Author: SomatiCat

Why Me?

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When you get hit with incurable, degenerative, and progressive diseases, you would probably say, “Why me?”. The life you believed you would have ends with the diagnosis. The person you have been dies with the diagnosis. You don’t know what you could expect for the future, except for the fact you would lose everything you thought you would have.

Why me? We don’t have any answer to that question. My friend, Maria, was diagnosed with ALS and passed away within a year. Every day she lost some of her function. She said that somebody told her that the Universe/God had chosen her because she was strong enough to handle it. “I didn’t want to be chosen for this,” she said. It was the most cruel answer to the question.

I have a friend who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Once an epitome of fitness, he had worked in the fitness industry for the entire life, training diligently. He is losing his physical function. He didn’t do anything wrong to deserve it. “Why me?” he must have asked.

I have a friend with scleroderma. Her physical movements are limited and is constantly fighting against its progression. Mundane issues of life, such as dentistry treatment, become huge challenges. She must have asked, “Why me?”

All of them are strong and facing the challenges. They are wonderful people. Why them? There are no answers.

If you don’t have any of these disease, you would never think, “Why not me?”

When I was hit with Meniere’s Disease, I cried out, “Why me?” Meniere’s Disease is incurable and degenerative. It is rather unpredictable than progressive. I couldn’t leave home without the fear of severe attacks, which would render me incapacitated. I lost the life I expected to have, bedridden most of days. I am tenacious by nature, so I fought to regain my function with teeth and claws. Did I do anything to deserve it? Actually I did. Eventually I figured out the trigger. It was my genetics and lifestyle that triggered it. Even though Meniere’s Disease is incurable, I am managing it with very strict lifestyle change and am currently in remission.

Now when I think about my friends with ALS, Parkinson’s, Scleroderma and other incurable, degenerative, progressive diseases, I think, “Why not me?”

I am dodging the bullet every day, every moment, as they are stealing every single day from the illness.

So, if you don’t have these illness, you are blessed. Be grateful and savor every moment of your life. You are probably dodging bullets without knowing it.

Chapter 1: Skin

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Where body meets air we are all cadavers

The Body: A guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson

Epidermis

I walked into the gross anatomy lab in a medical school in a brand-new white lab coat and stood at one of the dissection tables. There was a constant humming of air purifier. Under the gleaming florescent light, the lab looked sterile and lifeless. It accommodated multiple tables, on each of which a cadaver lay. It was my first human dissection class and I was nervous. Unless you are a medical student, coroner, forensic examiner, or some kind of specialist, you will never have a chance to see naked dead bodies quietly lying on stainless steel tables. The cadavers were embalmed for preservation. The texture of their skin has somewhat foreign quality.  

In my old country, we don’t have the custom of embalming. When my grandmother passed away, she was laid on a futon in her home as if she were sleeping and family members took turn to stay beside her body over a night. It is an old custom for family members to spend the last night with the loved one. It is also an occasion to familiarize the living with death. I stayed with her body for several hours, keeping incense burning. Her skin was yellowish, wrinkled, and dry, but otherwise intact. Cold air from the dry ice to keep the body’s decomposition process at bay seeped through the futon, with a whiff of death, unfamiliar but distinct.

In the lab the cadavers’ skin was unnaturally moist because of the embalming fluid saturating their tissue. We carefully observed artifacts of death and embalming process in order to differentiate them from the inherent characteristics of the deceased. The outer layer of skin on the shin was peeling in patches, similar to the pealing skin when you get too much sun, but slightly deeper. One of the cadavers was of a dark skinned man and we were bewildered seeing pale skin layer showing from beneath. We’ve realized the skin color was only epidermis deep. Under epidermis layer, we are all same color: pale and fair.

