When the World Fades to Gray, Darkens to Black, Explodes to White..

I want to honor my pain.

I don’t mean I want to wallow in it or even linger in it overly long. I just want to validate it and learn from it so that I can leave it with clearness in my mind and wisdom in my heart.

For many months now its like I’ve been living in a cocoon, desperately attempting to buffer the outside world because my entire being was wrapped in deep grief, burning rage, and paralyzing fear. Everything fell apart and a switch got thrown in my brain.
Its perfectly understandable, and if it weren’t for those few weeks of seriously indulging thoughts of suicide– actually practical. My entire life was upended upon the whims of a man gone mad from midlife crisis. He tossed every promise he has ever made to me out in order to indulge his appetite for youthful flesh and cowardice for the inevitability of aging and death. My survival was at stake, my heart was crushed, and I was thrust into a massive crisis.

“Overwhelmed” doesn’t begin to cover it…

There is a lot to go over with all of this, but for today I want to address the depression aspect of what my husband and two false friends did to me.

I’m not one of those people whose brain chemistry goes wonky without reason. Every time I’ve become depressed, things are going badly in my life– and often unrelentingly for many months. A point is reached where I can’t deal anymore and something rather odd happens… I start to retreat within myself and my brain literally begins to shut down.

Its been mentioned before that about once a decade I have an ‘episode’ of depression that lasts from 3 to 9 months on average. I stop dancing, writing, thinking, doing…. I’ve just been through my stint for my 40s it seems. One upside to having been through this before was that I was very aware of what was happening to me, and knew I could make it out to the other side. This was crucial, because I NEEDED to be functional with all the challenges suddenly before me, and having my effectiveness compromised was dangerous to my future!

Realizing what I was up against drove me to frantic levels of anxiety. Which in turn exhausted me– and further fueled the depression.
I think many people have been depressed, but there are many levels of depression. I have a color chart of moods I’ve used in my own self-assessments for many years. Here’s how I rank the sadness part of things:

    Blue: The mildest form of sadness. Melancholy is a good word for it. Not really depression, just feeling almost romantically sensitive and aware of your own loneliness and what is missing in life. Its like looking out a window on a rainy day full of dark clouds. You feel a bit cut off from joy but still very much engaged in life and functional.

I have always believed that Blue moods are a way to mildly grieve and acknowledge the rougher days as one goes through the normal ups and downs of any life. Perhaps I need to address some problems I’ve let go for too long. Or maybe its a signal in my life to expand my world more– meet new people, travel, try new things. Its a mood of LONGING, therefore you must find ways to reach out more and pull life in. You only long for what is missing if you’ve been drifting for too long. A Blue mood is therefore a call to take a step back and reassess one’s life, and so I welcome Blue moods as an opportunity to slow down and consider things. My intent is to re-emerge from these moods with a clearer sense of direction and purpose, and they have always served me well. I refuse to deny myself a little Blue mood now and again. Its a part of the multi-hued colors of emotional reactions that we need in life.

However, Blue moods take you over when you still have choices, when you’re not backed into a corner and being unfairly treated with no way out. When that happens, Blue transforms into something much worse.

    Gray: Mild depression, also called Anhedonia, is where contentment and comfort just– go away. The normal riotous colors of life fade out. Gray moods seem to be your brain’s way of buffering you from over-stimulation because shit is going wrong and your power to prevent disaster has shrunk. Things are starting to go really wrong.

You’re not yet in the danger zone at Gray, but nothing feels good anymore. ‘Anhedonia’ is the word for ‘lack of pleasure’, and at first glance that doesn’t seem so bad… Except that without pleasure to inspire us, life becomes like slogging through a bog in a fog. Everything becomes a chore without reward. You just go through the motions, but there’s nothing of your spirit in anything you do, and productivity suffers tremendously. You numb out.

Just think of all that you do to pleasantly pass time and take the edge off every single day. Little games, music, conversations, hobbies, reading or watching stories, indulging curiosity, playing or doing just about anything you like as opposed to things you’re obligated to do for simple survival’s sake like housework or your job. Think of all those things…

…now take that away, because its all faded into the Gray.

You can’t listen to music because its like the dance in your mind- the song of your heart- that you normally have when you connect to music just goes missing. Jokes seem like pop quizzes that you forgot to prepare for and nothing is funny anymore. Enjoying stories by connecting with the characters and feeling with them ends and you realize that you’re always thinking about other things anyway. Moving gets harder, because without normal motivation the will to pull yourself up and spend energy disappears.

Paradoxically, the world becomes both too big and too small, and there is an unfamiliarity to people, places and things. However, as alienating as this experience is, its too difficult to allow yourself to pay much attention. Instead, you wander from boring activity to boring activity, filling time and always missing the point of everything.

