The Demon

Please enjoy this essay I wrote years ago.

The Demon

It is the end of the semester. I have been hanging on by a thread.  Several times I have contemplated how simple everyone’s life would be without me.  Every moment that passes is another chance that my emotions can be swirled and remixed from being sane, to deeply disturbed.  I am a swirled yogurt of cherry and vanilla.  The red sweet cherry symbolizing the pain swirled in with the regular plain part of me.  There has been a demon inside of me since childhood, a silent demon that has quietly preyed on my soul and sapped the life out of me.   Maybe it would be better to call it a virus or a thief because it has stolen countless years of my life.  Its personality is sneaky, hidden.

The realization of its existence began last spring when my doctor prescribed two small green pills. I trusted her; I drove home from the doctor’s office questioning my sanity, but I filled the prescription.  I went home and sat at the kitchen table, I read the medication information, and I took the first two pills.  The demon, the virus, the thief still wasn’t fully identified to me.  I wouldn’t unmask it for another twelve more months.

Even though the medication helps, it is a daily battle between getting out of bed, bathing, dressing, and leaving the house.  It would be easy to curl into a ball and entangle myself in my blankets, and sob myself to sleep, only to wake up groggy, desiring sweet sleep again.

At one of my check-ups my doctor asks me, “Are you depressed?”  I answered, “No. I am just angry, tired, impatient, and bored.”  Regardless, she referred me to a counselor. I began seeing, Marc Witte. At the time I didn’t think I was depressed. My husband and I were having extreme financial difficulties.  I thought it was just a rough patch, nothing more than just situational stress that would pass when the circumstances changed. I later realize that the demon, the thief, the virus’s name is depression.

According to McMan’s Depression and Bipolar Web‘s site.  Depression affects 19 million people. “Depression is a mood disorder characterized by a range of symptoms that may include feeling depressed most of the time, loss of pleasure, feeling of worthlessness, suicidal thoughts, as well as physical states that may affect eating and sleeping and other activities.”

According to the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual there are nine symptoms of major depression; five or more symptoms must be present over the same two-week period.

 Major depression must include including one of the following two symptoms

ü      Feeling depressed most of the day, nearly every day

ü      Markedly diminished pleasure

Other Symptoms of Depression

ü      Significant weight gain or loss

ü      Insomnia or hypersomnia

ü      Psychomotor agitation or retardation

ü      Fatigue or loss of energy

ü      Feelings of worthlessness or inappropriate guilt

ü      Diminished ability to think or concentrate

ü      Recurrent thoughts of death, suicidal thinking, suicide attempts

 In fact I was depressed, and seeing Marc helped me realize this. I went to counsdeling for over six months, and soon I felt better, that was two years ago. This semester I am an honor student. I have two honor classes.  Two honor classes too many. The semester begins shakily. A few days before the semester begins; my husband starts a new job.  After a few days, he wants to quit.  He could make $100,000 a year if he just applied himself.

I feel anxious and I wonder how we will survive financially. My anxiety steam rolls out of control.  It’s happening again, I’m in speech class, I hear the students laughing, and I know they are laughing at me. I’m fat, ugly, and awkward.  My hair is wild, and my backpack is large. I can see outside of myself and hear people’s thoughts, thoughts that seep through their body language. I hate how they strangely glance at me. I feel awkward, awkward like a teenager.  . 

Where did my thick skin go? Last semester I felt wonderful. I had a 3.8 GPA.   I knew I could do anything my heart desired.  I visited my old counselor; I told him my doctor gave me Prozac, and I felt wonderful.  He said, “It isn’t the medication. It’s you, the medication helps, but you are applying what I taught you.”  I didn’t believe him, but now I believe him. 

When I was in the bathroom at school, I realized I was battling depression again.  I couldn’t stop crying. My advisor told me I should go home and rest.   I did.  I considered quitting school, but I have quit so many things in my life.  I refused.

Last semester I was doing so well, because I was applying the things Marc taught me, like the glass is half full instead of half empty.  I stopped sorting through my emotions, and I shoved them deep within a hollow part of my soul. Only to vomit them out at an inconvenient time, a time when I need to be sane, together, and getting good grades.

 I am so stressed out.  Marc told me that some people have a predisposition to depression and they never get to the point where they have “a significant amount of stress to trigger depression.” With others stress kicks off depression.   They “learn unhealthy thoughts,” or they learn inappropriate ways to handle stress, and they “move away from happiness.”

Marc was talking about me; stress allowed my depression to break through, but going to counseling taught me many coping mechanisms. At one time, I was an emotional jellyfish.  I thought my emotions controlled me.  I learned that no one makes me feel anything. I choose to be happy, sad, or angry.  At the time I didn’t understand.  How could I choose to feel happy, sad, or angry?  Doesn’t it happen automatically?

Sigmund Freud believed that our emotions governed or controlled our thoughts; but Marc believes that it is our thoughts that control our emotions. If we think healthy thoughts, we will have healthy emotions.  He taught me how to slow down my emotional reaction with ABCDE, a concept taught by Albert Ellis.

