Major Depressive Disorder

Everyone expects it to be over. You’re twenty-six. You have a house, a husband, a job, everything. You’re not nineteen and underweight and living in a twenty-foot box with another person who has no idea how to be an adult but has to act like one.

But you’re not. Not over it.

It starts with pain. Everything is hard – you know you’re sad because you’re hungry and because you’re stressed, so you start by dealing with that. After you lie in bed for forty minutes listing things to be grateful for, you get up and you brush your hair and put on real clothes. Because that’s what you do. You’re twenty-six. An adult.

You get out the huge tub of chicken salad and the huge jar of pickles. You know by now to have these things, easy things. But the whole time you chase little dill pickles around the jar with a fork, you’re in pain. Your stomach hurts. You think about all the things that you’re grateful for, your family. You got your nails done yesterday and your hair is wavy from braids and you found a new outfit you love when you got dressed from the four baskets of laundry your sweet husband folded for you.

But quickly, you’re not thinking about that. You’re thinking about how when it starts, it’s painful. Your chest is too tight to breathe. You’re so tired you can barely spoon chicken salad onto your plate. You look at the photos on your phone from Christmas break to remind you how wonderful it was but you feel nothing.

You’re thinking about how eventually it all turns numb, and almost looking forward to that. But you know that after you’re numb you miss the pain, the something, the caring.

You make lists. You practiced this so much when it was really bad. You list what’s stressing you. You make sub-lists of what you can control and what you can’t. You make lists of things you love. You list everything you remember from the past two weeks, everything you did, as if it will make you feel real. Like it will make you matter.

You do it all right. You even go for a forty-five minute walk, and read, and go to the gym. You watch Notting Hill.

Unlike when you were nineteen and paralyzed with it, you know what to do. You’re grown up.

But it’s still there. It’s chemical, you think, as you watch the carbon dioxide fixing in the cup of Diet Coke you just poured. You attempt to take the blame off yourself.

But you know it’s your fault, and that it hasn’t gone away, and that you’re just going to have to bear it. Because you’re twenty-six. No one cares. They do, probably, on the inside. But it’s an inconvenience. No one actually wants to know, wants to hear about it. They want what they’re not allowed to want. For you to always smile, laugh, crack great jokes. For you to be having a good time so they can be, too.

They’ll never ask for you to smile, or pretend. But you know they want it. So you give it to them.

The pain will stop. It always does.

At least for a little while.