I am not taking any pleasure in the rain tonight.

I’m not taking any pleasure in much of anything lately - hence, anhedonia. I was feeling OK this afternoon when I talked to my friend Theresa, but here I am a few hours later, feeling the complete opposite of how I felt when I talked to her.

At that point, I was feeling hopeful and thinking that I’d be able to “Pollyanna” my way through this bout of depression. But now I’m realizing that I’ll be spending the next three weeks home alone, most likely carless (unless my sister says I can use her car while she’s out of the country), with my father.

I think I can safely say that it will not be a positive living environment for me. If we manage to be civil, there will be the stressed strained air of people who don’t know what to say to each other without starting an argument. The polite indifference that will be suffusing the atmosphere will be frustrating. Not knowing what to say, but knowing that it’s rude not to say ANYTHING is rough.

Also during this time, I’ll find out about my wrist surgery. That will be yet another delightful stress factor, regardless of how positive the recommendation is. Surgery is surgery; it’s going to be invasive and require a solid amount of post-op recovery, and it’s going to be my first surgery ever. Thus, whether I was having a gallstone removed or a prosthetic bone put in, it would be stressful just by virtue of being the first surgical procedure I’d be having in which I’d be under anesthesia and getting cut open.

I’ve got “Napoleon Dynamite” queued up in the DVD player, but I’m not even sure I feel like watching it. I figured that a feel-good movie might help me, well, feel good. Instead, I’m just getting a little annoyed. Perhaps tonight’s a good night to watch something French or Japanese with the subtitles turned off, so I have almost no idea what’s going on and can just stare at the moving images and get lost in thought.

Tomorrow I’ll do some cleaning. Perhaps tidying up my external living space will help restore order in my internal living space. Or at least help me feel like I can overcome chaos in something, albeit it smaller than my life.

It’s sort of good that I don’t have a car or money to go out this weekend, because I really don’t feel like being social or spending time with anyone. If anyone asks me what’s wrong or how I’m feeling, I’ll cry. I don’t want to talk; I’m annoyed and frustrated at everything. Tonight my mother commented that she doesn’t know how to talk to me anymore. I replied, “I don’t know how to talk to anyone right now.” It’s frighteningly true.

The process is something like this. I’ll think about talking to someone (say, a friend), but then realize that I’d be repeating the same things I said last time I was depressed and that I’d be boring them. Then I imagine the conversation - I would say I don’t want to be a bore, the friend would say, “but I’m your friend - I want to listen/be your shoulder.” And I’ll be convinced that they’re saying that just because they have to to be a good friend - or to be able to say/feel they’re a good friend. Then I get angry at myself for allowing myself to think that any of my friends would be a friend for martyrdom’s sake. Then I decide that it would be easier to lie and say I’m fine and put on a happy face because it really is like speaking a foreign language to try to explain depression to someone who hasn’t experienced it or known someone with it before.

People automatically come to the conclusion that depression is just being really really sad and will try to empathize by saying, “We all have our down times…” or “We all get sad sometimes…” and follow up with a story about a childhood goldfish dying or not getting a job they really wanted. While that may sound like I’m making light of someone else’s pain, that’s not my intention. I can’t compare the intensity and importance of someone’s pain to my depression. They’re two very different things.

One - sadness or grief - is an emotional response to a loss or major life upset. The other - depression - is not really an emotional response to anything, though it can be triggered by times of stress or sadness. In my case, it’s not triggered to any one specific life event; rather, it’s part of my life. It’s a mental illness. It’s a condition. It’s something I have to work with (or against, however you look at it) every day. It won’t just pass with time. Yes, it will pass, but it will come back without warning. And it will keep coming back until I find the treatment or lifestyle change or combination of the two that helps me live my life beyond the confines of this definition/depression/disease.

In the meantime, I keep reading and writing and trying to learn and think and feel and do what I can while I’m in it so perhaps someone else reading out there in the ether will think, “Hey - so I’m not speaking a completely foreign language when I try to explain how I feel. There is at least one other person out there who ‘gets it’.”

And maybe not. Maybe no one will read and no one will understand. But that’s OK. There are very few things I can enjoy right now and while I can’t say that I’m sitting here smiling and enjoying myself, I am distracted for a little while, and that can be worth more than enjoyment at times like these.