The Depression Vacation

During my 2015 in-patient psychiatric hospitalization, something clicked during my last day of art therapy, and my teacher gave me the tools to try something different with emotions, draw them.

This is one the pieces I drew after my discharge. 

Whereas I was open with some of my other dark drawings at the time, posting on social media, few people saw this one. I was and am still rather ashamed of my hospitalization history.  However, recently I posted it on Facebook, with the following text:   

In recent years, people hinted a sense of jealousy or tell me I am lucky that I get time to indulge in self care while they are forced to stay disciplined and attend to life’s responsibilities. Being sick is not a vacation and trying to find ways to heal from being sick is not glamorous or enviable. I’ve worked for years while sick, attending to not only life’s responsibilities but crises after crises. Few people are making a choice when they take a time out, unless it’s the choice not to die. Even if you’ve been depressed, be careful how you relate to others. Some of us have been sicker than others.

One time, I desperately was trying to explain the depths of my depression to a close friend, and relying on the old trope of I can’t get out of bed and face the day.  She replied to me, but, no one wants to get out of bed, no one wants to go to work, and we all still do it. 

What I have come to understand, if we give into our illness, if we stop participating in life in the highly functional way expected of us, we are just indulging in the desires everyone has, that they are too strong, stubborn to give into.  We are taking a vacation. 

If we are so depressed, that we stop getting out of bed, that we stop eating, that we watch tv blankly for hours —- as I said in “What Sticks” post people are jealous, and think, “how lovely!”

If we take a day off work, when we start to relapse, we are told, “how good of you to be proactive and engage in self-care.”  And those who are still hard at the grind, they are jealous of the time we have given ourselves, time that their life doesn’t offer them.

If we provide a medical diagnosis for our ailments, to get accommodations, others entertain the idea, that they too deserve such things, they need to improve their mental health, who doesn’t? We are all stressed and burned out. 

During one my medical leaves, my therapist told me to plan an activity everyday, just one, to get myself out of the house.  We were trying to avoid another hospitalization, and while I needed to stop working, isolating myself at home was not the answer either.  So I got on this website coursehorse.com and I started signing up for stuff.  Art classes, dance classes, knitting classes, improv classes, museum exhibitions.  I dragged myself dutifully to all of these things, when at any moment during them I wanted to collapse in the corner in the fetal position.

Sounds like a pretty awesome vacation, right?  Aren’t you jealous?

I had hoped to find a job, a job that would be all the things my last jobs were not, that would give me that sense of purpose and utility that I desire, and heal me from the trauma of the past.  But I haven’t found it, so I’m “freelance” and abroad, so now people really really think my life is a fucking vacation.  As I said in “Living my Best Life” – they read into my photos a story that isn’t there.  And they are jealous. 

When people were angry about my depression, when my family got so angry at my dark thoughts, at my desire to commit suicide, as much as it hurt, it made sense to me. 
When people resented my depression, felt like own problems were trivialized and they had no space to bring them up, as much as it hurt, that also made sense to me.

When people are jealous and think my depression is a vacation, I want to say go fuck yourselves.