An Episode of Depression: A Raw Outlook
The night I finished my cause or effect essay, I went to sleep after reading a chapter of Anthropology and I left my computer open on the desk in my office. I thought everything would be fine I had a few days to submit the assignment and I would have time to make a few changes. My husband didn’t realize he hadn’t shut the door completely after he used the office. He comes home late and studies even later into the night while I sleep. Afterward, my nine-month-old cat Teddy broke into the office and slept on the keyboard. Somehow, which is still a mystery to me, she triggered an upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 10, which didn’t successfully upgrade the driver packs. In the end, my computer had to be completely reformatted to factory settings. I slipped into an extreme fit of depression that lasted almost a month with some lingering effects.
I use my computer to read my textbooks, watch the news on YouTube, and practice freewriting on my Goodreads.com account which was easily retrieved. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I was able to clean my house for a few extra hours and I slept more due to falling into the emotional “Pit of Despair,” (The Princess Bride, 1984). I found that I was too dependent on my computer. This, in turn, led me to look for different avenues to print out my study guides and handouts; reply to discussion questions; or to take quizzes on Canvas. I still feel inadequate for the loss of the time trying to fix my PC and managing only with a smartphone. I dislike reading on a tiny screen with my poor eyesight. I have my office set up just so and if one thing malfunctions my productivity flatlines. My computer had lost all my files, pictures, games, and programs. I’ve had the computer for about five years with very few problems, so I was devastated by the loss of the pictures which were of my children and recently deceased grandmother. I also lost many poems, short stories, essays, and journal entries that weren’t backed up on an online cloud. All my hard work; gone!
My mother likes to compare me to Henny Penny, the sky is always falling, and I never realize that it was only an acorn. As a result, I show my stress by how clean my house is. If the furniture has been rearranged it means that I’ve been having a complete emotional crisis. Memories and thoughts catch up and then they begin to spiral. This led me to fall behind in my required reading because two of my textbooks were inaccessible. My datebook was the only way that I kept myself on track. When I fall behind my mind tells me that I’m inadequate, I’m not good enough, they were right that I couldn’t go back to school. I stress and procrastinate more. I try my Focus: Pomodoro app but I just couldn’t concentrate. I would fold clothes in the living room and get distracted by the dishes while I was putting dish towels away, then the dryer would beep. I would run from task to task doing a lot yet accomplishing very little. This made me realize that my children aren’t ready to be self-sufficient yet because neither wholly finish their assigned chores or caused more work by leaving their cups, school papers, and snack wrappers in the family room. My children walk next door to do household chores, when they don’t have band practice, for my mother. I’m left in the moral quandary is it enabling bad habits by me doing their chores or asking too much for them to do double of the same chore that they help their grandmother with?
It also wasn’t helpful to bottle up grief, for over a year I had prolonged grieving over my grandmother’s death from Alzheimer's. I was her part-time caretaker in the last few months and was numb when she passed. This semester, my father had quadruple bypass surgery and a separate surgery to implant an internal defribulator. Little did we know he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's; the surgeries progressed the symptoms. This time has been full of unease for my entire family but to me, it seems like a reoccurring nightmare. On my husband’s day off, which are few, he was finally able to fix my computer. Then Murphy's Law decided to apply itself to my life directly, resulting in a tooth breaking off at the gum line and a filling in another tooth came out within days of each other. The following week my car broke down. Leading up to turkey day and no school for a week.
The week of Thanksgiving I got away from it all. I went walking twice to pick up aluminum cans, in all I walked four and a half miles. I took my time the first day, but I started back early on my second walk. I didn’t bother getting the litter on the walks; although, I plan to go again once finals are over. I collected over twenty-two pounds in a little less than six hours. It was a good thing I did this; it was a good way to put my thoughts in order and I was able to do something constructive. I listened to The Federalist Papers by John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton; going one way and walking back on the opposite side of the road I listened to a humorous book called Kill the Farm Boy by Kevin Hearn and Delilah S. Dawson. The landscape certainly changed in Ohatchee since the last time I beat the streets. In my Human Development course, it calls this mourning, grief work, and acceptance. Later I remembered Terry Pratchett wrote in I Shall Wear Midnight, “She heard him mutter, ‘Can you take away this grief?’ ‘I’m sorry,’ she replied. ‘Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.’”
When I returned home after the second walk, I had a good cry; put on my favorite anime One Piece; ate the last piece of pumpkin pie; and proceeded to bed. I watched the harrowing adventure of a pirate chasing his dream of being the pirate king, gathering crew members, and facing the underlying social issues of the places his crew visited. The next morning, I woke up feeling not great but better. I ate the frog and finished one assignment at a time. It was enough to focus on just that day and that’s how I’ve had to take things. The AA motto: “One day at a time.” I would only add; a datebook helps. I took the time and filled in all the important dates the first week of class using the syllabi from my instructors.
Coming back to school has taught me new ways to cope with my anxiety and depression, but this course taught me the most. I learned something new in every lesson that I didn’t know before such as learning how to cite a source. Learning the structures of essays will help me move forward in the next writing comp class. The discussion question due dates in my datebook kept me tethered and kept me from throwing my hands up in the air and giving up. Many thanks.
written in November 2019 for EH101 as a reflective essay