Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one's self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.
- Andrew Solomon, "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression"
Treatment resistant clinical depression. The label hangs over my head like the executioner's axe, waiting for the command to sever my head from my shoulders and spill my blood to the earth. Whenever the noonday demon wakes from his slumber and rears his head, gnashing his teeth and clawing at my spirit, dragging it downward into darkness, I close myself off from the world. As if my depression is shameful. As if the choking and crushing emotion is something that I can control. As if I have to hide what is part of me.
I've always needed solitude. I preferred it. I consider myself misanthropic; people are inherently evil and I have issues that would make Edward Norton in *Fight Club* look well adjusted. Put short, I don't trust or enjoy people at all. Individuals can be tolerated or even liked, but the general population is to be loathed and avoided. I praised Henry David Thoreau for leaving civilization behind in favor of nature and longed to do the same. But when your brain is wired a certain way, there is nothing quite so impractical as isolation...
I have loved and I have lost. I've marked the passing of four friends and two beloved family members in quick succession. I was broken, and then... I felt nothing for a long time - almost a year. Not joy nor sadness, not excitement nor lust. I was an empty body drifting along from day to day. I hardly even spoke. It took a long time to recover. Just as I was feeling hopeful again, I lost five more friends over the course of three months. I was utterly destroyed. My grip on reality was peeled away. Some mornings I wake up, still trying desperately to cling to a fiction in my head that makes more sense than the world around me, but never was it as overwhelming as it was November. I was drowning.
And then Christmas came.
I will not go into detail of what triggered the demon. There is none to recall. I was only aware of a need to stop my confusion and pain. So profound was my grief that just being in a room with other people made my heart race and my head spin. I would panic and have to run as far as I could just to be able to breathe again. On one such occasion, I found myself outside in the storm on Christmas as the flood coursed through the surrounding area. It wasn't enough to worry, but I knew the ravine would be filled and made up my mind.
Suicide isn't the easiest thing in the world to discuss, even more difficult to admit that you've attempted it. But in the spirit of honesty to strangers over the internet, I will just say it... Since the age of twelve, I have attempted to kill myself on average of two times a year. I have nearly been successful on five separate attempts. Christmas was one such occasion. It was my final attempt.
There was no parting of clouds and chorus of angels as light illuminated me. There was no great thundering voice that spoke to me. There was no dramatic entrance of a hero nor any profound sign from the cosmos to save me. It was a cat.
His name is Bowie and he's
my cat. I raised him since he was first able to leave his mother, but because he's such an asshole and destroyed everything he touched, he went to live on a farm. No, that's not a clever way of softening the blow of death. He's very much alive and living on an actual farm with several other outdoor cats and a plethora of animals from peacocks to goats, snakes and rabbits to cows and horses. This is where I happened to be for Christmas, among friends. And as I prepared to hurl myself into the ravine hundreds of feet below, splaying my body on jagged rocks being overtaken by the rising water, there he was - in the way as usual, laying right on my feet. I shooed him. He dug his claws into my leg and yowled at me above the loud wind, getting as saturated as I in the downpour. I ripped him from me and set him on a lower branch of a tree. In a blink, he was back on my feet with his claws dug in, refusing to move. Again, I pried him from me. Again, I blinked and he was there as if he'd never left.
Without warning, I started to cry. I couldn't stop. I sat down heavily and he finally let go, crawling into my lap and purring, rubbing his head against my chin. I held him and just sobbed until I heard people calling for me. I stood and started back toward the house as he decided it was safe to leave me and run for the cover of the garage with the others.
It was that moment that I realized yes, I have loved and lost. But as long as I'm still alive there will always be love - from more friends, from family, even from pets. Love is all around us. We may lose from time to time, but love... That's infinite. Boundless. It can be found anywhere we look and cannot be destroyed. And that, I think, is worth sticking around for.
