The Darkness, Part I

Okay, now that I've taken care of some administrative things, let me continue on the topic of the darkness. From what I've read, everyone has a name for it. I call it the darkness. There's a writer named Tracy Thompson who wrote a book about it called The Beast. For me, it's the darkness.

I don't remember the day the darkness came, but I remember the circumstance. It was a few months after my mom's mother died. Ever since both my grandfathers died around 1970, I've struggled with death and it's hit me harder than it should. This was no different. It would have been late 1999, probably close to Christmas.

I'd been sleeping horribly, averaging a little more than three hours of sleep per night. When I got to work in the morning, I just sat in the car. Sometimes I sat for as long as five or ten minutes before I got out. Just getting out of the car seemed a Herculean effort. And the effort to navigate the mine field at work was nearly as large.

At the time, I managed a group of five technical writers, one of whom did no work and was actively trying to get fired and the rest of whom more or less despised me. (Much of the blame for this is mine.) One of them was a guy in his fifties, and just the slightest request often escalated into a brawl. Not all of that problem was mine, as I found out when we crossed paths later, when I'd found equilibrium.

One Thursday afternoon, we'd gotten into it over something, only at the point where we normally went for each other's throats, we both stepped back. It was progress. It was also the last straw. The fight happened late in the day, and when I started to drive home, the last safety net of sanity broke.

The darkness was like a dark, incredibly cold presence within me and for the first time, it dominated me. All through the drive home, I had to physically restrain myself from driving my car into a tree as fast as I could. Some Christians consider hell a dark, cold place where the presence of God is completely removed. If that's the case, I felt a sliver of hell that afternoon.

The compulsion for self-destruction faded substantially that afternoon, and though it has been back since, it's never been nearly as strong.

Aside from the typical symptoms, the lack of drive or desire to do anything, the sleep changes, and the loss of interest, depression--for that's what the darkness is--robs you of the very tools you need to combat it. It robs you of perspective.

Imagine trying to maneuver through a maze, only this maze is filled with deep dark pits. And as you start out through the maze, you lose your depth perception. That's what depression is like. It fills you with self-doubt and you lose the ability to gauge how you're doing. The ability to determine whether you've been reasonable is stripped from you. What's more, your perception of what other people are thinking is taken, as well. So you wind up worrying that you're not doing the right things, but unable to tell use other peoples' reactions as a guide, as you are pretty much assured that you'll misinterpret them, too.

My ability to maneuver the maze was completely removed. Fortunately, that was the bottom. It got better from there. It got better with Celexa (more on that another time) and Zoloft, and with some minimal therapy. The darkness was controlled, but it never went away.