goes beyond an uncontrollable sadness. It's something deep inside you that stops you from being you. It throws a huge stick into the gears of your being, causing you pain and suffering and hurt and sorrow. Sometimes when I'm feeling low, I end up spiralling further downward with the realisation that I cannot fix it nor can I stop it. It is a soul-sucking liche that wears a black hooded cloak and has no face, and unlike all those fantasy books, there is no magic sword that can drive it away.

The only weapon we have against it is time and release. Weathering that time might take some pharmaceuticals to get you through, and achieving that release might take hours of time talking about it, but those of us that struggle with real depression understand these are all tools to help ourselves. We don't stand around waiting for other people to sympathize. We take action.

So for all those posers out there: if you stand there in your hipster shoes and proclaim to me how depressed you are, take no offense when I take action and smack your face. It is simply a test of my strength against your apathy.

Read More

Week in Review: Science Experiment Goes "Boink"

As any Calvin and Hobbes fan will recognize, the title of my post today refers to the small blond boy's escapades with his transmogrifier, a cardboard box that at times duplicated, transformed, and transported him on epic adventures. This past week I've felt like someone has transmogrified me into something I'm not usually, and taken the regular me out for pizza.

Everything aches, and I wish I was exaggerating. I have been laid out cold with a headache three times. I haven't been sleeping normally, as you can probably tell by my tweets and posts at all hours. I'm pale (for me) and wan, black circles under my eyes, and don't ask me how I'm doing because I just might start crying.

Read More

Flat-Out Friday: The Great Deluge

I can't sleep. It's 3 am and I'm making hot chocolate in an effort to try and normalize myself. I can't sleep because I'm having a mini-crisis. I'm having a mini-crisis because of this: Calgary has declared a state of emergency in response to the flooding of the Bow River. Dams are overflowing. Authorities are evacuating over 25 neighbourhoods. People are banding together over social media to offer support to those effected by all this. Environment Canada's Weather Office is now saying it will continue to rain in Southern Alberta until Tuesday. And I'm glued to my Twitter feed. They have evacuated the Calgary Zoo. The Zoo! Do you have any idea how hard the transport of that many animals would be? And where would they take them?

This is one of those things that sets off my anxieties. It is a situation completely beyond my control that is effecting people I care about, and, I'll admit it, me. Even here in Edmonton, it's effecting me. Thursday night was Date Night again. Matt and I went out for supper, and it was supposed to be a fun, relaxing evening to celebrate his long weekend. He got the call just before our meal came; we took it to go. I drove him to the base, and right now he's somewhere south of here, coordinating military efforts to support the Calgary Emergency crews and meet with city engineers to lend help. It's not looking like he'll be here tomorrow night either. And I'm not holding my breath for Saturday night's all ranks dinner/dance.

Read More

Week in Review: Head Spins

What a week. I feel like my head is still spinning. Actually, that might be the weather. It's been really weird here for the past little while: like today, which had bright blue skies this morning but by 3pm it's expected to be thundering and lightning. It makes everything ache, which makes my head feel all dizzy-making, which gives me a "my-brain" ("migraine" for those who haven't had a toddler say the word to them), which causes me much napping. It's a cycle, and a vicious one. This is also why I can't seem to keep a proper swim schedule. I suppose the lesson here is, don't worry about it. Just swim when you can and everything will turn out okay.

Read More

Not in Kansas Anymore

I was going to write a filler post today, but then something interesting happened:

We got a tornado warning. A severe tornado warning.

And suddenly my filler post didn't matter so much any more. There is nothing as scary and exhilarating as watching a storm bearing down on your location. This one was no exception. Though I have not heard yet if there have been any downspouts confirmed, I can assure you that the clouds were doing the twist right over central Edmonton.  The flag on the pole, though sodden, was flapping from the south wind. The clouds directly above it were moving in from the north fast. There was a wall of water obliterating my view of the river, and I watched as it swallowed up the valley until it hit me. I couldn't see the WEM first, then I lost the Groat Road bridge, and then suddenly it was on us.

It was raining so heavily that for a moment I even lost Jasper Avenue. And in that moment, the sky lit up pink and purple and the lightning streaked through it. I was blinded and deafened. The sound rattled the windows hard. Wherever it hit, it was close. Really close.

The hail came after that, white marbles bouncing off the concrete building with a distinct ping. They stopped traffic for a moment as no one could see where they were going. The buses waited at their stops so the commuters wouldn't have to get off into the pelting ice. 

Just as suddenly, it was gone. The sky lightened, and for a moment I could see my whole view of the valley again. The flag stopped dancing.

Then the rain switched direction, and suddenly the wall of water was advancing on me again. The flag began to point south, but the southern clouds were moving steadfastly north. Once more, the hail pounded down and the street lights came on in the middle of the afternoon. Traffic ground to a halt.

The storm is slowly lifting now, moving north, taking the hail, thunder and lightning with it and leaving behind a trail of rain. It is expected to rain now until tomorrow. There are patches of blue sky sprinkled amongst the clouds now, which makes the whole experience seem surreal. My only hope is that this blue sky is a promise of what is to come, and not the eye of a much, much larger storm.

Read More