Still Life E-Book

Gillian Marchenko

• Herausgeber: IVP
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 245

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

"I stand on the edge of a cliff in my own bedroom."Gillian Marchenko continues her description of depression: "I must keep still. Otherwise I will plunge to my death. 'Please God, take this away,' I pray when I can."For Gillian, "dealing with depression" means learning to accept and treat it as a physical illness. In these pages she describes her journey through various therapies and medications to find a way to live with depression. She faces down the guilt of a wife and mother of four, two with special needs. How can she care for her family when she can't even get out of bed?Her story is real and raw, not one of quick fixes. But hope remains as she discovers that living with depression is still life.

Leseprobe

STILL LIFE

A MEMOIR of LIVING FULLY

with DEPRESSION

Gillian Marchenko

To Sergei, Elaina, Zoya, Polly and Evangeline —in spite of, and because.

Contents

Part One: Bottom

1 Uncle

2 Why Are You Smiling?

3 Major Depressive Disorder

4 Who Am I?

5 Help

Part Two: Borderline

6 Home

7 Bad Mom

8 Origins

9 Work the Program

10 The Color System

11 Will the Real Depression Please Stand Up?

12 Escape

13 The Lord’s Prayer

Part Three: Breakt­hroughs

14 Thaw

15 Polygamy

16 Hide

17 And Seek

18 Grow

19 Shame

20 Best Mom

21 Faith

22 Forced Praise

23 Still Life

Acknowledgments

Praise for Still Life

About the Author

IVP Crescendo

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Copyright

Part One

BOTTOM

one

Uncle

Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

Philip K. Dick

I stare at an episode of Hoarders on Netflix and check Facebook, back and forth, back and forth. Depression has landed me in bed for about a week. My old tricks—sleep more, watch television, hold on for dear flipping life waiting for it to pass—aren’t working this time.

I can’t sleep my mood off or wait it out. It possesses unshakable power over me. I stand on the edge of a cliff in my own bedroom. I must keep still. Otherwise I will plunge to my death. “Please God, take this away,” I pray when I can, and then I lower myself into a steaming bath to abate the ache of my limbs. My thoughts muddy. I shiver. I sleep for hours and wake up exhausted. Always exhausted. No amount of sleep reenergizes me.

Years ago I decided that a stay-at-home mom succumbing to daytime television equaled rock-bottom living. I would turn on The View or another morning show while cleaning the living room and turn it off a half hour later. A productive person doesn’t watch TV during the day, right? But today? Right now? This is nothing new. I’ve been hiding in my bedroom watching bad television and sleeping on and off for days. Weeks? Months? I don’t know.

I click on Facebook, the opposite of Hoarders, because Facebook is like the giant neon sign of life: “Look at me! Isn’t my life great?” The folks on Hoarders would rather you look at the pile of used plastic bags they’ve gathered around them than at them.

I lie on top of stale, tousled black sheets in the room I share with my husband. As I scan my feed, my eyes key in on an advertisement on the right side of the screen. “Do you struggle with feeling down? Call this number and see if you qualify to participate in an exciting new clinical trial. The experience includes monetary compensation, free psychiatric care, and the opportunity to help individuals like you who fight depression by sampling a new drug that could become available on the market in the future because of your participation.”

My skin awakens. The sensation reminds me of a time when a childhood friend got ringworm in grade school. I walked to her house after school for a chance to see a worm under her skin moving around and around in circles, but when I got there there was only a red, raised surface on her arm. “‘You see the worm? It’s right there.” She kept trying to convince me. Little swirls now cover my body. A few words in the ad pique my interest. I sit up in bed and adjust the laptop on my legs.

I cross and recross my legs at the ankles and move around the laptop again. I imagine my family—my husband, Sergei, and our four daughters—and wonder what they are doing right now: the kids are at school, perhaps working on math problems or running around in the gym, and Sergei may be hunched over his computer next door at the church where he works. I’m home alone, but I look around anyway, afraid someone will see what I clicked on as if it were something embarrassing like porn.

