On Recurrent Depression

Relinquishing our resistance and making a comfy seat for our dark passenger.

And so it returns.

I don’t know why I thought it wouldn’t but alas it has. So here I find myself once again, submitting to the familiar need to make sense of the desolation of my soul in written form.

I thought I had banished the dark passenger to oblivion back in January. My elation was I am sure, akin to the majority of depressive sufferers when the clouds finally start to part: we blindfully believe that hooray(!) that is the last of it; we can host an internal, attended-by-one imaginary funeral for the most unpleasant intruder that has ever entered our stratosphere. Our psychological and emotional vigor to never experience the depths of a depressive episode again, renders us incapable of a humble and realistic acceptance that it likely will return, at some point or other. You see, our relief is distorted — the indescribable joy at seeing the doom in our rear view mirror gives way to a refractory denial of what probability and statistics will have us know — that we are most likely vulnerable to an unexpected revisit from the dark passenger on some idle weekday in the not too distant future.

Acceptance of recurrent depression is unpaletable at best, intolerable at worst. The mind does not wish to…