Blister

I can’t pinpoint when it happened. I don’t know why it happened either. But what I do know is that a blister formed inside of me. I can feel it in my chest. Everything that rubs against it irritates it and therefore, me. Little things that shouldn’t be hard, feel hard. And each little thing that occurs which rubs against that blister, makes me want to give up on the day. By noon, I could go back to bed, pull the covers over my head, and stay there until at least 9am the next morning. Then by noon that blister would be weeping from the smallest of irritants. And I’d just do that cycle over. But I don’t. My doctor says this is because I’m a woman and women can compartmentalize. That resonates with me. He says that women keep going, they hold all the rage in from those irritants because they don’t want to hurt others and they feel a strong sense of responsibility to do what needs to be done. Thus…the blister. This is also why women often don’t reach out for help with depression. We tend to think that since we haven’t given up, we keep doing the things we need to do, and we don’t go to bed at noon that we aren’t depressed. But as I found out yesterday…that just simply is not true.

I am depressed. It’s funny isn’t. How the grace we give to others comes so easy. Yet giving that same grace to ourselves is almost excruciating. For me, it’s not about shame because I do not subscribe to shame. For me it’s just that I literally don’t know what to do with depression and I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t really want to take meds. I don’t like taking meds. And as my doc, who I trust and like very much, said…” we’ve never screwed with your brain before, and now we are”. And I don’t really like that idea much. But, last week, in a moment of sheer desperation I went online and made an appointment and for the reason I put “concerns about my mental health”. The triage nurse called me the next day. We talked. I told her about last year. She moved my appointment up by more than a week. When my doctor came in, he hugged me then listened to me for 45 minutes. We cried together, he said, “you need some help”. I nodded. The tears flowed.

I’ve always been good at finding resources to help myself. But what I noticed is that, although they were there for me, and although I was grasping for them…. like sand, they slipped through my fingers. And the blister formed. And everything that touches it hurts. And everything touches it. But the hurt doesn’t bring tears, it brings anger and exhaustion and irritability like I’ve never experienced. The world gets the best of me because my conscious won’t allow anything else. But I get the worst of me. And the blister holds it all.

I could see what was coming. I’m intuitive enough to know…that blister was going to eventually explode. What a mess that might cause. And that’s what lead me to make that appointment, led me to be brutally honest with my doctor, led me to the pharmacy window to pick up the low dose anti-depressant. My hope is that the blister will begin to slowly dissolve. That I will be able to grasp and hold onto the resources I am immensely privileged to have available to me.

This journey is meant for me. I have been rejecting it. The depression is part of that journey and the lessons I’m meant to learn. And now to sound like a petulant child, but I don’t want to. But I will. But I don’t want to. But I will.