We don’t have a lot of money. I want the compensation to fund my dream of publishing the memoir I wrote about my third daughter Polly’s diagnosis of Down syndrome. Chilled, I hug myself. The hair on my forearms stands up, urging me to pay attention. I consider the other words in the advertisement that caught my eye.

A psychiatrist. Someone who specializes in the human psyche. I’ve never been to a psychiatrist for my struggles. The few times I took medication in the past, my primary care doctor prescribed them, and I’ve often wondered if she knew her job. “Oh, Prozac isn’t working that great anymore? How about Zoloft? Cymbalta? Paxil?” My childhood friend Carol says that taking medication is like playing Yahtzee. Put a bunch in a cup, shake them up and roll the dice. If you are lucky, you get a winning hand. More information about myself, medication and mental illness in general would be helpful, right? Could a psychiatrist help?

This is problematic. Do I fight depression?

Historically, I wouldn’t claim depression as a diagnosis. Sure, I’ve had difficult times in my life, but up until these last few years my struggles with mood revolved mostly around having babies. Although I was prone to melancholia and brooding, my more serious struggles—that is, the times I couldn’t get my crap together—were all tied up with the kids. I experienced postpartum depression after three births and then again after we adopted Evangeline, our fourth daughter, from Ukraine. Polly and Evie both have disabilities. Sergei pastors a small church where shoveling snow, cleaning up spills and moving the chairs around are all as much a part of his job as preaching. My older girls, Elaina and Zoya, are young women, complete with mood swings and preadolescent angst. It’s a lot, right? So is it depression or a challenging life?

I’ve searched lists of depressive symptoms online to see how I check out. Symptoms of depression, according to various websites, include hopelessness, aches and pains, sleep issues and disinterest in things that once provided joy. I don’t want to admit it out loud, but I know that all of these emotions take up more and more occupancy in my heart. I think of depression as a visitor who comes more often, uninvited, unwelcomed, and stays longer than ever before.

But then the fog dissipates for a few days and my mood alters, and I talk myself out of the diagnosis once again. Later on, after I know I have depression, I’ll call this depression amnesia. Every time I start to do better, I assume I will never feel that way again. I read somewhere that with each episode there is a 10 percent risk that a person’s depression will become chronic. I push that information out of my mind. It’s not depression, okay? It’s just a bad afternoon. A bad day. A bad life.

The “I won’t get depression again” notion is right up there with the alcoholic’s avowal that one drink won’t kill him. I once found a depression support forum online and stayed up all night reading other people’s posts. Struggles with medication. Thoughts of suicide. Unable to have relationships or leave the house. What a miserable lot. There’s no way I am one of them.

I have no memories of staying in bed for days when Elaina and Zoya were little, except for the time right after their births. And when depression comes, I can never figure out how it gets here. What are my triggers: stress with the kids? too much stuff at church? friendships? my relationship with Sergei? I have no idea. Depression comes and go as it pleases, and like a victim in a domestic abuse situation, I assume I’m at fault. Something is wrong with me.

A breeze blows through the bedroom window I opened earlier. A bird tweets like a metronome, and I wonder how he can breathe and tweet so long and so well. Our neighbor Tony’s voice calls out, I assume to one of his elderly parents in their backyard, but I can’t understand his words.

I enjoy seeing Tony’s mom and dad who live with him. They wear traditional Indian garb, the mother modest saris in muted browns and grays and the father long cream button-down shirts with matching linen pants.

A door slams, and I think more about Tony’s family. When the weather is warm, his mother comes outside with an empty hamper and pinches the tops of clothespins, letting stiff, air-dried garments fall into the basket in the early morning light. Sometimes when I feed Evangeline her breakfast cereal, I watch this neighbor retrieve the laundry while her husband perches on a tall stool close to her, looking on.

