A few years ago, I didn't think of myself as a person who had depression. Sure, I had days when I really didn't feel like getting out of bed. I could sometimes have low energy. I couldn't have really listed many things I looked forward to in a day. But I had two young kids! Stress, exhaustion, struggle — these things were just part of motherhood.
There were some other signs that something might be concerning about my mental health. Like that I definitely relied on evening wine to curb whatever it was I was feeling, that I could almost never get to sleep at night, and that, well, I just didn't feel quite happy. Really ever. Meh. Still, those things were all easy to brush off as variations of normal.
Things felt mundane but not agonizing — which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse.
That was, until a few years later, post-separation from my husband of eight years, when I found myself in a deep hole. I was undeniably depressed, so much that I took a little 72-hour hospital vacay, and realized, hoo-boy, I am dealing with some pretty gnarly depression, and it wasn't going to go anywhere unless I really dealt with it.
While I was only just feeling the full scope of that depression, I realized that it was something I'd be dealing with for just about my entire life, in some form or another. I just hadn't let myself acknowledge it, which was something that became exponentially harder to do after I had kids.
I am not exactly thankful for the deep, dark days that took me to the hospital. But I will say that (1) it was unavoidable, and (2) it did allow me to fully realize what was going on inside my head. That allowed me to confront it. If it hadn't gotten so bad and thus out of my control, I probably would've just allowed myself to continue living in an unhappy state. Maybe forever.
Here's the thing that's really tough about depression when you're a mom — and it's not even that we have more on our plates, which is also true. It's that it's tougher to pause for long enough to look at yourself and your mental state. You're so focused on making it through to the next day and doing what needs to be done, sometimes you don't even realize what's going on, or how you're really feeling. You're just moving along, hopefully forward, fingers crossed, hoping for the best.
It's probably why a lot of moms have depression that goes untreated. It's not that we don't notice it. I mean, we know we aren't fully happy. But we just think it's probably not worth acknowledging because, hey, life is hard and mothering is hard. What can really be done to change it anyway?
We don't imagine that simply being unhappy is a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. And we don't make the distinction that feeling unhappy, over and over, and struggling until things completely go off the rails, is, in fact, depression — not a bad day or a series of bad days.
For me, making that distinction did not come easily. I wish it hadn't taken so much to get there. But now I completely understand how and why that happened. I see it happening to other moms all the time — the acceptance of too much pain that they really don't have to keep on accepting.
I want to tell them to tune in.
Tuning in is hard when there are so many things going on around you. It's hard when you're a parent. But it's also hard because you might, like me, think you're already doing everything you possibly can to live your best life. You're taking care of your kids, making a healthy dinner a few times a week. Hell, maybe you're even exercising as much as humanly possible.
But that feeling, like there is no way out, like this hardness, this lack of motivation, this fear that you'll always be just a little bit sad — it's very real. It's very exhausting. And sometimes, it becomes completely debilitating.
For a lot of people, there's a breaking point. The rock bottom, so they say. It's the place where you begin to realize that you can't keep on existing the way that you're existing. And believe me, when you're really in the throes of depression, all it feels like you're doing is existing. You don't feel like you're actually living your life anymore. That thought is scary. Because it can turn into thoughts like What's the point? or Why am I even here?
I have been lucky because I've had huge revelations about depression in the past few years — both my own and just this mental health condition as a whole. And what I've realized is that you have to give yourself so much more than you ever realized. I mean that in just about every way possible. When you are depressed, you have to give yourself love and kindness. You have to remember to eat and to take deep breaths. And you have to give yourself the grace of saying, "This is real." That right there is huge. Because if you tell yourself that you're wrong, that you're weak, that this is somehow your fault, you're only going to bury yourself further.
I had known for my entire life that mental health issues, like depression and anxiety, ran deep in my family. And on some level I knew that I struggled with these things. But it was quiet, oh so quiet. I needed for it to get loud and unavoidable. I needed to fully fall apart. I needed to get close to the edge. Because that is how hard it is for so many people to simple say, even to themselves, "I have depression." Some of that is our societal view of mental illness. But when you're a mother, some of it is, plain and simple, not wanting to fail.
Fast-forward to two years post-hospital stint, and I am in a better place. I am never completely the other side of depression, though. It's always near. Sometimes, it just needs more attention than others. Sometimes, it's the only thing I can give my attention to. Sometimes, it creeps up and sits on my chest, and I, quite literally, can't budge until the worst is over. Sometimes I can pinpoint why it's happening, and other times there is no rhyme or reason.
But no matter what state I'm in, I never think of depression as a failure.
What I no longer do is deny that this thing exists in me. Not to myself or to anyone else. It's something I have to talk about, write about, and even remind myself to be conscious of and cater to on the regular. Is it work? Absolutely. But these days, it just feels like work I'm ready to do and work that I'm glad to do so that I can have joy in my life.
For the most part, I feel joy every day. When I was lost in the denial of the mundane but not terrible, I could never have said the same.
