I’ve been talking about Taiji, mental health, and me for the past week-and-a-half. Today, I want to tell you how I know that my depression is deepening. In the last post, I talked more about my family dysfunction. I kinda rushed it at the end because it was very late and I was very tired. You can tell because it abruptly ended with no real conclusion as to waht I was saying.
My point of that post was that abuse twists everything. And that sometimes it’s more complicated than one person is the abuser and the other person is the abused. I have always felt that was too simplistic, along with the idea that you can’t question anything an abused person does. The latter makes me very uneasy, but that is not the point of this post. I bring it up because the uncomfortable truth is that a person who is being abused can simultaneously abuse others. Especially in the case of parents.
It’s true. My father was emotionally abusive to my mother. He was awful to her. He cheated on her and didn’t bother hiding it. It was an open secret, but no way anyone could bring it up to him. Everyone in our church knew it and covered it up. Which was a separate issue. He was mean to my mother, dismissive of her, and treated her as unpaid help. She had to work full-time (which was strange for a Taiwanese man to demand, but in keeping with my father’s fear of being poor), do all the household chores, and take care of us kids as well.
My father was openly disdainful of her as a woman and a person. It was clear that he thought women were sub-human. I mean, he didn’t think much of other men, either, but at least he treated them as human beings. To a certain extent. It’s the alpha-male thing/social class thing. If a man was above him in some way, then my father would pay him at least nominal respect.
My brotehr is not the most observant of men, but even he noticed that my father treated us differently based on our gender. Again, it wasn’t as if he showed a lot of respect for my brother, but it was at least a whit more than he showed me (which was none). And he respected that my brother had expertise in at least one area–technology. Me? No.
Here’s a two-part illustration of this. I did not date before I was sixteen. There were a lot of reasons for it, and it did a number on my already scraping-the-floor self-esteem. My father, out of nowhere and apropos of nothing, offered me the following advice. He said, “If you want to get a boyfriend–” Here, I braced myself because I knew that whatever followed was not going to be good. Remember, we were not talking about dating or anything like this when he pulled this out. “You need to raise your voice an octave or two, let a boy beat you in a sport/game, and ask him to teach you something.” I was appalled. I retorted, “If that’s what it takes to get a boyfriend, then I’ll stay single for the rest of my life.”
I stand by that. In fact, it’s one of the reason s I don’t date. I am a terrible partner, and I revert to being my mother when I try to be one. It’s the only role model I’ve had, and the training is so hard to break. I am independent and happy to be on my own–until I start dating. Then I’m mentally obsessed with the other person. I try to keep it to myself, but it bleeds out in the weirdest ways.
So. How do I know that I’m depressed? Well, the short answer is taht I know myself well. The long answer comes in list form.
1. My sleep is shit.
I have had a long and tortuous history with sleep. The long and short is that it wasn’t until my medical crisis that I got any kind of decent sleep. Then, once that happened, I was able to sleep a tight eight hours a night. Which was unheard of for me. Truly. The most was 6 1/2 hours before that, and that was only with the aid of a decade-plus of Taiji.
Then, two years or so after the medical crisis, my sleep schedule started shifting again. I mean, It went back to going to bed around one or two and getting up at nine or ten before that, which I was fine with. But then it started pushing back even more. Then, my personal tragedy happened three months ago, followed by daylight savings. These two things combined have thrown my sleep schedule out the window. Now, I’m going to bed around five or six and getting up anywhere from four to ten hours later, depending. It’s disconcerting after having a steady eight-hours-a-night sleep every night for two years.
2. I feel like no one loves me.
I know this is not true. Objectively, I mean. And subjectively. I have friends and family who love me, and when I am feeling ok, I know this in my heart. However, when I start to feel that it’s not true or they don’t love me any longer or that maybe I should have just stayed dead, that’s when I know that the depression is creeping upwards.
It’s hard because my brain knows it’s not true, but my brain will then try to convince me it is true. I hate my brain sometimes. It’s my worst enemy on my bad days. When I came back from the dead, I was filled with love for and from my friends. (And a few family members.) I was soaking in and soaking up the love. I was so grateful to be alive. I t was pretty neat to hear my friends and family say how much they love me (or, in the case of my brother, show it by doing things ofr me) and that they were glad they hadn’t lost me.