Okay, so here I am just going along in survival mode. This is the thing about dealing with chronic depression: you go through periods where your goal is to just get to the next day. It’s kind of like being in a building when the power goes out. When a back up generator comes on, it’s only going to power the important stuff: the life support systems and enough light to see by. If you think you’re going to plug in and play video games, forget it.

I’m lucky that I have a “back up generator” a sort of skill set developed over long years of dealing with relapses....

The first thing you have to do is recognize that you’ve fallen down the mineshaft into a relapse in the first place, which is harder to do than you might think it is. After all, nobody wants to think that their health is getting worse on any level, and I don’t care what anybody says: there’s still a LOT of social stigma associated with depression. Moreover, if you’re doing everything right, taking your medicine and searching for the bright side of everything it’s very disconcerting to have to accept that it’s not working. In short, it’s depressing.

But the thing is, if you don’t realize you’re in a hole you’re liable to injure yourself running into the walls. A person can very easily wreck their relationships, lose their job, injure themselves due to accident/carelessness/poor concentration, suffer physical health problems and wind up on the edge of a bridge before it dawns on them: “maybe there’s another way to handle this”

And that way is survival mode – to turn on the back up generator. In my case that means jettisoning anything that is not directly related to me a) staying alive and b) keeping my life. By that I mean not making any major decisions or allowing any major decisions to get made for me (i.e. getting fired) The trouble with depression is that it is a MENTAL illness. You make terrible decisions. No one can expect you to make a good decision because the thing you use to make your decisions with is not working right. Everything seems to be going wrong and if anybody asks you why the only thing you can think of is a) life sucks or b) you suck ( are a failure/can’t do anything right/will never amount to anything, etc)

So a lot of my “rules” for what I consider my “normal life” get bent: healthy diet? Forget it. Recycling? Sure, if I happen to have the item in my hand and be walking by the bin. Anybody who doesn’t know that it’s possible for a perfectly intelligent person to lack the concentration to first find all the plastic bottles in and around their desk and then remember the way to the recycling center hasn’t really been in the pits of darkness. They’re just a poser. If I haven’t returned your phone call, I’m sorry, if I walked right past you on the street and didn’t see you, I apologize. And if you happened to see me one day when I forgot to wash my hair cheer up: at least I wasn’t wearing my underwear on the outside. At least I don’t think I was. If so, somebody! Send me an e-mail!

Once the emergency power is on –the focus on life support- the next thing to do is similar to what somebody who falls into a physical hole should do: try to stay calm. Anxiety goes with depression like peanut butter goes with jelly and this leads to the whole running into the walls/tripping over the stones/imagining that there are rats scenario. It won’t help. In fact, one of the best things to do is just be still and concentrate on whatever light is coming in from outside. If you don’t do anything for awhile, and your relapse has been brought about by something situational, wait it out and that situation might change. The person who is angry enough to kill you may calm down, the check might really be in the mail, your husband may learn to cook, your child may learn to back his own book bag and your elderly parent may tell you that since they couldn’t count on you to drive them to bingo they started walking and now they don’t need their blood pressure medication any more. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that I think it’s okay to just let everything go to hell and let somebody else worry about it – at least not forever. But really – does it make a big difference if something goes into the mail today or tomorrow? Other people may indeed be inconvenienced. Life is full of inconvenience. They’re gonna be even more inconvenienced if you freak out, have a nervous breakdown and they have to come scrape you off the ceiling with a spatula.

Then, once you’re calm you can start to look around yourself and find a way out of the hole. You still want to conserve your energy at this stage. You want to look for proven solutions. Before you take off climbing the wall see if you can’t get somebody to lower you a ladder. Or one of those baskets. Or some hot chocolate and cranberry scones or something. Mmm. See what I mean about forgetting the healthy diet?

Look, seriously, you want to consult a professional for help and get a time frame so you can ration your energy. So you know how long to expect to be in survival mode. In my case, it’s about three more weeks til I’ll have the full effect of the higher dose of medication. In the meantime, I’ll have the sleep study. As long as I don’t have to run a marathon for any reason I probably won’t have a stroke. As long as I continue to show up at work and do whatever is in front of me as well as I can I probably won’t get fired and I have paid vacation days and personal leave to take if I truly am afraid I’m going to fall asleep at the wheel or just start crying and not be able to stop….although, for me personally, I’m past crying and pretty far down the road to comfortably numb…..

Which reminds me: music helps. Exercise helps too, but it may be easier to find a cd and your cd player than it is to find your shoes, keys, pants and door – I think those are the minimum requirements for a human being outside these days. Oh, and a shirt if you’re a woman or you want to get service in a 7-11 on the way back from your walk.

After awhile the light will seem a little brighter, you’ll get a good idea, you’ll think of something or someone else will make a workable suggestion. Something will happen, it always does and even if it’s the worst thing…well, there’s still life on the other side of that too. You just have to keep on being long enough to find out what it is.