Last week while I was out on our chipped blue porch, I saw Tony’s dad hobble by on the sidewalk, leaning on his cane. Sergei had mentioned something recently about a stroke and said his health had gone downhill. Today I startled when I saw him, because it had been so long. “Dad!” Tony yelled, running through the alley next to our house to catch him. “Dad! You can’t leave the house without telling us. Do you hear me? Dad!” Tony reached his father, bent down and put his hands on his knees to catch his breath. His father stared past him, unresponsive.

I lie in bed; I think about life. People are out and about in the world, doing daily things, and I’m here, again. My body jailed by mood. I’m not even well enough to hobble around. Is this now the content of my life? If so, is it a waste? Will I shrivel up like a raisin in my bed? Will my neighbors one day be startled in surprise if they see me outside because they haven’t seen me for so long?

I’ve never been hospitalized for depression. I never found myself driving eighty miles an hour toward the peak of a cliff with my kids buckled into the backseat. I never made plans to stuff our van muffler with an old rag, turn it on and stay in it with all the windows closed tight. But I have started to give up on my family, on myself and on life in general. This again, I think as I wake up in the morning, swing my legs over the side of the bed, sit upright and sigh. I daydream about a nice bonk on the head, one hard enough to put me in a coma.

I want deep sleep.

I close my eyes and imagine the force of a car accident; I’m in the driver’s seat, a car sideswipes me, metal screeches against metal, pushing in, squelching breath, and then silence. Just silence. It doesn’t sound bad not to exist anymore. At least then I could stop the negative thoughts that swirl around my head.

You are a terrible mother. You are a terrible Christian. You are a failure. You don’t know what you are doing. You are losing your effing mind.

I stare at the Facebook ad about the clinical trial for depression. My heartbeat quickens as I reach up and push a strand of greasy hair out of my eyes. I need to call now without consulting Sergei. He is leery of doctors and would not agree to my participation. I pick up my cell phone from the bedside table and dial.

two

Why Are You Smiling?

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Oscar Wilde

A man with a deep voice answers the call and walks me through a preliminary questionnaire. Do you struggle with depressive thoughts? Yes. Is your mood often low? Yes. Do you have problems with sleep, concentration or sexual arousal? Yes, yes, yes. I snap my cell phone shut in tears after I answer the questions. It is spring time 2011, early afternoon on a weekday, probably around one o’clock.

A few days later, a representative from the clinical trial calls back while I work on a magazine article in the dining room downstairs. I clear my throat and concentrate on a steady voice. “I am interested in participating. The ad stated there is compensation?” Yes, there is compensation. I listen, but words don’t compute. I’m obsessed with the money all of a sudden. I’m an addict looking for her next fix. Why? Is it because a psychiatric trial for money instead of need is easier to stomach? I cut the man off midsentence. “I want to clarify—there is compensation, right?” Yes, compensation. His voice gets louder. He is agitated. My body weakens and starts to swoon, reminiscent of the first time a cop pulled me over for speeding in high school.

“I called a clinical trial for depression today after seeing an advertisement online,” I mention to Sergei later as he browns hamburger in a skillet in the kitchen for dinner. “They want people to test a new antidepressant.” Our kids (Elaina, eleven; Zoya, ten; Polly, six; and Evangeline, six) are scattered around the house. I have no idea what they are doing. It doesn’t occur to me to find out. I have become an absent mom, a guest in my home. A nice family friend who may notice the children once in a while and smile, but keeps to herself. Off limits. Shut down.

Sergei, as expected, objects to the clinical trial. “Why would you want to ingest unknown and undertested medicine? Aren’t you afraid of the side effects? What if they figure out the drug is dangerous?”

Born and raised in Kyiv, Ukraine, Sergei lived through the Chernobyl power plant disaster in grade school. It occurred sixty miles north of Kyiv, but wind and weather brought the tragedy to the front door of his fourth-story apartment building. The Dnipro River, which runs through the city, splitting it into two large land masses, the right and left bank, turned green. Radiation rained down on the country.

