The Anxiety of Depression
It was a Thursday in the depths of winter when the world I knew shattered — and a new one began. I sat uncomfortably next to my father, the chair’s frame rigid against my shifting body. Around me, the faint hum of white noise filled the air as I stared blankly at a lone playset in front of me. Plastered on the walls, generic paintings against a dark sea green tint created an engulfing atmosphere. This was not the first time I had set foot in a psychologist’s office, but I had never felt this way before. The line between logic and emotional intuition blurs into one huge mess.
Down the hall to my left, I saw my therapist walk casually toward us with a warm expression on his face. Exchanging pleasantries, he gestured with a wave of a hand that I should follow him so that we could talk alone. I shuffled after him, my iPad clutched between my fingers as a last defense against what I feared would become true. The previous fall had been a series of constant roadblocks, and even now the stressful memories of each one replayed like a sequence from an old film.
Upon walking inside his office, I went straight for the couch upholstered in tan leather that lay a few feet from the door: a criss-cross pattern over the surface that felt unusually uncomfortable. For a split second, there was utter silence until my therapist began his usual stream of questions as a way to break the ice. We hadn’t met in the past two weeks due to scheduling conflicts, and at that moment his questions didn’t faze me. My voice was monotone, and I responded as truthfully as I could until I sensed a growing need to address the poem I had written and left on my phone. I had written poems about my experience with anxiety before, but depression was a new concept, and revealing it for the first time appeared catastrophic.
I looked at him then, his face happy as a fogginess surrounded me and I extended my hand shakily to him with my phone up. Quietly, I uttered the words: “I don’t know how to say this…But could you read a poem I wrote? I’ve been feeling really out of it lately, and I think I might have depression.”
Beginning with my mother bluntly asking me one day if I was feeling depressed, the piece recounted how I had quietly researched it afterward by taking a lot of “Am I Depressed?” tests and consistently finding out that the computer believed I was mild to moderately depressed. From that point on, I began to question everything from the way I ate to how I slept and thought about my daily life in fear of believing that I was indeed depressed. But now was the moment of truth. Gazing up at him to see a quizzical expression, I let out a breath. He shifted in his chair before revealing in a frank manner that he didn’t believe in telling his patients their diagnoses because he wanted to remain fully focused on the issues themselves. My heart sank momentarily as my brain tried to process what had been said. Then he spoke again, and this time it was what I had been both dying and fearing: the truth.
“You have an adjustment disorder with depression,” he said. “It’s when your body reacts to a stressor and reacts with depressive symptoms but that will fade after a period of six months. I’ve known since the first day you came to visit me over three months ago, by the way, you were acting. You were extremely sarcastic and irritable which is a key identifier of adolescent depression that exists outside of what one would generally associate with it.”
I was stunned. Hearing the words fall from his tongue was comforting, and yet a wave of denial swept over me. Up until that point, I had always thought that depression meant you were visibly sad all the time and unable to think positively. Yet the image I had painted of myself there in his office reflected another way that depression can rear its ugly head, one that I never thought about because I was too naïve about mental health to see.
I cried on the way home that day, holding my dad’s hand like I used to as a little girl when I needed comfort. He told me how sorry he was that he couldn’t identify the signs that showed up months earlier and that we would work together to get through this difficult time. I smiled at him as tears fell from my eyes. Part of me was still upset about having to find out at all, but mostly I was overfilled with relief that my thoughts were validated so that I could begin the process of managing them until they disappeared like a train gliding off into the distance.
Author’s Note: This piece was originally written in September 2017.
