That Sneaky Little D

That Sneaky Little D

 

Depression. What did you think I was going to say???

The awful truth of the matter is that I couldn’t talk to anyone about this. I couldn’t find the words. That’s what some people don’t understand is that sometimes depression doesn’t have words. It’s just a presence. It just IS. The ugly truth is, we don’t talk about it because until someone finds the words to explain the… the… even now I can’t find the words. It goes beyond a feeling and can only be explained by what it leaves in its wake: tiredness beyond comprehension that reaches into your bones and sucks not only the energy but the life out of you, the meals lost to the sleep and the pain, the embarrassment over having to tell someone, or worse yet not telling someone, then them finding out later and blaming you for not telling them.

The mortality rate of an autistic adult is staggering. Don’t Google it. Seriously, don’t. We talked about it in one of our groups, and at the time, I hadn’t noticed the depression creeping into my life, so I was just a supportive community member being empathetic towards my fellow peers who were creeping towards the age most high functioning adults don’t live past.

This morning, I woke up and decided to do things that scared me. I’m meeting with a friend tomorrow in person. I’ve only done that one time since burnout so far. It lasted less than an hour, and I was completely unmasked, and this was a friend I knew for a while. Tomorrow will be a friend I will be meeting for the first time in person. We have talked online for quite a while now, supporting each other, sharing memes, making jokes.

What’s weird is how quickly I can pick up on someone’s strengths and identity in life, and yet my own remains a mystery to me. I was just living my life until this revelation that what I was truly living was a mixture of depression, making other people like me and trying to fit in, and some of what really makes me happy. As a child growing up in church, I had prophesied over me that I would have “a spirit of achievement,” and I have tried to live up to that every day. In spite of all the tragedies that have happened in my life, there has always been someone there to bless me. My life has run relatively smoothly, and I am beyond privileged for the friends and family I have in my life. Sure, I’ve had to ask friends for money when my savings ran out and I was between jobs, but I’ve never had to sleep on the streets. I never had to wonder where my next meal was coming from or work deathly ill because there was no other choice.

Life just seemed to flow around me. I never thought I was actively living it. Growing up, I moved where my family moved, did what my family did. In college, I went to the one with the lowest bottom line, which happened to be my dream college. My internship turned into a job, my housing was perfect and from the newspaper for goodness sake! I came out just in time to go to the annual Gay Christian Network conference in Pittsburgh, PA where I stayed with my host family for months after the car crash when I needed a place, any place, in the United States to move to. They shared from what they had and were happy to do it because they were simply great people. I met people and ended up at a job just a few blocks away from my now husband lived at the time. My life just flowed from one thing to the next to the next around me.

Who am I without molding myself into the expectations of others? I have to snap myself out of depression, get myself out of bed (figuratively) and start answering it.