This is difficult to describe and harder to admit. I had been struggling for a while (when I look back at it now, a long while) with low-grade depression.
The first thing any doctor or mental health professional will ask someone dealing with depression is whether they are suicidal. In my case, the answer was no, but I was at the point where if I did die of more natural causes, I would have been OK with it.
The morning things came to a head I found myself forcing myself to go to work, with my stomach roiling and my soul feeling as if it were soaked in sludge. I had been in a similar place before several years ago, and that time my wife and supportive coworkers encouraged me to call my doctor. I did that, and was put on a low dose of anti-depressant medication. Things got better. But I hated taking the pills, and after a year or so, with my doctor’s OK, I stopped taking them.
This time around my wife again first noticed the cloud coming down.
“You don’t seem to enjoy anything any more,” she said.
I am an expert at self-delusion and denial, and I had a variety of excuses. I was training for a marathon and just tired, I said. Things will get better after that. Things are stressful at work. Things will get better when we go on vacation.
Things did not get better. Just talking, working and living took so much energy.
Finally, I just ran out of oomph and it seemed like something cracked in my psyche. I decided this feeling wasn’t normal. So I called my doctor and started to cry while trying to make an appointment, much to the consternation of the person at the other end of the line.
I am now on another anti-depressant, and I’ve attended a few counseling sessions. The medication took weeks to take hold, typical for most anti-depressants. The counseling sessions helped immediately, especially after the therapist gave me practical suggestions about how to deal with depression and anxiety.
She also told me that it was likely I have a form of depression called dysthymic disorder. When I looked it up on the Mayo Clinic website, the listed symptoms unfortunately read like my personality profile — hopelessness, lack of energy, fatigue, low self-esteem, trouble making decisions.
Oddly, that comforted me.
I’m lucky that my particular illness is not severe in the whole spectrum of the disease, and I have come to understand that it is an affliction and needs to be dealt with like any other ailment.
But the most striking thing to me is how important exercise is as a weapon against depression. I was struggling to run a couple of times a week just before the breakdown, and exercise alone wouldn’t have cured me. But now that I’m feeling better, I’ve got the energy to go for runs, walks and cross-country ski sessions.
I can’t even begin to describe the difference.
I’m not skipping up and down staircases, but the sludge is gone. My goodness, but that feels good. The whole experience has led me to reframe the way I look at exercise. Now I’m doing it primarily for mental fitness — physical fitness is the secondary goal.
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