“I remember my mom called me in from outside. She told me to pack, that my brother and I would take a train to Russia to stay with my grandparents. They didn’t tell us what had happened. It was a scary time,” Sergei said. Rumors circulated. It’s been said that people who decided not to leave their homes near Chernobyl took sick and died. Others grew extra limbs, and lips swelled up to five times their original size. Residual damage of the explosion, although less powerful, still exists today, some say.

We met when I took a year off from college to teach English in schools and universities in Kyiv. On the airplane to Ukraine, our leaders told us no matter what, we were not allowed to date “the nationals.” I got off the plane at one o’clock in the morning, and one of the first people I saw was a young boy with long greasy hair, acne all over his face and a skeletal build. I joke that it was love at first sight, but it took us six months in Ukraine to fall in love. Sergei interpreted for the group I worked with, and at the end of the year he followed me to the States. We’ve now been married for thirteen years. Side effects and danger exist in Sergei’s world. It isn’t something you watch on television or read about in a book as I did in my tidy little upbringing in the Midwest.

My parents have owned and operated a weekly newspaper for over thirty years. I have a brother, Justin. One sister, Amy. I’m the baby of the family. My folks built and maintained a typical middle-class American life in a small town in Michigan. My childhood trauma included breaking my left arm two times, once near my shoulder and once in my wrist. Each time I rather liked the attention.

I field Sergei’s concerns for two or three minutes and start to cry: “I want to do this, Sergei. I want to be evaluated by a psychiatrist. And I can because it doesn’t cost anything.” My tears force my husband’s concession, and I decide not to mention the compensation. I’ve gotten my yes. Right now that’s all I need. Besides, he lives my struggles. He realizes I need help. We need help. And he knows me. He knows I would cry until he said yes.

Two weeks later I drive out to the suburbs of Chicago for the trial. They administer a quick medical exam: blood pressure, urine sample, reflexes, nose, ears, deep breaths while a cold stethoscope presses against my chest. I’m ushered into a tiny room with a small desk and two chairs and a sink in the corner, to complete yet another questionnaire.

A cheerful man with a salt-and-pepper beard goes down the list of questions. Trouble with sleep? Change in diet? Thoughts of worthlessness? Unable to get excited? Do you ever want to hurt yourself? Cloudy thinking? I answer the questions, smiling, jittery and nodding throughout, mostly yeses.

I’m showered and in clean clothes. I haven’t looked this good in a while, I decide: combed hair lacquered with Big Sexy Hair Spray, mascara, shimmery lipstick. But I’m concerned. This is one of the few times I’ve talked about my depression in the midst of an episode in the presence of someone other than my husband. Even while saying yes to all the questions, I attempt to act as if it is a social interaction with a long-time friend. Why this need to perform? On the inside, I deem myself a failure. I can’t do anything right. But on the outside? I want people to see me and think I have what they call “it” together.

“Mrs. Marchenko, our tests indicate you suffer from major depressive disorder. The numbers are low, some of the lowest I’ve seen. If the information is correct, then you are extremely depressed.” I nod my head and offer another shaky smile, attempting to project understanding and confidence.

But inside, I start to break down and break apart. Major depressive disorder. Sounds ominous and final. Sounds like a real honest-to-God mental illness. Is this what I wanted—confirmation of a cracked-up head? A loss of life? A saying of Jesus comes to mind: “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25). Yeah, okay, but what about those of us who watch our lives drift away and we do nothing about it? What if we no longer know who we lose our lives for? What if there seems to be no purpose or way to stop it?

I reach my left hand up to my cheek and rub it for a second. I’m here, right? I’m still here. My toe starts to tap. The cheerful man’s lips transition from a smile to a straight line. He stares at me, his eyes attempt to pierce mine, but I don’t let them. I hold his stare but block the piercing. What does that say about me? That now, in this pivotal moment in my life, I still fake, or at least try to fake, my feelings?

