My Little Blue Pills

In honor of Mental Health Awareness month I am using this post to speak my truth, and to put a voice to the struggle of reconciling my identity as a human being with the mental health issues that are present in my life on a daily basis.

75mg of Zoloft has control over whether or not I live my life in the way I desire to on a daily basis. Swallowing one and a half little pills daily can change the course of my week. I have been open about my struggle with mental health going on five years now. My acceptance that I will most likely need medication for the rest of my life is a different story. Let me elaborate.

I had a conversation with my psychiatrist a few months ago that really struck me in an odd way. I have yet to speak about it with anyone outside of my closest confidants. In the conversation, I admitted to him that I had not been taking my medication. It had been about two weeks since I had last taken a dose and I remember joking with him chuckling while saying “oh ya know, that old depressions’ still got a hold… thought it would have gotten tired of me by now”.

After four different psychiatrists, I have determined most must not find depression jokes funny. Which is unfortunate because I find them hilarious… **enter unhealthy coping mechanisms stage right.**

After asking questions about the symptoms of my depression while taking what the Doc called an unintentional ‘hiatus’ from my medication he said the following:

“Well, sometimes depression just does not go away: some brains just have a bit of a chemical imbalance. It is possible you will need medication for the rest of your life.”

To which I responded… “Well that’s fun. Do you think you can just not ever retire so I wont have to find another psychiatrist? I think we have a good thing going.”

Once again, he did not laugh.

After a few more minutes of check in questions, most of which contained me biting my tongue trying to avoid making light of the lifelong medication situation, I said goodbye and started my venture home. Later that night I had time to digest what he had said to me.

I tried to rationalize my feelings. Plenty of people had to take medication everyday for the rest of their lives… people with diabetes, high blood pressure, anemia, hypothyroidism, just to name a few conditions. Why was I so uncomfortable swallowing the fact that I might have to be on antidepressants the rest of my life?

It took a few days to realize the reason… the medication was not the problem… the condition was. I was prepared to take a pill the rest of my life, that was the easy part. What I was not prepared for was dealing with the realization that the fight my small blue pills signified could now be a lifelong battle. I would have to explain to my next partner what those little pills did for my brain. I would have to triple check on all vacations that the pills were in my carry on, not a checked bag in case my luggage got lost. I would have to visit the pharmacy every three months when I eventually ran out.

I, like many others in society, had been under the false illusion that depression was temporary. An awful, horrible result of trauma, grief, or even a medication side effect that once remedied or dealt with would slowly give way to a balanced brain. That is definitely the case for many people. In my appointment, my psychiatrist had unintentionally informed me in a callous way that the assumption I had help was untrue. Depression could be lifelong, it most likely is for me.

The harshest part of this realization was the fact that I could no longer separate my identity from the depression I suffered from. From the age of fifteen to now at 23, I realized I had always viewed my depression as temporary and as long as it remained temporary it existed as a separate entity from myself, from my personality. It existed as a dark cloud passing over my head… apparently slow enough to still be affecting me eight years later, but passing nonetheless. This declared permanence was scary. It was then that I decided I was going to have to reconcile my depression with my personality. Blend them into a whole human being, rather than viewing them as competing forces.

Some people may be saying.. “Ok Gennie, I understand this sucks but aren’t you somewhat glad? It could be diabetes, or a heart problem or something way more dangerous. Aren’t you glad it’s just depression?”

To some degree I am. I am truly blessed to be physically healthy. My body keeps up with the endless stream of activity I put it through. When I get sick, I usually bounce back fairly quickly, and at the end of the day I would say that my doctors would describe me as a generally healthy individual. That being said, the people who do not understand the stress I have suffered due to the realized permanence of my mental health condition have probably never suffered from depression themselves.

Putting this mental health realization in this blog helps to make it more real for me. It helps me to publicly admit that who I am is not separate from my depression… they are one and the same. In addition, this speaks to what I believe is one of the chief issues in the movement of Mental Health Awareness today: the separation between those that have experienced depression and other mental health conditions and those that have not. Starting with depression, because that is what I can speak to on a personal level, a standard of understanding, of comprehension of how this chemical imbalance affects people could lead to greater empathy and ability to help those suffering.

How do you explain depression to someone who has never suffered from it? How does one relay the effects of something intangible, invisible to the naked eye of strangers yet so profoundly impactful to the one's everyday life? Although it is a singular point of view, and depression can affect people differently, I will try to relay how depression has impacted my life and how it continues to affect me on a daily basis in the hopes that it will provide both myself and others with some clarity on both the symptoms of the disease and on personal note, how I can work to combine the condition and my personality into a singular persona.