Epidermis, the outermost layer of skin, is only 0.05mm (eyelids) to 1.5mm (palm and sole of foot) thick, and it defines you in the society. It is a social organ which meets the eye of others first. As a person of east Asian origin, I have olive tinted skin.  When I was a kid, I spent most of daytime outdoors and got tanned where my skin was exposed to the sun. Naturally I was darker than adults who spent most of their time indoor. My father used to tell me I was too dark to be pretty. In my old country, at that time, women should have fair skin to be considered beautiful. The fairer was the better. My skin is still tanned, but not as much as when I was kid. Actually the part of body which rarely see sunlight is as fair as my European friends. I just don’t get burnt as easily as them. Labeled as an Asian girl too dark to be considered pretty haunted my self-image, although it was just an epidermis layer deep, and the label can be peeled away easily. Nowadays, I am a proud woman of certain advanced age with beautifully tanned skin, less sun damaged than that of fair skinned friends.

Melanocytes reside in the bottom layer of epidermis and they produce melanin, which determines your skin color. So without epidermis, you are pale. Defining people by skin color is just absurd. Melanin protects you from UV damages from the sunlight. Darker skin color just means your skin is more tolerant to UV exposure. 

In the living, deepest layer of the epidermis, where melanocytes reside, is firmly attached to the dermis and thankfully won’t peel away easily. Since epidermis layer doesn’t contain sensory nerve endings — except for  vibration sensing Merkel cells, which are found in the bottom layer of the epidermis — touching the epidermis alone doesn’t cause any sensations. There is a rare genetic disorder with which the bond between the dermis and epidermis is very weak and epidermis layer peels away at a slightest contact, exposing nerve endings. The sufferer of this condition could be vulnerable to UV, germs, and any other outside threats.

Imagine if you are without epidermis. Every slightest touch would cause excruciating pain. Your existence becomes agony. When I studied psychology, the instructor described a person with borderline personality disorder as “being without skin.”  A condition of being without epidermis might be the more accurate analogy. 

The epidermis forms the boundary between what is me and what is not me, acting as the first line of defense, protecting what is inside from what is outside and it is just a less than 1mm thick boundary. Our physical existence is vulnerable as such. 

When I got temporary Henna tattoo, the “tattoo” faded away in a week or two. It is because the pigment only penetrates the epidermis layer and the outermost layer of the epidermis (stratum corneum) is made of dead cells and constantly flaking away. The cells in outer layer of the epidermis are replaced in thirty to forty days. Part of us is constantly dying since birth.

As a manual therapist, when I touch a client, I make a contact with their epidermis. I would never touch their dermis, a.k.a. the true skin directly. Between them and me, epidermis layers stand guard, keeping “not me” out.  Every caress of lovers is through the layer of dead cells. Flaked dead cells of us get mingled and float away in the air or ringer on the floor.  And that thin, evanescent boundary keeps us safe from each other.

Meditation on Cadavers-Prologue

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Savasana

I am not writing an anatomy book, nor a dissection manual, though I use nomencIature of anatomist when it is more clear than everyday language. This book/writing is not about scientific knowledge. If you want to learn detailed anatomical information, there are tons of great books you can choose from. This is just A story of my personal experience facing cadavers in dissection labs, and a story about how that experience has affected my perception of who I am, how I relate to everything, especially to my body, in this lifetime.

I once read about a meditation technique where you lie on your back and imagine your body gradually decomposing until it becomes a skeleton. I heard that in Buddhism there is a meditation method in which one observes one’s own body both from the inside and outside while observing an actual corpse decompose. I liked this meditation method because I interpreted it as a training to realize that all material existence in this world, including one’s own body, is a mere phenomenon, just like a decaying corpse. 

When we experience unbearable trauma, our body and consciousness may become dissociated in order to protect ourselves. The body becomes a thing that performs a specific function, and becomes separated from the ”I” consciousness.

Once I had sessions with a Zen psychology therapist. He often asked me, “What do you feel in your body?” I looked up at the ceiling, looked around the room and always looked for the answer outside of my body. “Can you feel your feet on the floor?” he asked. Of course I could feel my feet physically touching the floor, but that was completely disconnected from what I was feeling mentally. 

I didn’t have much knowledge about my own body. So even when I meditated on a corpse, I couldn’t visualize it very well, and I had no conscious connection to my body, so the corpse quickly turned into abstract bones. I couldn’t understand how complex and delicate the human body was, and how it was related to my very existence.

