Depression is not an easy road to travel. Not for anyone. There are so many ups and downs while trying to navigate life, and not having the desire to do anything more than curl up in a ball and let the world go away.
It's hard to get up and function as an adult for anyone these days. I like to think of life as a roller coaster. There's a really good scene from the movie Parenthood with Steve Martin that made me think of it this way; a great analogy. The grandmother in that scene, played by actress Helen Shaw, calms down Martin by explaining that life is full of ups and downs and boring plateaus, not unlike a roller coaster with plenty of loop-de-loops.
It's the ups that make me keep moving.
But I, too, live on the other side of the coin. It is my significant other who suffers from severe depression. He refuses to take medication, which we all know will likely make him feel loads better. He thinks he can do it all on his own. In addition, we suspect me may be bi-polar. At the least, suffer from BPD.
"I wake up a different person every day."
He does. He really does, and I honestly don't have a clue how to deal with that. The younger, more selfish version of me would have hightailed it out of this relationship - deemed too hard on my sensibilities and too draining for me to cope with on my own. The older, wiser version of me sticks around. She's patient, this one.
I sometimes feel helpless. It's hard to motivate someone when you really, truly have no idea what they are going through. I've had times where I've felt down, sure. I've had crying jags that have come out of nowhere and stopped the world around me. But they were fleeting; lasting no more than fifteen minutes and then I'd move on. I remind myself that this will be better tomorrow.
Not everyone has my coping skills, though. When he's laying there, trying to get the motivation to move, if even just to brush his teeth for the day, I don't know what it is that I'm supposed to do. I feel like a broken record saying "This too shall pass" or "I promise it will get better". I've changed the curtains in the bedroom so they black out as much light as possible, and we have fans for ever-present white noise to block out all other sensory information. I don't walk on eggshells anymore, but I still have become hyper aware of the changes in his mood, which may last two minutes to two days, depending on what triggered them.
He's my soulmate. Yeah, yeah, you've heard it all before. He really is. It's like two halves of the same soul, placed in different moments in time and swirled around the universe before we landed in the same place. We are so much alike and yet different enough to not bore the hell out of ourselves. And I wouldn't trade him for the world.
I've read articles, listened at symposiums, watched videos, and gone over so many statistics. The fact of the matter is we have no idea what the root cause is. Is it a chemical imbalance? Broken synapses? Is there a miracle drug that will repair the issue that keeps him from being a fully functional human being?
I don't know. No one does right now. We that sit on the other side only know that we are there for the ones we love. We will keep being right there. We won't give up on you, so please don't give up on us.
And live for the sunny days.