I truly and massively dislike being in the Gray mood, as I was for several months this time. Nothing is any fun anymore and I stop being myself. A “Gray Ghost” of me is all that is left. Sometimes a bit of color will pop out very short term when I’m lucky… bits of me from my past that forgot to die completely… but I am soon back to blending into the background like dust on wallpaper.

I have learned to respect Gray moods. When life fades in such a way, I know I have to take steps to heal my life because my brain is chemically reacting and it can get much worse… SO much worse..!

    Black: Truly horrific clinical depression with often traumatic consequences. People make light of it with the whole “goth” and “emo” constructs, but for many, Black becomes more than just a cultural fashion indulgence. My first and worst depression was during my teens and lasted years. I wore black because I couldn’t stand colors. Even gray seemed too cheerful.

A Black mood is an awful way to suffer. I descended into the Black level of depression for only a couple of months this time, but going through it again was a sobering thing. It clings to your mind and heart like a giant insect that can’t quit stabbing you with its spiky legs. At this level, its like that Gray slog through the bog in a fog had you stumbling blindly into a massive hole in the ground and then you fell, down and down, into a dark cave of cold silence, with nothing but your own mind for company.

And at this stage, your mind is NOT your friend!

Every awful thing ever said to you- every awful thing you’ve ever suspected about yourself- which is rightfully suppressed most of the time, just comes roaring to the surface like the devil rising from the core of hell. The self-recriminations begin and they won’t stop. Its as if a portion of your soul splits off just to turn on the rest of you. You literally become your own worst enemy and the aim of this enemy is your utter destruction.

Part of you decides death is better than living and sets out on a campaign to convince you of this. The world will be better off without you, the inner-enemy says, and besides– can you really stand to continue to live with this self-hatred?

It becomes harder and harder to argue with that.

When this Black mood takes over your life, you actually look upon your previous Gray days with fondness. Being all buffered from both pleasure and pain is nothing compared to the torment and utter misery of being trapped in the Black. Either you can’t cry or react at all, or any small thing can send you into heart-rending sobs as if you’ve just lost a loved one.

At this level, there is a simmering element of rage beneath the festering pain. A very small portion of it is directed towards the world, for disappointing you so bitterly. You feel disgusted by life, and by your own foolishness for ever caring for it or thinking it could ever be better. Justice? Fairness? Mercy? What pathetic lies they all are! But most of your wrath is reserved for your judgments of yourself. As bad as this world is, you think, you’re surely one of the worst parts of it. A pathetic loser who couldn’t make it…

You lose perspective entirely. Your sense of worth is lost. Nothing means anything. Its all proof of the absurd and sadistic joke that is life. Your heart curls into a tight ball and hides from the torment by going blind and deaf and just trying to hold on. The effort is exhausting. You spend a lot of time in dark rooms, either sleeping too much or never able to sleep at all.

The only saving grace of this level is that you become so ineffective at anything that little effort is made to self-harm. Sometimes the self-hatred is over-whelming, and there is self-harm which is used to interrupt the flow of nasty chatter in your head. Any self-harming seems to take you “up” a level back to Gray temporarily. Regardless of this, a tiny part of you (that heart all curled up) is still trying to survive. Everything hurts, but lost in the Black you’re just reeling in it and can’t see past that monster or its non-stop voice of self-hatred. That is, until…

    White: Depression so acute you go insane and suicidal. Luckily only a couple of weeks for me on this last descent.

Granted, this is my own personal symbolic system (and I hate white– wouldn’t even get married in that lack of color) but bear with me.
White Moods are the level you go to when something snaps mentally. From feeling lost and lacking energy in horrific pain- its like someone flips a switch and a really bright light dazzles your senses. The world comes lurching back into awareness, but its normality smacks your head differently. Things get ugly. Really ugly. Black moods seem like being in hell, but that hell is now inside of you because you finally surrendered to it. There is a shallow blankness to emotions that would be incredibly alarming if you could care enough to focus on it.

Most stages of depression are about suppression and repression. You’re in a state of seemingly permanent retreat. Urges GO AWAY. Its all a foggy or dark mental space, and impulses are shut down. Most of the drama is going on where no one can see- right between your ears. Oh, your hygiene probably suffers and the state of your living quarters would make anyone with OCD want to rip their hair out, but you avoid people and places when depressed so few really notice how bad off you are…

But at the White stage, all that turns on its head. Life rips into you and suddenly you are able to react once more– but everything is now twisted. You can smile again, but its most often a sneer. Laughter is possible, but its hysterical and incredibly cynical. The one feeling missing when in the grip of the White mood is, ironically, sadness. You can’t feel sorry anymore, though, and that comes as an unexpected relief.