Through the gross anatomy training, I gradually recovered the connection between my self and my body. Every time I stood at the dissection table, I felt like I was slowly regaining my humanity. It has been more than 10 years since I was initiated into human dissection, and I have spent over 1,500 hours in dissection labs. Now attending an annual dissection workshop is like a Zen practitioner regularly practicing at a temple. 

I see it as my spiritual practice. It prepares me for the reality of death and dying, and reminds me of the meaning of living this moment. 

Savasana in yoga is said to be a pose where you lie on your back and imitate a dead body. When we go to a dissection table in a dissection lab, we face a donated body that is quietly in Savasana pose. It is the last pose we all will take.

Split

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I watched Split and Glass on NETFLIX, in which a fictionalized character with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) creates a personality with superhuman ability. The actor, James McAvoy, was phenomenal, switching one personality to another seamlessly on camera. It’s a textbook premise of severe childhood abuse, splitting the psych to protect the vulnerable one. The Beast, the personality with ultimate power and strength, punishes the “undamaged.” [SPOILER ALERT] The Beast considers the damaged/suffered one as clean and pure.

That’s what attracted me.

I have a friend with DID. Sarah is an highly intelligent, cultured, well-read, and funny woman. She placed many younger “damaged” women under her wings. She was the one who familiarized me with Broadway shows, by gifting me tickets to Sondheim. We went out to nice cafes and restaurants, discussed arthouse films and other things. The story of her life was exciting. She was one of the first female producers of TV programs, or something like that. I’m not sure Sarah is the original personality. I met two other ones, Tommy, a boy who was always saying “Sorry.” and the scary one, probably her mother internalized. The switch was not so clean cut as you see in films. She said she had a “Flat Earth” committee in her mind, which decided what she could do or not. She always said she was not allowed to step out of her apartment. Before she was diagnosed to have DID, she had ben diagnosed with charcuterie board-full of disorders, including agoraphobia, depression and anxiety disorder. She was prescribed with variety of medications, none of which worked.

A lot of her friends tried to help. After all, she was a wonderful person when she could present herself to us, which has become rarer and rarer.

I was the last one who tried hard, due to my urge to rescue somebody else instead of myself. Since some of her disorders were blown up image of mine, I could speak her language to a certain extent.

I don’t have DID. I was dissociated but not that much. I had dysthymia and occasional major depression. Sometimes I was not “allowed” to go out of bed. I had extremely low self-esteem, and was not a good communicator, while I could present myself highly functional and intelligent in professional environments. I had and still have occasionally a voice in me, telling me to “jump” or “kill yourself.”

Eventually I realized Sarah’s other personalities sabotaged whatever would make her less damaged and allow her to live more normal life. When she acknowledged she was getting better, they sabotage the progress with full force, as if it would threaten their survival. In the first place, their original purpose should have been her survival.

To be honest, she and the committee exhausted me as they had exhausted many before me.

I haven’t seen Sarah for some years. She contacts me once in a blue moon, when she desperately needs something. The last time, her another friend contacted me because she couldn’t reach Sarah. It turned out she fell and hurt herself and admitted to ER, where she was told to stay till some blood test result would stabilize. She didn’t have her phone with her in the hospital room and couldn’t contact anybody. She figured out ingenious way to send a message. She befriended a woman in the same hospital room and asked her husband to hand deliver a note to my building. Yes, Sarah is resourceful and extremely capable. She once said that she has made a deal at some point with the committee to keep her alive. One of her friends with DID committed suicide. At least she is not a suicide risk.

Eventually, I accepted Sarah as they are. There is no original normal Sarah to return to. Sarah had already had others when I first met her. I just didn’t know them. The woman contains multitude and all pieces of her is part of my friend. And I acknowledge that it would be a childish fantasy to believe that I could save her or anybody.

Anybody would split to a certain extent. There are some incidents I don’t remember, while my body seems to remember. I don’t have a single monstrous trauma incident. Amalgamation of my verbally and emotionally, could be sexually, abusive father, manipulative and passive aggressive mother, highly narcissistic aunt, and non-communicative probably borderline grandmother, along with misogynistic social belief, with inappropriate touches and the luck of loving contact, traumatized me.

