THE INSIDIOUS VOICE OF DEPRESSION
The darknes comes at night, or in the morning, or sometimes the late afternoon, in that liminal time between daytime and nighttime. It doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care that I have work to finish or that I should wash the dishes stacked in the sink or that I need to check in on how my two boys’ distance-learning schoolwork is going. It doesn’t care that, after seven months of mostly staying at home, I have already been examining the uglier recesses of my psyche.
It comes fast and hard, and it’s nearly impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced the weight of anxiety and depression. But I will try. If you imagine the excitement, anticipation, and joy of a forthcoming event—seeing a loved one, going to a concert, attending an awards ceremony, a day of skiing or snowboarding in powder—and then you invert that feeling, you will have some idea of what the experience is like, for me at least. Rather than butterflies in your stomach and a hit of dopamine or endorphins, it feels like a shroud has been dropped over your senses. Sometimes there’s a triggering event: a small conflict at home, a particularly challenging day at work, an unsettling segment on the evening news. Sometimes there’s not. Sometimes when I wake up, it’s just there. When it’s really bad, the colors in my field of vision dim.
I frequently notice this desaturation of the world when I’m driving to work, when we used to do that kind of thing. To get to my office in LoDo, I drive up Speer Boulevard from my neighborhood south of downtown, and it’s as though everything outside the windshield is dulled—the green trees that line Cherry Creek, the blue Colorado sky, the contrasting white clouds. They all run together in muted shades, as if a child blended the colors of his paints a little too carelessly. Nothing seems to cut through the gray. A
