my depression story | The Off Parent The Off Parent

Since My Last Confession

It’s been awhile. Um, and I’d like to tell you it’s been pleasant, or productive. It has had moments, but mostly I fell off a cliff.

I’m not sure exactly what kicked in to release the flood of … Depression, Fear, Lonliness… I put them all with capital letters, because it has been a bear crawling back out of the abyss. I fully expected, as I closed my last post, to pick things up and stick with the honest revelations. And… NOT. My creative flow doesn’t work that way. And I simply shut it all down.

In some ways I was crashing back into my divorce again. The rage that I have expressed here, turning into feelings of shame and regret. Why would I vent so furiously? I must’ve been nuts putting this much emotion and pain out there. How embarassing.

And what now, has changed my mind? What elements of life have brought me back to life? There is so much to tell.

Let’s start about the time the wheels fell off. I was struggling to finish my last post here (Loneliness. Fessing Up When Things Hurt for No Apparent Reason) and was fairly self-aware of what was happening, and still unable to avert the plummet. It wasn’t one thing that was freaking me out, it was several.

The biggest fear-factor for me was money. What I thought I had a month before had failed to materialize. And I went from self-confident (and perhaps arrogant) to despondent and lost. When the ability to pay your credit cards begins to fall off the map, things get a bit stressful. And they had been falling off for months. The prospect of work was keeping me afloat. And as the client continued to stall, my grip on the positive side of EVERYTHING began to loosen.

It wasn’t a dramatic pop, more of a sigh, as I let go of the cliff of Mazlow’s hierarchy and slipped back into the base plan of survival. Trips to pick up the kids at my former house became harder. My longing for a woman who did not love me back, continued to fester, even in the contradiction of my own awareness and good counseling. And my desperation about my own situation, probably emotional more than financial, began to turn bleak indeed.

I laughed at my unrational mind as I walked through our up-scale grocery store. On one side of the unattainable relationship model, was the yoga-fresh women in their mid-morning workout stride, flashing teeth, thin and evolved athletic legs, and lulu lemon outfits that cost more than my car payment. And on the other side was the obese cleaning lady standing in the customer service line. Neither extreme seemed attainable. And thus I felt hopeless in my contemplations of how I would EVER find a woman, another woman, to be with. I wanted to crawl back into what I knew before. To collapse in the sturdiness of my ex-y, irregardless of the cost.

So I was out of my mind.

And I could not seem to put any of the puzzle pieces of my life back together again. So I did what I do. I isolated. I shut down. I became very quiet. But I was hoping to be found and rescued. I knew that. I was nose diving into “fuck you” while hoping for a hand to reach out and scoop me up. I was emotionally about five years old.

Sincerely,

The Off Parent

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