It’s because I’ve disappeared already. At some point my body became a solid sheet of ice over a raging sea of emotions. The cold I put out has caused people to look past me. They started to see through me. Or not see me at all. And now I am a master at pretending—that is, in front of anyone but Sergei—because I hate the fear, the guilt, the paranoia. Freezing meant a final attempt to hold on to myself and not disappear: stay cold and get through the day.

But now I hear the diagnosis. I sit in an uncomfortable chair in a bare cream-colored room. In one moment my fingertips tingle. My feet begin to burn. I start to thaw.

No, I can’t thaw. No! I imagine myself starting to crack and break apart inside. When my siblings and I were kids, my mom took us ice skating. I don’t remember gliding across ice, but I remember my feet killing me afterward. Back at home, my mom ordered me to undress. “Take off your socks too. It’s best if you don’t have anything on your feet right now.” She set a bowl of tepid water in front of a chair. “Here. Sit. Put your toes in there.” I stuck my feet in the water, and pain shot up my legs. My feet were on fire, burning, burning, burning in a bowl of warm water. “It hurts, Mom. Make it stop,” I cried.

Now, at the clinical trial, I watch myself thaw. Hold yourself together, Gillian. Stay cold. Don’t break.

I suppose that as with frozen toes after ice skating, one must be stripped bare to start to thaw. I thought I wanted this—a diagnosis, more information, help—but now I don’t know. I don’t want to bring feeling back to my limbs, because I have no idea how to handle them. I want to scream: It hurts. Make it stop. Instead I stare past the cheerful man and smile.

“Why are you smiling? I told you that you test in the severe range of depression.” He waits for an answer.

“Um.” I clear my throat. “I don’t know why I’m smiling.” Sweat pours down my back between my shoulder blades. The cheerful man, who I assume is the psychiatrist but later find out conducts preliminary testing, looks at me with compassion. Cracks run up and down my body. Can he see them? I’m dripping. Is he glimpsing the real me?

The cheerful test taker’s face shows a pang of concern, and then poof, it’s gone. Cheery and smiley again, he speaks. “Wait in this room. The doctor will be in to see you in a moment.”

An hour later, assured I am a perfect candidate for the trial, I drive home in a fog, pulling my shirt up and wiping the wet makeup off my face at stop signs. At home, I change into yoga pants and a T-shirt with a stain on it and crawl back into bed. I sleep for the next few hours, until the rest of the family comes home from school and work.

three

Major Depressive Disorder

The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Annie Dillard

Yes, but what about Jesus?” friends ask later on. It is a valid question. If others look at my life, I hope they’ll see that faith is important. I believe in the story that some people let waft through their minds only at Christmas: that Christ was born of a virgin, lived a perfect life, died a death we all deserve, so that we can have a bridge to God. Sergei is a minister. I spent years as a missionary in a foreign country. The point of my faith is that God came to me so that I can be with him.

What about Jesus? I think. When depression takes over, everyone in my life falls away, including him. I can’t pray, or read, or talk. When I am not stuck in a pocket of depression, I pray for help and healing. “Take this away, or at least help me figure out how to handle it better,” I whisper, expectant. But a concrete response doesn’t come. All I get is silence. How does one keep faith in silence?

There is a story in the New Testament about a woman who hemorrhaged and bled for years. Jesus walked by her one day in a village, and she reached out and grabbed on to his robe. Feeling power leave him, he “turned and saw her. ‘Take heart, daughter,’ he said, ‘your faith has healed you’” (Matthew 9:22). I thrust my hands out in front of me. I am a little girl lost in a dark house alone. I need to find that robe. I want to be healed. But there is no robe. My faith, so far, has not made me well.

Why doesn’t Jesus respond to my cries for help? Does he care? Is he even there? Don’t I have enough faith?