THIS is the most dangerous form of depression where you have wild and often horrific impulses. Self-harming is not just a distraction, its a mission, and a part of you seems to take satisfaction in physical pain. “Take this, you [insert insult here]!” you say to yourself. Its feels powerful to punish yourself. After so long feeling utterly powerless, taking the initiative to mess yourself up seems right somehow. You become obsessive and compulsive- but not in the orderly avoid-anxiety way of OCD…

The uppermost obsession is a death-wish, with thoughts of how and when and where running circles through your mind endlessly. You plan your suicide. You may take steps in quiet moments when the screaming White mood backs off a little. But compulsions to do awful things to yourself come at a whim. Any high spaces tempt you to jump. Fast traffic beckons you into the road. Sharp objects sing to your skin. Hard surfaces and heavy objects invite self-bludgeoning. Every dubious situation calls like a siren… Dark alleys and high crime neighborhoods? Loathsome people and high-risk actions? ‘Sign me up!‘ you think.

The reason I call it the White mood is because of the lack of color and the ongoing mental scream of this stage. Its White because you lose concern, regret, and fear. Those emotions may not be good to feel, but you need them because they keep you alive. When they are stripped away at White, you lose your normal survival instincts and common sense.

And it can be the end of you… either slowly or suddenly.

So, yeah, this has been my experience from late last summer until about a month ago. One good thing about having been through this awful journey before is I knew what to expect and I reached out for help– eventually. I didn’t until I found myself in the White stage, when some small, smart, part of me rebelled at my own crazy shit. I scared myself– really scared myself.

Realizing I was in trouble, I got a therapist, a support group, and medication. I dared to ask friends for help– and all but one stepped up to do what they could and I feel incredibly grateful. Until now, I’m guessing many of them had no idea where I was at– though several of them certainly do!

We’re taught not to share these deeply personal things and to feel ashamed of them, but I don’t want to follow that rule. I’m proud that I got help and made it out again. (Anxiety is still a massive issue, but I’m working on that.) And I want others who have been through this to know they are SO not alone.

I am also writing about it while it is still raw and fresh in my mind because there is a gift hidden within this terrible experience: Compassion.

Suffering can only ever have that one worthy piece to it. Otherwise, I don’t agree that it builds character or strength. My own life has shown the opposite: suffering breaks you down and weakens you. Always. Our cultural myths to the contrary have only created more suffering and I refuse to indulge them any longer. Rising to a challenge is one thing, expecting people who are in the monochromatic moods I described above to “just get over it” because “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is entirely unrealistic and cruel.

But dipping into that kind of pain does create perspective. After all these years of learning through the process of life, I have come to really care about other people who suffer as I have, many much worse than I could ever imagine. I don’t pretend they don’t need me because its inconvenient. I don’t judge them as weak and rightfully deserving of their fate. I don’t roll my eyes and snicker about “drama queens.”

And THAT makes me a better person.

So I have embraced the experience and am acknowledging it and finding some value and taking that compulsion towards kindness, towards empathy, with me as I rise out of the bleak and often harsh place I have been.

For everyone who reads my words above and realized I was describing their own experience, or a very similar one, I hope knowing that some people ‘get it’ helps in some way. I hope they share their own Gray and Black and White moods and memories of moods and stop feeling ashamed. I hope they stop blaming themselves and get help, and realize its okay to need it.

I did and I’m already shedding the Grey mood as I’ve risen back up from my descent in reverse order of how I went ‘down.’ Perhaps the most important thing I want to convey to anyone who is still down there in that pain place is that its possible to get back out again. Even when life is sucking so bad and so hard you can’t see a way out. Just ask for help. And if the first people you ask won’t do it, find others and ask them. Its incredibly hard because it feels like begging when your pride is already smashed into oblivion, but do it anyway!

I asked for help and so many people surprised me with their understanding and compassion. I was so enmeshed in my depressive moods that I didn’t give the people who cared for me nearly enough credit. The hopeless part of me who was convinced I wasn’t worthy of consideration got a pretty thorough education this time around. A lot of people don’t agree with my inner enemy and I was reminded that that voice of self-hatred is a liar. I have never felt such gratitude in my life as I have for those who just gave me a ride, let me talk to them when I needed, kept me company so I wasn’t alone, or gave me support to see doctors and lawyers to assist me in the challenge I’m currently facing.

Finally, I write this to illustrate how important it is to identify the levels of a depression. Each requires consideration so that the help you get is appropriate to what you need. Also knowing how each level can transform to a lower level is important so that we can recognize the signs and get help before the mental illness becomes dangerous. I was so enmeshed in the drama of my suddenly hellish life that I didn’t pay enough attention until I was in a very bad place and I wish I had reached out for assistance earlier. If I ever go Gray again, I’m going to get help THEN and not let myself fall further, as I know I am likely to from experience.

Thank you for reading! 

~Lucretia Heart, coming back again…