When asked about when my depression started or about my years in high school, when I was in the deepest, darkest part of my depression, it is like looking over a hazy Los Angeles after a particularly smoggy day. The brown fog is heavily set against the buildings.

The time spent trudging from my locker to Spanish class, the drives to weekly group therapy, and the lunches spent on the street in front of the main building are all covered in this dark haze, not dark enough to completely black out my view, but enough so that all I can see are outlines of experiences, just like you would only be able to see the shadows of hazy city skyscrapers. One of my only bright memories from my high school years is my senior prom ( I am in the red flower dress in case you can't tell).

That is one symptom of depression I feel like many people do not realize is possible. Depression can affect memory. Although the cause is unknown it has been concluded in numerous studies that individuals who suffered from clinical depression will “typically show poor memory for positive events, potentiated memory for negative events, and impaired recollection” (Dillon). Having a “potentiated memory for negative events” means that negative memories are more effective and more active in the brain. This quite literally means people with depression have trouble focusing on the positive because negative memories are stronger.

Apart from affecting my recollection of certain events, the way my depression affects me the most is by the sense of aloneness it instills in me. Depression has the uncanny ability to make me feel every negative emotion you can think of: ashamed, sad, angry, fearful, anxious, etc. all in one massive wave. It can turn me into an irritable monster, who snaps at anything my sister's say. It can cause me to withdraw and sleep for eleven hours when I took a three hour nap earlier in the day. The worst part is it tricks me into thinking that I am the only person in the world who acts and feels this way.

That’s the worst part of my depression. Not the sadness or the anger or the anxiety, but the loneliness. In a metaphoric sense, I often compare my depression symptoms to a tunnel. When my depression begins to rear its ugly head, I enter the darkest tunnel with no lights to be found anywhere. Not only is it pitch black with no end in sight, there is not even a bright spot of sunlight to look forward to. There is no light at the end of the tunnel so that you know it will eventually end. The tunnel only contains a kind of darkness that is so isolating you feel that you have nowhere and no one to turn to.

That is the strongest lie that my depression tells me: that I am alone. Alone in my feelings, alone in my community, alone in my struggles. On the days where my depression wins, (currently those are the days where I have not taken my medication for 2+ days), those are the things that I believe, when in reality I know that could not be further from the truth. These two descriptions are just a glimpse into how depression affects me and so many others, often on a daily basis.

These are the lies, the symptoms, the experiences that my one and a half small blue pills fight against. These are the things they protect me from. These are the dark aspects that I am afraid I will have to run from for the rest of my life. That being said, my depression has also helped me develop parts of my personality that I love the most. At the end of the day depression can also be my superpower.

I am not saying that I like my depression, or I want it. I don’t. I would not wish these thoughts and symptoms on my worst enemy. All that said, viewing my depression as my super power has helped me turn it into an asset rather than a burden.

How is depression my super power? Being stuck at one point in the deepest darkest part of my mind has given me the ability to see when others are struggling. It is easy to see when someone is upset, stuck in distressing thoughts, sad or disappointed even when they mask it well because I have experienced all of those emotions in some of the strongest ways possible. I like to believe my depression has brought me to a place to be more in tune with others’ emotions so that I can cheer them up with jokes or a friendly face and smile.

Depression is my superpower because it brought me to therapy. It motivated me to sharpen tools like self reflection, self care, introspection, and boundary setting. It has helped me become a more intentional friend, a better advisor to my sisters, and an overall more aware human being. It has shaped the evolution of my personality these last eight years, sometimes negatively, but more often for the better. Who I am today is because of what my mental illness has taught me.

My depression has taught me to savor the good moments of life, appreciate what brings you joy and learn to let go of what does not. Acknowledging all the blessings my mental health struggles have brought me have helped me come to peace with the fact that those one and a half blue pills might be a daily occurrence for the rest of my life.

This post is dedicated to Emma, my most authentic friend. Thank you for being there when it is hard to get out of bed, for knowing to ask more questions when I say I am just fine, and for always taking me to go get ice cream. Our friendship is one of the most treasured things in my life.

Mental health awareness month is only 31 days long, but it should be a topic discussed all year. Although clinical depression is not a condition I would wish on anyone, I hope my story, my realizations, help others to realize there is a light at the end of the tunnel even if you do not see it.

Dillon DG, Pizzagalli DA. Mechanisms of Memory Disruption in Depression. Trends Neurosci. 2018 Mar;41(3):137-149. doi: 10.1016/j.tins.2017.12.006. Epub 2018 Jan 10. PMID: 29331265; PMCID: PMC5835184.