Sometimes people get confused because I'm a chronic optimist despite living under the cloud of depression for so many years. Admittedly, this confusion is understandable since it only makes sense that an illness which robs you of a hopeful perspective of the future would make a person - well - less than hopeful about the future. Lack of rose-colored-glasses and all that. But I feel like looking on the brighter side has, for me, been the natural consequence of spending years searching and searching (and searching!) for the light even when it doesn't appear to be there.
If there's a problem, I think it'll be all right. My life is on fire? Oh, it's not that bad, I can make a new one. Oh, my academic career has been destroyed by my illness? That's okay, I'll find something else to do with my life. Oh, I lost my job? Well, that's not ideal, but I've been meaning to make a change anyway.
Having said that, if I smudge a freshly-painted manicure, nothing will ever be okay again because this is the end of the universe, so I think I'll just sit on the floor and sob hysterically for 20 minutes. I think what I'm mostly lacking isn't a sense of optimism so much as a little perspective.
Anyways, when I heard that having rTMS was a possibility, I was already thinking we are trying something new, and it will work. I was fully prepared for it to work spectacularly well. And it did: it gave me moments of clarity and feelings of well-being that were beyond even my expectations. I feel truly blessed that it worked so well for me. And when I had the opportunity to try adjusting my medication levels to try and alleviate some of my lingering exhaustion and bursts of inexplicable sadness, give me back a little pep-in-my-step, of course I jumped on it. It is a great plan, and this time we are going to go all the way and it will totally work, especially while I'm still in the consolidation period following rTMS.
Well, as it turns out, not so much. Of course, there's always a period of adjustment while medications are being changed, and that's only to be expected. But it might be that more of a good thing is sometimes just too much. I hate to admit defeat, in anything, but sometimes it just has to be done. I was wrong, universe: it is not a smooth line upward - though I do believe that upward will be the ultimate trajectory. Sometimes, it's just hard when the direction is more sideways than you were hoping for.
It's easy to tell people you're doing poorly - that you need their visits, their prayers, their support, and their offers of fresh fruit - when you are so sick that you're an inpatient in a psychiatric unit. It's another to tell people you're struggling when you're doing so much better. You, as well as everyone who has rallied around you, need the story with the happy ending. You need the recovery story. You need to tell it to yourself, and so you tell it to everyone around you. I am doing so much better. I am recovering. I am in recovery. Even, I am better. It's so, so easy to leave out the second half of those sentences: I am recovering, but I am still struggling. I am doing so much better, but the truth is that it's still really rough. I am in recovery, but the road is uneven and I am afraid of falling, and I have fallen.
The logical part of my mind reacts to setbacks as setbacks. I tell myself that this is part of the recovery process, that it will take time, that it will not always be smooth. The part of my brain that is still depressed tells me that this is just like before and I will never, ever be better. The truth is that when you live with an illness in which your brain tries to convince you that nothing will ever be okay, you're going to spend a lot of time arguing with yourself. It takes patience, and self-compassion, and determination to tell your brain that it is wrong. Your brain is saying two contradictory things at once, the one which you encourage and the one which you struggle against.
And it's hard. It's so, so difficult. And part of that difficulty lies in not knowing how to say that this is a story about recovery and also a story of learning to live with not being completely well all of the time, of learning that recovery is a process requiring you to learn and to grow and to stretch your fragile wings, and that you are not quite all the way out of the nest and ready to fly.
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