The Funny Thing About Depression

               I have dealt with depression for most of my life.  I can’t say that anything ever started it, but there are seasons when things trigger and it is worse.  The thing that is interesting to me is that one of the things that usually raised me out of my sadness is the absolute humor of dealing with people as I deal with depression.  I really don’t think they know what they are doing.

              Two years ago, I hit one of my triggers.  It was interesting because it was one of the first times that I feel like anybody noticed naturally what I was going through.  The funny thing is that he handed me a flier about dealing with depression, said “If you need anything, please let me know,” and walked away.  I wanted to call after him, “No, I should be good.  I got this pamphlet.  Thanks!”

              A few months later, we had a short rash of suicides at the school that I work at.  Two of the students were from my classes.  (Again, one of my colleagues recognized that this might be affecting me specifically – so I did get a huge bucket of cookie dough out of it.)  Since the whole school was on heightened awareness, we got a district booklet.  There were lots of ideas in the booklet of warning signs to look for in depressed individuals.  I tried a few of them to see if anybody would actually notice:  For example I didn’t brush my hair or do any maintenance on my beard for 3 months.  When nobody seemed to notice, I decided to call it a failed experiment and went back to life as normal.

One of the other suggestions in the booklet that I thought was interesting was not to try to befriend a depressed person, but instead to inform social services personnel – I guess friendship with depressed people should be left to paid professionals.  We can’t allow depressed people to have unsupervised friendships.  Who knows what disastrous things could happen?

            Around this same time, Melinda Kathleen Reese started her beautiful mistranslation series called Google Translate Sings.  Her first song came at a very timely moment.  She took the lyrics of "Let It Go" and translated them into other languages and back to English, the result became the theme song of my life for at least a month - "Give Up."  Horrible timing for the message of the song, but it gave me more reasons to laugh.

              I think my favorite story from this particular period of my life is when I came across a spare length of rope.  It was pretty obvious who the rope belonged to, so I thought I would do him a favor and return the rope to him.  He said that he no longer had any need for the rope.  “You can keep it and use it for whatever you may need.”  Since he didn’t need it, I decided the best thing to do would be to throw it away.

              A few weeks later, Robin Williams died (suicide by belt - an option that I'd never before considered - thanks to the national news for adding that little detail).  It was interesting to see how people around me handled the situation and especially the things they said.  “How is it that somebody that is so happy and constantly bringing joy to other people could consider killing themselves?”  Sometimes depressed people use humor to keep themselves sane.  There are humorous things that happen every day.  Sometimes it’s the humor of depression that keeps us going.  Thanks for the laughs.