• Antecedent
• Belief
• Consequence
• Dispute
• Evaluate

                     ABCDE helps me to sort out my thoughts. When I am feeling overwhelmed, I take time to think about the situation.  What led up to these feelings (antecedent)?  What is my belief about the situation?

In counseling I learned an irrational belief such as no one emailed me today, so no one loves me, can cause the consequence, or feeling to be pessimistic. If I am feeling overwhelmed, I should reexamine (or dispute) my belief.  Is there is a healthier belief that will reframe my emotions? If so the last step is to evaluate my emotions, and clearly establish a new belief.

Now I know depression lived inside of me for a long time, plaguing me. I didn’t even know of its existence in me.  I don’t know when it began. Did it begin when I was two and my parents divorced?  Was it a few months later when my father allowed another man to adopt me (My name changed from Kara Joy Perkins to Kara Joy Emplit.)?   Did it begin in third grade, during my mother’s second divorce?  Was it when we discovered my brother’s brain cancer, or did it happen a year later when he was hit by a car? Did it begin when my forty-year-old father married and eighteen-year-old, or was it when I waved goodbye to my father and his new family as they left for Florida? Did it begin as a teenager when I realized I was utterly alone, and wrote my first poem – a suicide poem?

It could have been any of these circumstances, but I think it was the day my father (my mother’s second husband) told me they were getting a divorce.  I was in the basement; my father’s part of the house.  We were watching Knight Rider.  I can see my father’s beautiful face, his perfectly groomed mustache and beard, and his shiny black hair.  He is leaning towards me as he talks.  I understand what he is saying, but all I can see is an image of a heart being jaggedly cut into two.  It is my heart, and it was being split between my mother and my father.

The months following weren’t much easier.  My father moved us to Florida; my four siblings and I moved into my grandparent’s trailer.  My father wouldn’t allow us to talk to our mother. We were there for several months; without seeing or speaking to her.  I remember taking the bus to school, fighting back tears. One time I sobbed loudly and without restraint in front of the children in my class.

One humid night my mother and her boyfriend drove from Ohio to get us.  Since that humid night a black cloud surrounded the years that followed, a black cloud that hovered and followed me.  My body worked without me, walking, talking, eating, sleeping; was all done on its own.  I just existed within its shell.

I remember being a high school student, during lunch I would sit with my head down.  My only escape was writing about the circumstances surrounding me. My senior year in high school, I took the SAT.  I didn’t read the questions; I just filled in bubbles. Because of my poor SAT scores, my freshmen year at Kent State University, I had to take college prep classes in college.  In college, I lived with four roommates on campus. We didn’t get along. My sophomore year I lived in a single dorm room.  It wasn’t a good choice. I ended up being invisible.  I didn’t even know my next door neighbors name.  I couldn’t wake up for my classes, and I was terribly tired and irritable.

 That was thirteen years ago. Now, I am sitting in the boardroom that Marc and I sat in during counseling.  My daughter is playing with her toys. Marc and I are talking about the faulty core beliefs you have when you are depressed.

During my visit, Marc told me that if you are feeling depressed “you should try the least restrictive approach first,” which is counseling, or therapy.  He said that counseling is not a long-term thing.  He usually sees clients for a short period until they are able to “see their therapist in them.”  They don’t have to travel to him, they can just look inside.

If after counseling you are still feeling depressed, you should consider medication. “Medication makes the brain normal but it doesn’t ensure happiness.”

 And if after counseling you need a “booster shot” its ok to see your counselor and take a refresher course.

I tell him I found my core faulty belief, it was that I was not worthy of anyone’s love. My father, Gary rejected me, so I thought there was something wrong with me. Now I realize that my father never took the chance to get to know me, how could I have been the cause of him abandoning me? If my father doesn’t want me, a wonderful woman, as his daughter, it is his loss.

Since that conversation with Marc, I have found more faulty core beliefs. Daily I fight these beliefs.  Beliefs that I shouldn’t bother asking for help because I don’t deserve it.  I am worth nothing, so I should suffer alone.  Everyone’s life would be much simpler, if I didn’t exist. I am a failure, because I have failed at everything I have tried, and I will continue to fail.  So I should stop trying, and just quit.  I feel like my existence is futile and unnecessary. I am just a nuisance to everyone I encounter. 

These thoughts are a constant daily battle.  Deep down, I know that I am loved.  I have a wonderful husband, beautiful children, and sincere friends.  I am not a failure. After tomorrow, this semester will be finished, and I didn’t quit.  True, I still have some unfinished coursework, but I didn’t quit. I have to realize that it is truly amazing that I am even a college student, let alone an honor student, getting A’s and B’s.

 My existence isn’t futile. There will be people who dislike me and think I am nuisance, but their opinion does not govern who I am. My opinion governs who I am. If I choose to see the cup as half empty, it will be half empty.

My life is full of people who love me. When I think about how easy it would be to disappear, not just from my home and marriage, or from college; but how easy it would be to disappear from life. I think about my daughter. Every time I look at her, I know that she loves me, she wants me, and she needs me.  Where would she be if I cease.

Thank you Franchessca for getting me through those hard times (April 16, 2011)