Lately I haven’t been feeling like myself. Whom I’ve been feeling like exactly, I can’t say. But I can say that I’ve been feeling lethargic, overwhelmed, and hopeless. In other words, I’ve been a real Negative Nancy–a wet blanket–a gloom merchant–the opposite of Rainbow Brite. Anyway, this afternoon I saw my therapist and fell apart. Well, sort of fell apart. I cried enough to dampen one-half of one tissue. Still, I could have used the whole box if I’d let myself. That “hold it together” part of me is just really fucking stubborn.

It’s had a lot of practice.

Okay, here we go. (Breathe, Marcus.)

My therapist suggested I may be dealing with what’s called Post-Surgery Depression. “People don’t talk about it, but it’s really common,” she said. Then she repeated herself. “Really common.” And whereas she didn’t hand me an official diagnosis (I’m not sure she does that anyway), we did talk about options. To take a pill or not take a pill (to get me over the hump), that is the question. It’ll be a while before I have an answer. Honestly, I feel slightly better simply having admitted everything to my therapist. “I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.” Plus, it feels good knowing a lot of people in similar or even different circumstances feel this way–unmotivated, deluged. “You’re human,” my therapist said. “There’s only so much one person can take.”

This evening I looked up Post-Surgery Depression online and read five or six articles about it. (So now I’m pretty much an expert.) From what I gathered, there are a lot of causative and contributing factors, including the stress of the surgery, the anesthesia, the use of antibiotics, the feeling of chronic pain, and (as in my case) the loss of mobility and (therefore) income. Check, check, check. I wasn’t making a ton of money before this accident happened, but what I was making was coming from dance. Now that I’m on a rehab prescription that includes six months of no dancing, it’s difficult to see how everything is going to work out. Granted, I can still teach, but someone’s going to have to call to schedule a lesson first.

In terms of the stress of the surgery, none of the articles said it, but surgery is clearly traumatic. I mean, it’s not like they’re sawing on a piece of plywood or dicing up a fruit salad. You’re a living, breathing organism with a mind, body, and soul, and in order to repair the damage of the original injury, they have to knock you out, slice you open, run a drill through your bones, rearrange your parts, and staple you back together (no wonder you wake up bruised). In other words, you’re injured twice. As for the knocking out part, one of the articles said that being under general anesthesia is less like sleeping really soundly and more like being in a controlled coma (which is a big damn deal). The same article compared it to a city’s power plant being completely taken offline. That is, not everything “comes back on” at once. It’s more like a couple blocks at a time.

For me, I can’t quite shake that my entire world has been turned upside down. As a baseline, last year wasn’t great. In fact, it sucked, and as I’ve said before, it was my hardest ever. Sure, it included a lot of personal growth, maybe more than I’ve ever experienced. Which is why I’m constantly saying you shouldn’t work on yourself–because if you want the good stuff, plan to go through hell. They simply go hand-in-hand. (Also, to be clear, I do recommend working on yourself. It’s better than the alternative, which is long-term suffering.) Anyway, so there was hell, then this injury came along. And whereas I’ve been supported and gotten good help, I’ve also had the shit scared out of me and been totally inundated both physically and emotionally.

Someone said recently, “It’s like the straw that broke the camel’s back.” I replied, “No, it’s like the hay bale that broke the camel’s back.”

I’m not in love with the fact that I’m talking about (potentially, officially) being depressed to the entire world-wide web. After all, there’s a lot of stigma around this topic in our society, and it’s grossly misunderstood. Hell, clinical depression runs in my family, and I don’t understand it. (Once a psychiatrist told my father, “People understand depression to the extent that they’ve had it.”) Obviously, it can take on a lot of different forms. My personal experience with it is limited to feeling empty and paralyzed while I was in a no-good, horrible, very bad relationship several years ago and feeling extremely unhappy just before I closed my dance studio. In both cases, I knew something had to change.

The articles I read today about Post-Surgery Depression offered the standard advice. Be patient, get outside, exercise, don’t neglect your friends. Also, they said it was important to celebrate small victories. For example, this last weekend while in Nashville, I noticed that it was easier for me to go down the stairs at my friend’s apartment when I left on Monday than it was to go down them when I first got there the previous Friday. My natural tendency is to brush this improvement off, since it wasn’t dramatic. But the articles suggested you can find a lot of hope by recognizing incremental gains.

So to commemorate this milestone, I just ate an Oreo Blizzard from the Sonic.

But back to my not really wanting to talk about this and why I’m doing it anyway. My therapist pointed out this afternoon that I’ve chosen to make my very personal and private journey public (on this blog), and I agree. Not that I share everything that goes on in my life or head, but putting my insides on the outside is sort of what I do here, so it doesn’t seem right to stop now. Plus, because there is a stigma in our society around The D Word, I can’t imagine that will ever get better by not talking about it. And it needs to get better. I know what it’s like to feel sad, isolated, ashamed, embarrassed, different than, and less than, and it needs to get better for anyone who feels these things. And since every major stride I’ve made in terms of my mental health and personal relationships has always started with no longer bottling up, stuffing down, and keeping secrets, but rather with having an honest conversation, then I’m having this honest conversation.