I didn’t split, but I created a tough bitch and an abrasive man (I internalized my father) to protect the vulnerable original me. I spent decades to re-parent the little girl inside of me. I wanted her to grow up to be who she was supposed to be if she were loved and left alone, a happy, loving, beautiful girl; a confident capable woman who can love and be loved. My current personality is not what I hoped to be, but I am happy with this version of myself. You can’t restore the original little one. Hold your scars and pain in your heart with kindness and you will be who you are supposed to be, clean and pure with old scars. Survive and then thrive.

Giant Anteater

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My high school best friend recommended me to watch a Japanese drama series, titled Brush Up Life. It is a story of a young woman, who suddenly died in a freak accident. She arrived at the reception desk of the “upstairs” office. A clerk at the desk told her she was assigned to re-incarnate as a giant anteater. She refused to be reborn as a giant anteater and asked the alternative option. The clerk told her that she could redo her life from the birth with her current knowledge and consciousness. The woman chose to start over and changed her life as she went. To make a long story short, every time she started over, something didn’t work and she died. So she kept going back to the start. Eventually she got the result she wanted (she saved her friends’ life).

My friend asked me if I could start over with current consciousness intact, what would I do. I thought about changing this and that. I would be on SSRI as soon as it’s available–I wasn’t diagnosed until in late 30s and I had developed a basketful of disorders. I would focus on physical fitness –I had eating disorder and was out of shape, a heavy smoker with alcohol dependency. I would move to the U.S. as soon as possible–I moved here in my late 20s and didn’t know my old country’s restrictive culture had traumatized me. I would study harder to get in a medical school –I applied for but wasn’t accepted and instead went to study liberal arts.

Then I realized I would be born into the same family and would have to do it all over again. The heroine of the drama has a “normal enough” and functional enough family. She tries to change things to save others. I can’t change my dysfunctional family. I can’t change how my parents deal with me. I would be born into the same family with all the pain, fear, shame, and anger. No. I would rather be a Giant Anteater. It would be much better.

My friend said she wanted to change one event, which traumatized and defined her life. Her parents moved from a metropolitan area to a rural city due to her father’s job and she was transferred from a private school in a large city to a local public middle school in a pretty tough district, where she was bullied as an outsider. She still can’t get over the trauma. She is now a professor of psychiatry at a local medical school, established and lives in a large house. She is married, has two sons, and they both are well-respected medical doctors. She has grandchildren, who live in the same city. I am freelancing, living in a small apartment with an old dog. I’m divorced with no children. From outside, she seems to have a good enough life. Still, she wanted to change.

I’ve been thinking about starting over, but every time I think of it, I end up choosing a giant anteater. I had a volatile life and I wish I could choose differently here and there, but if I changed any event I wouldn’t be able to be here. Every mistake I made, every bad choice I made, it was a ferry to carry me here and now. I have realized I am very content and happy with who I am now.

I just spend much of my life in constant stormy weather, hanging onto whatever I could to survive. And the deadly wind and current pushed the boats, ferry, or sometimes just a wooden lifesaver to where I am now.

So it’s possible to make peace with your life. I never expected to have this calm ordinary days at the end. (Of course, I spent large sum of money and time on this and that therapy.)

Father’s Daughter

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If by chance I talk a little wild, forgive me; I had it from my father.

— HENRY VIII, ACT 1 SCENE 4

My childhood home was not a happy place. I didn’t know how being loved felt like. My younger brother told me once he made his presence as sparse as possible to avoid unpleasant encounters, well, mostly with our father. He also told me he had never felt loved by our father. When he was a pre-teen boy, he was always attached to our mother, like a baby monkey, while I don’t remember my mother’s touch. I had never felt loved by her, either.

My parents fed, clothed, and provided a bed and more than enough schooling. So I wasn’t neglected and was physically well cared for.

After multiple of failed relationships, I realized I didn’t know how love feels like. I didn’t have felt sense or reference point of being loved. I still don’t grasp the idea of being loved for just being me. I have to be needed and useful for the other person to be loved. That’s my false belief. Becoming aware of it was a great step.