“The psychiatrist diagnosed me with major depressive disorder today,” I tell Sergei later in the dining room as he feeds Evangeline a spoonful of strawberry yogurt. I take a step closer to my husband to see what he thinks, but he shows no response. His face, a chiseled chin, full cheeks and deep-set blue-gray eyes, does not change when he hears the diagnosis. There’s not even a flinch. He seems to accept the words as he would if I told him I ate a ham sandwich for lunch.

I’ve known Sergei long enough to understand that his lack of response could be for several reasons. He could be nonchalant because he doesn’t want to scare me, or he may not believe me, or he doesn’t want to hurt me with the wrong response. It could be none of these things too. It could be his stoic Slavic personality processing the information. It has been a challenge for us to attempt to understand each other with such different upbringings and cultures. I remember one time after we were newly wed: Sergei called his mom in Ukraine, his voice loud, Russian words jetting out and filling up the room, guttural and angry. What’s wrong? Why is he arguing with his mom? But once he hung up, he eased my concerns. “No, we just talked. Everything is fine. She says hello.”

In most relationships I know, you’ve got two roles: the emotional, curvy, up-and-down person and the steadfast, even-tempered, realistic one. In our marriage Sergei is steadfast. Trustworthy. Responsible. He can catch vomit from one of the children in his hands early on a Sunday morning and then go wash up and deliver a sermon at church an hour later. Vomit has always freaked me out. I even struggled with spit-up when the girls were babies. “Gillian, you’re going to have to deal with throw-up at some point, you know?”

My husband’s an old soul. His father left him, his mom and his brother when Sergei was around ten years old. That shift in family forced him to learn responsibility and a work ethic at a young age. When he was a teenager, his maternal grandfather got hit by a car as he walked down a street in Ukraine. After that, Sergei moved in with his grandma for a while so she wouldn’t be alone. To this day he walks on the side closest to the street with anyone he is with, so that should something dreadful like that occur again, he’d be the one sacrificed.

I knew Sergei would be my husband one day when we rode a crowded bus together in Kyiv. He found me an open seat, plunked me down and stood next to me, his arms forming an impenetrable force field around me as one hand grasped the seat in front of me and the other held on right behind my head. I felt protected that day. Cared for. Loved.

His opinion matters a great deal to me, so today his lack of response to my news hurts. A couple of seconds later, though, he turns his head toward me, a slight indication that he wants to hear more. “The doctor said my test scores were some of the lowest numbers he’d seen.” I realize I lie as I speak. The cheerful test guy said it, not the psychiatrist. But I don’t correct myself because it takes effort to speak, and besides, it sounds more official coming from a psychiatrist.

The theme song from the PBS Kids show Caillou sounds from the living room. I imagine the eyes of Polly, daughter number three, transfixed as she watches. Growing up is not so tough, except when you’ve had enough . . . Ugh. Caillou. My older girls watched the show when they were toddlers too. I’ve known that baldheaded little twerp for years now. Caillou whines. He’s a whiner. All. Day. Long. And his parents always respond with patience and grace. If I were Caillou’s mom, he would have been sent to his room.

I shake my head, look back at Sergei and consider what I’ve told him. Today they diagnosed me with major depressive disorder. Validation bubbles to the surface. See, this is more than me. More than the postpartum depression I had after having babies. More than I can snap out of or manage on my own.

Neither of us are rookies to diagnoses; our youngest daughter Evangeline has Down syndrome (and a couple years later will be diagnosed with autism), and Polly has Down syndrome and Moyamoya, a stroke and seizure disorder. Up until Polly our lives together clipped along at an expected pace. We expected to have “typical” children and we did. We wanted to move to Ukraine and it happened. We probably got a bit too cocky about how well our lives were going. But after disability showed up in our family, we learned that life is not tame. It’s not here to align with our desires and plans. No one is immune to things that tend to happen to “other people.” We all are “other people.”