Lies Between Us, podcast episode #27
Drawing by Lex De La Rue
How do we even begin to define depression? Well, from where I sit it appears to be an unsettled emotional state that crosses over into a physical ailment, brought on by a belief of being held down or pushed aside.
Under mild conditions we are perhaps agitated, self-loathing, and unhopeful. Advancing then to moderate levels, a helplessness arrives, we seem to seek shelter in the negative, and even our once happy places are then shuttered, verifiably closed for the season. Moving then to extremes, we ourselves become a human snowball, mostly on autopilot and freefalling downhill. Earlier helpless conditions evolve to hopelessness, we abandon interest of self-care, and our internal voice begins a shutdown sequence.
Not all of us even survive level one of such darkness.
For me, this shit is as real as real can be, well, close enough anyway. You may have tuned in enough to know that I lost my dear niece Lexie on September 11th in 2017, when she turned a shotgun upon herself with accuracy, game over. Lexie was a ridiculously bright and sparkling star on earth for all her 25 years, now relegated to a flickering far-away entity in the night’s sky. She was way apart from crazy, operated soundly as a dynamic self-employed business lady, and held an advanced art skill. Lexie’s suicide note still presides on her Facebook wall, and such is a rather sensible however harrowing tale of her conscious search for solace after being pursued by monsters for much of her life.
Perhaps the acceptance and marketing I promote for depression is because the ultimate state of dark has brushed me threateningly close. Within this pod episode, I attempt to explain the what and the why of the previous sentence.
The very day when Lexie won the war against her monsters, I was actively pursuing a way out of my own misery. When my favorite middle sister Beth called me frantic with the news that Lexie was dead, I accepted it as a sign. Literally, I believed Lexie was inviting me to join her. Just months prior, two publicly famous individuals also took their lives in dramatic fashion, best friends Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington, so once Lexie was gone, it felt to be the perfect storm and time for me to finally jump overboard and into the stormy sea, no life jacket.
By my accounts, Lexie suffered much because of trauma encountered in her early childhood. Knowing a thing or three about adverse childhood experiences myself, I see that much of my own unsteady footing is because of missing safety and love in my youth, meaning I entirely missed that shit under the age of eight.
So, after recently escaping the grasp of my seventh great bout with depression, I have chosen to open more on the subject. Here I divulge never shared detail, as well as uncover some of what affords me the tactics to NOT accept an early termination of my human operating system.
Once more and again, why do I do these things? Why, so to help, because some of our humanoid experiences contain crossover, or withhold some slight similarities that we can all learn from. And if one of us holds some insight, I believe it is best to give it away, even when unpopular or painful to do so.
But can we not just figure shit out on our own and skip the drama? Do we need such hard topics to be spewn out in front of us, isn’t this detrimental to our optimism and inner light? Maybe, but not for me. I would rather know too much than too little because I know how coming up short feels and it sucks, it sucks extremely.
‘Early termination’ seems like a really bad idea, but when consumed by it, early termination doesn’t appear as painful, but rather sounds like relief.
