Truth. Lies.

I've decided something.

It's not popular to be depressed. It might even make you uncomfortable to hear about my experiences with it.

But this is what's going on in my life right now. I started this blog partly to keep in touch with you and partly to chronicle my life. The friend in me needs to be honest with you; and the autobiographer in me is loathe to gloss over the Grand Canyon in my mental landscape. So there you have it. If this offends you, part of me is sorry, but the other part has learned that you can never, ever keep everyone happy and mostly you just end up compromising your values when you try.

So here goes: the truth.

The truth about depression (at least for me) is that it's really hard to hold on to the truth. The part of me that is me knows some things to be true. I have friends, I am a good-enough person, I do my job decently, there are some people who miss me and won't mind seeing me again when I come back.

Depression distorts that truth, rips it up into tiny shreds and replaces it, violently, with a different one. Depression takes a hammer and pounds at you where you are most vulnerable, and it knows where you are most vulnerable because in some twisted, backwards way it is you. It stages a coup of everything you've known before. It mutinies and makes yourself walk the plank.

What it does to me is line you all up like bowling pins and pluck you off one by one. "She doesn't like you! Look what she wrote!" "He hates you - look, he didn't write!" "They barely even notice you're gone!" It hammers me exactly where it hurts the most. It's logical, rational and right. At least it tries to convince me that it's right, and they're good arguments - they should be; they come from my own brain. And if my own brain wants to be self-destructive, it knows exactly where to start.

So there are all these truths dancing around inside my head, purporting to be real, chanting and shouting incessantly. It gets dizzying. Sometimes it's like standing on the edge of a swirling vortex of faux-truths. After a while it's damn hard to sort out which ones are true-truths. You try all sorts of gimmicks to stay sane - asking your friends what the truth is (but when the distorted truths tell you that your friends all hate you, it's awfully hard to turn to them when you're most vulnerable), reading all that stuff you used to write about yourself (which now feels like lies, all of it)...

Do you ever notice how many millions of decisions you make every day? Which clothes to put on, which sock to put on first, which shampoo to choose in the shower, which way you walk to work, which answer to give, what to do next? Try making these decisions when there are two or ten or a thousand opposite truths vying for place in your head. "Indecisiveness" is a symptom of depression. Now I know why.

I'm starting to reevaluate literature too. You know how they say that the famous impressionists were not so much artistic geniuses as just extremely near-sighted? Well... Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? I could write that book right now. It doesn't feel like fiction. There are days when It wins and I wreak a path of angry destruction in the relationships that are most cherished. And the next day, when sanity returns and I can tell the truth from the lies again, I find mounds of hurt friends and damaged feelings in my wake. How many times can I rage and cling before the friends give up and move on?

And Martin Luther. Simul justus et peccator - his theory of how we are all simultaneously saints and sinners. Yeah, I can relate to that one in spades right now. They say he was depressed most of his adult life, searching desperately for a merciful God, lamenting his shortcomings, hating himself and calling it holy. Been there.

It's a gamble, waking up. You never know what kind of a day it will be - will the medication have created a blessedly neutral blank slate? Or will the constant thrumming in the background of my mind have stepped up its pace until its drumbeat marks the course of my day?

Meg in "A Wrinkle in Time," fighting against the incessant, pounding external "truth" of It which tries to hammer her into submission; I cheer her on with every scrap of sanity I can muster.