My father passed away about 10 years ago after suffering Alzheimer’s disease. He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in early 30s and he was insulin dependent for most of my life. His father and his older sister died young from complication of diabetes. There are many diabetics in his family.

After more than half a century of dodging genetic bullets, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and since I can’t take medications due to a severe and weird side effect from raised insulin level, I have been controlling it by diet and exercise only. Currently I wear CGM (continuous glucose monitor) and I finally understand what my father was going through.

I remember he said that he never enjoyed eating. He considered it as a bitter medicine. Even though he was on insulin, he was on tight calorie deficient diet. Our family never enjoyed dining out because of his diet restrictions. I always thought I didn’t want to be like him. So I enjoyed eating a lot. Now I am on a very strict diet. I can’t eat anything which I used to love–ice cream, cheesecakes, chocolates, sweet fruits, pasta, rice, pancakes… I don’t enjoy eating out with friends, because I can’t eat most of what they eat. I’ve learned that my blood glucose level dictates my moods. My father’s diet was not as scientific as mine. It was just a guess work and he was so disciplined. He needed to if he wanted to live. Now I am also disciplined regarding what I eat because I want to function.

It also dawned on me that my father must have experienced no felt sense of love. He used to say his mother, my grandmother, had loved his older brother, but never loved him. He didn’t know how love feels like. I had never felt sense of love from my grandmother, either. She cared for me when I was a little girl, but I didn’t get the sense of love. It didn’t start with me. And if you have not felt loved by your parents, it’s almost impossible to love yourself. I used to hate myself.

Fortunately my dogs taught me how loving and being loved feels like in my body. I remember my father used to take home a puppy and took care of it. The dog might have been the only thing he could feel love.

I don’t have children and it’s a good thing. Neither my brother. At least it stops with us.

If your family is loving, make sure to teach your daughters and sons to stay away from those who don’t know love. They could often be very attractive in a way only damaged people could be.

Savasana

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I once read about a meditation technique where you lie on your back and imagine your body gradually decomposing until it becomes white bones. I heard that in Buddhism there is a meditation method in which one observes one’s own body from the inside and outside while observing a corpse decompose. I liked this meditation method because I interpreted it as a training to realize that all material existence in this world, including one’s own body, is a mere phenomenon, just like a decaying corpse. 

When we experience unbearable trauma, our bodies and consciousness may become dissociated in order to protect ourselves. The body becomes a thing that performs a specific function, and becomes separated from the ”I” consciousness.

I had sessions with a Buddhist psychology therapist for a while. He often asked me, “What do you feel in your body?” I looked up at the ceiling, looked around the room and always looked for the answer outside of my body. “Can you feel your feet on the floor?” he asked. Of course I could feel my feet physically touching the floor, but that was completely disconnected from what I was feeling mentally.

I didn’t have much knowledge about my own body, so even when I meditated on a corpse, I couldn’t visualize it, and I had no conscious connection to my body, so the corpse quickly turned into bones. I couldn’t understand how complex and delicate the human body was, and how it was related to my very existence.

Through the anatomy training, I gradually recovered the connection between my self and my body. Every time I stood at the dissection table, I felt like I was slowly regaining my humanity. It has been more than 10 years since I started doing dissection, and I have spent over 1,500 hours in the dissection lab. Now attending the annual dissection workshop is like a Zen practitioner regularly practicing at a temple. 

Savasana in yoga is said to be a pose where you lie on your back and imitate a dead body. When we go to the dissecting table in the dissection lab, we are faced with a donated body that is quietly in Savasana pose. It is the last pose we all take.

Evanescent

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“Count to 20,” the anesthetist said. One, two, three, four and I was out. After several hours, I guess, I slowly came back in the recovery room.

It was the most peaceful moment of my life. I was not there.

It is not accurate. The subject, “I,” wasn’t there for several hours. And I recognized the fact that I didn’t exist. No dream, no nightmare, no nothing.

My then boyfriend was waiting for me to wake up in the recovery room. The subject, “I,” slowly started to focus, still feeling groggy and peaceful. I wanted to stay there longer, where no subject “I” was. It was just a simple biopsy operation for breast cancer.

