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My “Unusual” Struggle with Depression

[additional-authors]
May 6, 2015

I spent two years of my life in consuming depression.  My mind reaches for reasons, as if depression needs justification.

The tipping point happened in my first year of medical school.  The Iranian revolution had sent me spinning through several countries and many more schools.  As the first born, I shouldered my family’s pain and financial hardship.  Within a couple of years, I lost my grandparents.  The hormones that basted my teenage brain complicated the serotonin depletion. 

I needed to mourn.  There is sweetness in loss that demands reckoning; there is comfort in being a victim.

How could I sulk in face of success?  I was granted access to the coveted U.C. San Diego School of Medicine.  I had tried self-sabotage by not applying to schools outside of California, but failed even at that.  When I needed self-pity, I was not allowed. 

My cerebral cortex designed ways to bypass my limbic system, intellect defeating emotions- subtle and destructive.  Subconsciously, I failed the easiest test and “aced” the most difficult.  I skipped classes in lieu of swimming in the La Jolla Ocean.  Instead of anatomy, I spent days at the zoo.  The morning ritual of welcoming sunrise on Mount Soledad cut into class time.  I skipped neurology to rollerblade down Torrey Pines Road without a protective helmet.

To the untrained eye, my reckless behavior made me appear to be following the advice of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society:  Carpe Diem.

Meanwhile, I cried, often and alone.  As an alcoholic drinks in isolation, as an addict finds refuge in a dark corner, I found myself in tears, abandoned.   As an introvert, I always had an itch for solitude.    Still, there are wounds of the psyche that don’t bleed  and throb much worse than physical ones. 

Through love, therapy, and miracles, I clawed my way out of that pit.  To be honest, I did the work.  I wrote.  I read.  I prayed.  I attended therapy.  I didn’t skip over depression; I went through it.

To some, depression is sadness.  But to many, it is a change in your being, an internal revolution.  Listen to my patient’s daughter who came to my rescue as I struggled to convince her father to stop resisting treatment: “Forget the smile on your face.  Last year, you lost your wife of 54 years and you quit surfing, you don’t sleep, you put on 28 lbs, you had a heart attack, and you’ve stopped taking your medications.  To me, you have a death wish.  If that’s not depression, I don’t know what is.”

During recovery, I had a choice- to become hard-shelled, mute, or to remain vulnerable and find strength where I was once broken.  I decided to follow God’s fascinating demand to circumcise our hearts: “cut away the thickening around their hearts and stiffen their necks no more.” 

The demons of melancholy schooled my soul.  Pain unraveled into courage.  That damaged little boy whose innocence was cut short, who never developed roots in a land, a language, a people- began to repair.

The cracks in our soul are holy, and yes, that’s how the light gets in.  But to those of us shattered and healed, the cracks are also where our internal light, our precious spark, shines out onto the world.

Today, I use my past to soothe others’ future.  Patients present with somatic symptoms of chest pain, shortness of breath and fatigue, much of it disguised depression.  I see the highly accomplished young mom in constant fear of losing her child as she battles untreated postpartum depression, the wealthy entrepreneur who just can’t find the right wife, whose depression manifests in mistrust and anger, the beautiful grandmother who suffers from memory loss which is not dementia, but pseudo-dementia, or depression.

For me, relapse looms around a corner, as in a recovering alcoholic, or the tumor in remission.  Yet, in that balance, the world pulsates full of chances, and my tears bleed as words onto these pages.
 

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