Psssst. I Have a Secret. Want to Know? It May Make You Feel Less Alone.
By Joanne Jarrett MD
I hope learning my secret makes you or a loved one feel less alone, more understood. Every depression has its unique beginning, progression, path. Mine has been with me off and on since my teen years. But I didn’t look it in the face until decades later. This is my story.
This story started as an article that I wrote and published as a guest post on another blog over a year ago. I wasn’t ready for “my people” to hear it then. I am now. In light of the recent rash of suicides and the ever-expanding reach of mental illness, I feel that although the topic is heavy, it is time for us all to be brave enough to do what we can to help each other. It’s a five-minute read. I hope it helps either you or someone you love.
I love my husband. Not in a common way. This love is an earth shattering, jigsaw puzzle fit, Hallelujah Chorus kind of love. I look at him and just reel with the awe of our having found each other. We have a mutual respect that sees us through conflict and a collective sense of humor that keeps us laughing. And yet, I have a disease that, at its worst, made me want to turn away. Not from him, but from his need of me. From my role in his life. My emotional reserve was so shallow that by afternoon, anything but solitude felt like an assault. I was obligated and determined to meet the needs of my daughters, and after doing my best with that, I had nothing left for him.
I love my kids. My highest ambition had always been to be a wife and a mom. We waited 6 long years to have our two girls, and they are more than I ever could have designed. So much more. Yet this vicious, lying thief of a disease left me walking the other way when I heard their sweet footsteps. “Please don’t need me. Please don’t need me” on repeat in my unwell mind.
I love my parents and my sister. They love and support me unconditionally and have never wavered in showing me. Never. But I hid my disease from them. The energy it would take to explain and reassure alluded me, leaving me in a selfish lie of omission which would, were the tables turned, hurt me deeply.
I love my God. Since the age of 3, I have had an abiding, life-giving faith in my Creator. Yet this disease flattened my resolve and dulled my hope. I never lost faith, yet I didn’t seek God for help.
I love my friends. And yet I withdrew from almost all of them. I felt I had nothing to give, most times feeling already scraped clean, turned inside out, and shaken empty by just the basic responsibilities of daily living.
Every depression has its unique beginning, progression, path. Mine has been with me off and on since my teen years. I was in a juvenile relationship that ended in rejection, and the effect that had on my mental state was way out of proportion to the situation. In retrospect, that was my first bout. Then I was in college in Seattle and began feeling spent, worn thin part way through the day. This was uncharacteristic for my typically high energy, determined self. I didn’t know what it was then. I kept thinking that if I could just get more sleep, I’d be fine. I limped by, graduated, and moved back to our huge, bright Reno skies and the challenge of medical school, and I returned to myself. Medical school and residency brought their own built-in anxieties, but that dark cloud and inexplicable worn-thin feeling didn’t return until after I had my first baby at age 31. With the sleep deprivation and new-found responsibility, it seemed expected. I wasn’t as happy as I had envisioned being, but I was exhausted from 60-minute sleep intervals and all that comes with being a new parent. The storm cloud didn’t take up residence again until around 40. With no warning or reason, the skies went gray and the bottom fell out of my heart despite all the love I had in my life. Premature ovarian failure, or early onset menopause, confused the picture. I had hot flashes, a brain full of cobwebs, an inability to multitask, and a short anger fuse. I couldn’t find my cheerful, high-functioning, energized self anywhere. Prescription hormones helped some. I thought they should fix everything, so I waited to feel normal again. I waited for 2 years, telling no one. The feeling was one of inexplicable, deep, all-encompassing defeat.
A turning point for me was reading a blog article from CupofJo.com entitled The Hardest Two Months of My Life. In the telling of the author’s own self-realization, she says, “The funny thing about depression is that you don’t know that it’s depression — like, chemical imbalance in your brain, or a hormonal crash. You just think it’s your actual life–that your career really IS ending, that you really ARE a terrible mother, that your husband really WILL stop loving you, that friends DO think you’re boring…When you’re depressed, you don’t realize that your life actually is fine–you’re simply sad because you’re depressed. The depression is the reason for the depression.” The depression is the reason for the depression. I began thinking about how I have a significant family history of clinical depression and about how no matter what I fixed, I never felt better. Her description of the experience, the feeling, the mind-set rang so true to me that I felt I was reading words I myself had written.
When I finally decided to confide in a friend and in my husband, they were both blind-sided. I am a great pretender. How could I have looked so normal to those closest to me when inside, my cup was emptying faster than it could be filled and springing new leaks every day? It was as if the appearance of being okay was all I could control, all I had left of my former self.
I resisted medication because I was afraid I’d lose my “edge.” This was a lingering fear from the residency days when I was convinced that one of the reasons I was a good doctor was because of the fault line my anxiety kept me straddling. I thought my anxious perfectionism was my superpower. But, in truth, depression blunted my edge. I had no energy and was so quick to think, “I just don’t care.” I never contemplated suicide. But I did sometimes wonder how having me around in this state was irreparably, if subtly, harming my kids. And I often thought that it would be a relief to just be done. Waves of despair hit me at the oddest times. I’d often find myself carting through Walmart, willing myself not to cry while calmly consulting my shopping list. At every point in my past, if something was scary or hard, I would simply approach it with the requisite level of vigor, determination, and focus and then presto! Mind-over-matter would prevail. I prided myself on my mental heartiness, my ability to avoid shrinking in the face of fear. But “mind-over-matter” could not fix this. Love could not fix this. It was a first, and it was a blow. Grit and strength of will had failed me, and love, rather than being a savior, felt like another way to fail.
I eventually found a combination of exercise, adequate sleep, and medication which has me back at center. There is no such thing as a happy pill or quick fix. Sometimes I’m happy and sometimes I’m sad, but with medication and good self-care, I can reach happy. And when I’m sad, it’s about something sad, not about something trivial or for no reason at all.
This story has no tidy conclusion. My life is an ongoing, messy combination of joy, love, faith, disappointment, struggle, and striving just like yours. I’m telling it so that you or someone you love might feel less alone, a little more understood, armed with the language to describe their invisible battle. I write it so that those that have the gift of sound mental health might remember that a person who looks completely together may be drowning.
Joanne Jarrett is a family physician on her 17th year of maternity leave. She is a loungewear designer who sells her line of cozy clothes at ShelfieShoppe and hosts a podcast called Fancy Free where she and her guests tell their most embarrassing funny stories so they all feel less alone in their imperfections. She lives in rural Montana with her husband and two teenage daughters and is also a reluctant part time assistant and office manager for her husband’s mobile endodontic practice.
