Looking back, I realize it's been a long time coming. And so now it's here, and I admit that were it not for my addled brain (the reason for writing this post in the first place), I would be pretty confused by it. But since I'm living in the fog of a depressive episode, pretty much nothing confuses me. Or everything does. Or,

um....right.

And that's what's so odd. I've been living for 36 years now to greater or lesser success. I have a husband who loves me like a madman, and whom I love like mad when I'm functioning, a little boy so sweet that he defies the toddler moniker, a new house which should make me ecstatic and yet here I sit, swallowing my brand new prescription for pills to make me less blargh than I am currently.

Depression, a woefully inadequate and limp word for a debilitating experience, creeps in between the cracks. It's insidious, like cancer, but invisible--more akin to a gas that oozes in silently, effortlessly. It sinks in through crevices when you're preoccupied with life--it is the general stresses of the day-to-day that get me in the end. Nothing dramatic--death or disease haven't preyed on my life nor thrown me into crisis--instead it's the mundane but living parts of the day-to-day that seem to set me off.

I was crying to my mother the other week, crying with distraction and emptiness but no solace about what we were going to do about the bun, why wasn't he gaining weight, why, why, when she pulled up short and said, "For someone who's life is as good as yours, you're crying far too often." It was an uncritical assessment. She was genuinely concerned.

She reminded me that I had agreed to see a doctor if she noticed a profound period of the blues after the bun was born. At the time, when I was not depressed, in fact when I was extremely effective at living a "normal" life, it seemed an easy, if melodramatic, oath to make. "Sure, yeah, of course. But I can't imagine that I'll ever feel that way again."

With a cavalier shrug, I assumed that I had mastered my emotions. I had come out on the other side valiantly: pregnant, happy to be a parent, looking forward to the great unknown. It's a tricky business being prone to depression. When you have it, you can't remember what life was like without it, and when you're not, you can't imagine ever having it again.

But here I am. I am in a strange nether world right now having concluded that I am not just an extremely sensitive person, someone deeply affected by the woes of the world, the gravitas of it all. Instead I am forced to grudgingly begin to question my emotions, which, because they're emotions, feel so grippingly real. I have been forced to admit that depression (in my case) is not a state of mind which passes, but a state of mind which is symptomatic of an illness. I have had to conclude that my brain has betrayed me, which is a horrible thing to confront.

Who of us doesn't believe that we are the sum parts of our emotional life? Our highs and our lows are what make us who we are, and we wear our emotions as if they were dogma. I am what I feel like, and damn the person who invalidates my emotions! But what if our emotions are out of step with life? What if they lag behind the events in our lives and muddy them with confusing conclusions and wrong deductions?

But that's too simple, because it's not so much about feeling as the absence of it. In the grips of depression I listen through walls of mud, looking for the meaning of simple tasks and finding none. I struggle with inconsequential decisions as though my life were hanging on them, and still come up wanting. Making dinner becomes a chore worthy of Job, showering becomes irrelevant.

But the worst consequence in my battle with a chameleonic and devilishly slippery adversary are my relationships. As I've slipped slowly but surely into the grips of another melancholic episode, I have been channeling the last good parts of me into the bun, instinctively understanding, if not completely consciously, that he was the most vulnerable person in my life. But that leaves little else for the rest of my family, and my husband has been getting the raw end of the woman he married. Short tempered, irrational, distant, vague, apathetic, defensive, solemn. I am the opposite of the woman he married and it is completely unfair.

So I've started taking pills to possibly correct the imbalance in my traitorous brain, hoping to stave off worse ills, and make the pieces come back together in some order that I recognize as myself. Since they haven't had time to work yet, I don't know if they will or not.

The pills themselves have raised some interesting, not altogether pleasant questions about my life.

Now that I've agreed that I'm not functioning normally, and I've sworn to take my regimented daily allowance of god-knows-what, what if they don't work? I'm depressed enough to recognize that I need them, or need something, but thankfully not depressed enough to completely ignore the entreaties of concerned family members to do something for myself, my family, and most importantly, my son. And so I have, in a sense, put my faith in a handful of chemicals. Once you put your faith in something, you become vulnerable to its failure. One worries that in those two to six weeks it may take to even out my errant neural pathways, that the chemicals won't do their job. What then? More of the blank? More existential struggle with putting a chicken on the table? Agreeing finally to take the pills gives you just enough hope to hang yourself, if you don't mind the bad pun.

But more perplexing is, what if they do work?

What if they work, and in four weeks I come out of the mist, perhaps not well-balanced and normal, whatever that is, but able to take part in the life I've been given with a centeredness that has been sorely lacking? What if, at the end of my topsy-turvy "will they work or won't they" period, I have to evaluate my life as being punctuated not by normal ups and downs, but an illness? It has thrown a great part of my life into a certain sharp relief, and as I read about Depression (capital D) the illness versus depression the passing experience, I have no choice but to look upon periods of my life with a disquieting clarity. I have to conclude that certain steps I've made (but in more cases haven't made) may have been a symptom of a shrunken hippocampus and faulty serotonin levels.

It is an unsettling conclusion to arrive at: the person I think I am, the person I have always imagined myself to be, has been at the mercy of some faulty wiring. And if I had had it fixed earlier, I may have been a much different person.

So I'm taking deceptively small pills. How can something so small feel so enormous? How can our psyches be so fragile and yet so malleable? How can I not be who I think I am?

God knows if I'll document this journey. It's certainly not as entertaining as Musings of a Bun Popper. And it's a subject that's been done to death (haha), one which I am loathe to make into another rehashed episode of the depressed housewife. But it explains my absence to a greater or lesser degree, and may explain my continued absence.