Anniversaries

We all have anniversaries. There are those we celebrate: weddings; births; the day we met someone special; the year we graduated ~ all happy occasion.

But that are also anniversaries that we don't celebrate: deaths; sickness; major accidents; the end of relationships. We generally just suffer through those alone.

Now never having been married and never having had a child, I can't speak to whether these good anniversaries cause you to relive all of the wonderful emotions that you felt with the actual event. I do, however, have more than my share of the bad type and it seems that no matter how far you get from them, the emotion and the pain still return on the date, just like clockwork.

There's a day in October that my mother refers to as the worst day of her life. It was the beginning of 12 horrible days in my life and my family basically holds their breath around me, willing me to be strong and not feel sucked back to that time. It will be 14 years this October. I was surprised last year when my mother told me it was the worst day of her life ~ it wasn't the worst day of mine, I've had much worse. But I suppose they're right to tread lightly. We measure this distance as linear, year by year, that we traveled away from something. On the 9 year anniversary, I was overcome by a horrible anxiety. What if it's really cyclical and not linear and instead of being 9 years away, I'm coming back to being in the year before? Now that's a frightening thought ~ being doomed to relive some of the worst experiences of your life because time never truly moves you away from them anymore than it brings you back.

Today is a bad anniversary. A year ago today, I had been out of work on disability for 4 weeks. My doctors felt that the reduction in stress and the removal from the truly toxic work environment where my supervisor was seriously out to get me (among other people ~ I had just been of special interest lately) would be enough to stem the symptoms of my illness. They had convinced me that removing myself from that situation would end the freefall that I was experiencing. It was June 2nd that I took stock of my condition and myself and realized that not only was I not getting better, but I was getting worse.

If you have never experienced major depression, let me assure you. There is nothing more terrifying than a freefall. You never actually hit bottom, because there is no bottom. That's the ugly lesson that depression will teach you. And the further you fall, the less of you remains. William Styron once wrote (and I'm paraphrasing) that the mind becomes so overwhelmed calculating its own pain that it does nothing else. You basically have a ringside seat to watching your personality, the things in your life that defined you and everything disappear. In the end, your body is taken over by some shadow of your former self that haunts your former life.

So a year ago today, in complete panic, I spent the day on the phone, trying to get a hold of my psychiatrist, telling the receptionist in his office that explaining the etiquette of scheduling follow up appointments while I was in the office was going to do neither of us any good at this point, trying to explain that being suicidal did not necessarily mean I needed to go to the ER, I just needed to adjust my medication, if they could just put me in touch with my doctor. At 4 o'clock, when I still hadn't heard from my doctor, my sister provided the only thing that put a smile on my face the whole day. When I told her that he still hadn't returned my calls, she responded, completely deadpan, Maybe he's just not that into you..

Finally, at 6pm, a phone call from my doctor. 24 hours later we had altered one drug in my cocktail and I had gained optimism.

One year later and I'm still taking that same cocktail. I need to find a new doctor since I moved halfway across the country and it's not an easy task or one I look forward to. The optimism, not so much there anymore. It's hard to feel clear of something in such a short period of time, even though I know I'm doing much, much better. The anniversary just knocks me a little off kilter.