Depression

what does it feel like?

One of the hardest things for me to describe is depression.

I’ve been living with depression for so long now that I really don’t remember having existed any other way.

Depression is a fairly debilitating mental illness.

I don’t think that I’ve ever been truly and honestly happy for so very long now that I’ve forgotten what happy feels like.

I’ve had days in which I am so mind crushingly numb that I feel so absolutely sick.

Depression is where you can’t accept praise from people because you “know” that they’re just saying nice things to keep you from being “sad”.

Prolonged depression can cause long term changes in the brain’s wiring and the brain’s chemistry.

As a kid I used to have so much trouble getting out of bed. It’s not that I stayed up late as a kid. It’s just the the depression had such a stranglehold on me that I wanted to stay in bed and die.

I wanted to die so badly as a kid.

Contrary to public belief, depression isn’t something that one can wish away simply by smiling or thinking happy thoughts.

My depression came from two places. I’m fairly certain that I inherited depression from the paternal side of my family. And you can’t go through what I’ve gone through in life and not be somewhat depressed.

Depression as a child is just a negative feed back loop of epic proportions. When you’re depressed as a child you don’t want to hang around with other kids. When you don’t hang around with other kids, you become marked as “odd”. Kids love teasing and antagonizing “odd” misfits.

As my grade 5 teacher said. I had become the class scapegoat and everything that went wrong the other kids blamed on me.

With Captain Totzke and my father blaming me for what had occurred on CFB Namao it just drove me into such a deep fucking depression that I never surfaced again.

Is there a fix for my depression? I honestly don’t believe so. It’s been eating away at the inside of my brain for so long. And that’s not being melodramatic. That’s the truth.

Yes, I responded pretty quick and dramatically to the escitalopram, but the escitalopram hasn’t stopped the depression. It’s just raised the floor to which I can crash down to.

The depression has stolen everything from my life.

What would I have been like if I could have found a partner earlier in life?

What would I have been like if I cold have determined what my orientation was earlier in life.

What would I have accomplished in life had depression not filled my head with so much self doubt, so much self loathing, and so much self hatred?

At work I just finished a project for trending and logging the temperatures of sixteen medical fridges and freezers. I used general refrigeration components to do this. Some Dixell Universal controllers for doing the actual monitoring, TTL to RS-485 converters to allow the Dixell Universal Controllers to communicate on a MS/TP network, NIST Certified temperature probes for measuring the temperatures, and a web server to act as the front end to allow anyone anywhere on the Vancouver Coastal Health network to log in and see the temperatures, read the logs, and generate reports.

Then there’s working with IMIT to establish an active Ethernet port, get the web server a static IP address, give IMIT the MAC address of the web server to allow it onto the hospital network, have messaging allow the web server to use the MSTP server to send emails for alarms and reports.

When this project is completed the pharmacy department will also be able to monitor the fridges at Mt. St. Joseph hospital. This will be done using a Ethernet to ModBUS converter that will allow the web server to communicate via the Vancouver Coastal Intranet with a pair of Dixell Universal Controllers at Mt. St. Joe’s.

After this, pharmacy would like to expand this through the tower to pick up all of the ward fridges.

Am I proud of this?

Nope.

I feel like an idiot even talking about this because if an idiot like me can do this, then anyone else could have done it, right? My old man always said that I was just showing off by doing stupid things.

And that’s what depression does. It steals everything fucking thing from your life.

I know that I did a good job on this. But the depression monster keeps yelling at me that anyone could have done this, that I’m not smart, that this was nothing special.

And of course once those thoughts start, then everything else starts.

I’ve aborted so many projects in the past because my depression monster knew that I was too fucking stupid to see through to completion.

Even talking about this make me feel like a stupid attention seeking crybaby.

That’s how this shit works.

I don’t make the rules.

I try not to play by the stupid rules of depression.

But I’m also not able to fight them.

Many a braver man than me has lost their battle with depression.