As I
made my way deeper into The Noonday Demon, I came to a place where the learned
Andrew Solomon and I had a slightly different perspective. It’s his belief that “the
opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality.” It’s easy to see why he
arrives at his conclusion when sitting up in bed is tantamount to climbing
Everest. What’s lost to depression is gone forever. You don’t get to double down in hopes of regaining it. The
loss of vitality, especially over a long period of time, frequently leads to
the loss of hope. With the will to live right
on its heels. This is especially true when major depression is Treatment
Resistant and repels everything you throw at it in effort to slow it down, if
not eviscerate it.
For
me, nothing was more depleting, defeating, deadening and heartbreaking than the loss of my Emotional Arc. That 180 degree
span that runs from the mountaintops of joy to the dark dungeon of despair is forever
eradicated and replaced with an arc that runs from 3 degrees to, if you’re truly
lucky, 45. Four seasons become One. They
are not compressed into One, because that would suggest there are vestiges of
all the seasons in lesser amounts. Never
again will you embrace the soothing warmth
of a Summer sun, the smile that seems to come as if by request, with a gentle
Spring rain, or the stunning poetry found in the changing colors of Fall leaves.
For you, one season lives on INSIDE your heart and mind. You won’t be needing
skis, sled, boots or mittens as you live minute to minute enduring the killing cold
and endless brutality of the one season that remains. The Siberian Winter that
is now your life.
