The alarm has been blaring for several minutes now. You feel like you can barely raise your arm to it turn off. It feels like so much effort. Everything feels like so much effort. Even though you are so very tired and all you want to do is sleep and forget, you can’t. Some nights you lie awake for hours tossing and turning, finally falling asleep exhausted in the wee hours of the morning. Then you drag yourself around the next day, repeating the process the next night.
You can’t stop crying. You’re crying in the bathroom stall at work, behind the wheel when you’re driving, while you’re making dinner for the kids, or sitting alone in your empty apartment missing the hubbub of the kids and the dog. You’re a big sloppy mess that you don’t even recognize.
You wonder how long you can go on like this. You’re not eating, or you’re overeating. You’re maybe drinking a little too much.
Truth be told, there are moments when you don’t want to go on anymore. It’s too much. You may think about suicide. You fleetingly ponder a plan and then, possibly, less fleetingly, come back to considering that plan again. Hopefully you resist that urge. Some people in your situation do not.
You may be wondering how normal this is, if this is the way it is for everyone going through a divorce. The answer would be, yes, at least to some degree. The group of people who self-medicate with alcohol or other substances, who otherwise deny and avoid what is happening, are merely postponing the inevitable. In the long run, rather than experiencing an episode of situational depression, these “avoiders” sometimes end up suffering from a more chronic form depression.
There are a few things to keep in mind about the sadness, however appropriate it may be for the moment. First, as you may have already noticed, the flip side of the sadness is anger. Swinging back and forth between despair and rage is a common pattern. Each feeling with be deep. With time the swings moderate until they, too, become more episodic – when you see your Ex at Court, when you exchange the children in person, when you attend a family graduation or wedding, etc. So, if you feel like your emotions are swirling and swinging, know that this is part of the separation process.
Second, if you are experiencing symptoms of depression for more than a couple of weeks, call your primary care physician or local clinic. Make an appointment with a divorce counselor who can listen and support you. There’s no award on the horizon for slogging through the days on your own. I hear you saying that you don’t like to take medication, that you don’t want to be dependent upon anything or anyone. However, understand that you are potentially placing your physical and mental health, and quite possibly your life, at risk by not addressing your sadness head on. You are on your own now. You need to be proactive. Medication and therapy have their place. They can get you over the hump so you can sleep, eat, and function on a daily basis.
Third, if you find yourself serious about suicide, please call the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273-8255 or go to your local emergency room. Call that friend who said they would be willing to help you out, no matter what you need. The sadness does pass. And there is a new life waiting for you around the corner. But you have to stick around to live it.