You'd think it would be a relief.
It isn't.
Suicidality of patients on antidepressants spikes because, one theory goes, they realize how they could have felt all along and they can't stand it. Ursula K. LeGuin writes, of a long-suffering character, "She wept in pain, because she was free." Heavy on her mind are "the long years spent in bondage to a useless evil." She didn't see it that way before--as useless, that is--because she couldn't. Her liberation *is* in a sense her imprisonment--her realization of the true nature of her prior existence.
With which she will always be stuck.
I don't think most depressed people feel that their time or lives are being wasted by the struggle. As soon as the struggle recedes, however, that's exactly what many feel. They project their new consciousness back into their past and see their lives very differently from that vantage point. They see possibilities to which they were completely blind back when they were just holding themselves together. Certainly that's true of me.
And this is not the usual "If only I'd known then what I know now" stuff. Many depressed people are in a kind of miasma, there's static, things seem very complicated. To the point where it can get totally ridiculous. I went through college absolutely starving--like I'd wake up at night seriously hungry--because I literally could not figure out the concept of keeping a candy bar by my bed. Even when I did, I wouldn't eat it half the time, because if I did, then I wouldn't have it later when I might need it more.
You're laughing, but those ruminations made perfect sense to me back then. I experienced those objections--"but I might need it more later, but it's only an hour til class, but if I eat now then I won't be hungry at the 'right' time"--as insurmountable obstacles. Invisible but very real walls around me. If you had told me "But Savannah...you can just...GET ANOTHER CANDY BAR," I would of course have understood you intellectually and said "I know." But inside, it would have been like, "But that would mean I'd have to go to the store." And I was not always able to do that, you see, because, as Anne Lamott would put it, I was not always well enough. So things were complicated. Which is what I was saying.
With food, it was just an annoyance. With other things, not so much.
Oh well. What are you going to do?
Besides, I'd rather have that than the reverse. An ideal, golden past from which one is now cut off. A wasted present.
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The griefstricken Ursula K. LeGuin character is a girl named Tenar. Much later in her tale, cursed with fear by evil wizards, she reaches back to the dark priestess that she used to be and turns the curse on them. Sadly, however, it doesn't stick; her "useless evil" is useful enough now, but she can't or simply doesn't reclaim it sufficiently to give the posturing baddies the shock they deserve. I was always annoyed by that. If her past was strong enough to make her suffer, strong enough almost to kill her when she escaped from it, then it should have been strong enough to save her too.
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So, yesterday's "later" turned out to be a bit later than I thought. Sorry about that. I ended up not getting home until 8:00, at which point I had to make dinner and do mom stuff. Long day.
Take care...