Then, sudden commotion was heard. The door to the recovery room slide open and EMS personnels rushed in. Another door to the operation area slide open.

An old man in the waiting room was panic-stricken and was trying to figure out what was happening on the other side of the door. A medical personnel was explaining why EMS was called in. They didn’t have the equipments to deal with the specific kind of medical emergency the man’s wife was in.

My then boyfriend was in shock. He had been waiting in the same room with the old man for the last couple of hours. “That man must have had coffee as usual this morning with his wife before they came to the hospital. He didn’t think it could be the last time…,” he said. I don’t know what happened to the wife.

Life is evanescent. It could have been me, who didn’t come back. And it’s not bad not to be. I am not afraid of dying and I want to live fully while I am here, until there comes the time of no dream, no nightmare, no “I.”

It’s not bad at all.

Trauma Walking

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The young woman walked straight to me and introduced herself. “Hi. I’m a survivor,” she said. “Hi,” I said.

It wasn’t a meeting for survivors of any kind. It was just a shamanistic drumming circle gathering. I was in a process of healing journey and was trying out many modalities. At that time, I was highly sensitive to other people’s emotional state and somehow my attention was habitually drawn to traumatized people’s energy. Even before she talked to me, I sensed a tightly wound vortex with thousands of black birds swarming against the dark sky and the vortex was walking toward me.

No, I don’t want to be sucked in that, I thought.

I was taken aback that the woman introduced herself to a total stranger as a survivor. I don’t remember if she said what kind of survivor she was. However, my mind interpreted as a child sexual abuse survivor. The fact she identified herself as a survivor made me think hard. She had chosen that word to define her state of being.

During the drumming, my attention was relentlessly drawn to the woman. No, I don’t want to be sucked in that, I thought again. I could sense that she was looking for a “hook” in people around her. She was looking for a survivor to share the vortex with.

After the gathering, I told my friend about the woman and asked, “Did I look like that?”

Do I look like that? Is a survivor my identity? Does that word represents my entire state of being? I had to think hard because I saw myself in her. Trauma walking, vulnerable and dangerous at the same time.

When there are predators outside of the room, we need to survive. Our sympathetic nervous system needs to be on high alert, like a tightly wound vortex. Once the predators outside of the room leave, we can unwind (deactivate) the sympathetic nervous system. For some of us, the predator is inside the room. We carry the predator with us.

After decades of therapy and numerous healing works, I don’t carry the predator with me anymore. I survived but I don’t define myself as a survivor. The trauma doesn’t define me.

You can’t clean with oven mitts on

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“I was a slob,” I said, “I knew the drawer of the dresser was half open and I couldn’t close it. It must take nothing to close it, but I couldn’t. So it would be half-open for weeks, months.”

Mia’s younger sister, Norma, has been suffering Depression on and off for a while and occasionally locks herself in. Mia was planning to visit her parents and to stay at her sister’s place. “What should I do to help her?” she asked. She knows I have a clinical Depression and often asks advice from me for her sister. Mia is that kind of person who always tries to offer solutions to “problems,” to fix.

“I think I should tell her to stop taking medications,” she said.

“NOOOOO!” I said. “That’s the worst thing for a Depressed person!”

At one point, I felt so great and I stopped taking SSRI without consulting my shrink. (My shrink thought I had a hypomania episode.) I quickly fell into a state of Major Depression and didn’t go out of my apartment (except for bare necessities. I’m not agoraphobic. I just didn’t have the will to move.) During the three months, I was diagnosed with a variety of mood disorders and prescribed different medications, which made my condition much worse. Nothing stuck, well, except for the original straight forward SSRI. Eventually I came out of Depression organically and since then I’ve been on the same SSRI, currently with a minimal dosage.

“I take it for the rest of my life. I can’t risk having another episode,” I said. “It’s like you have a bad eye sight. You need to wear contact lenses just for functioning normally. Nobody tells you you shouldn’t wear contact lenses. You might fall into a manhole.”

“My sister doesn’t answer our calls, doesn’t respond to texts. We are sure she has read our messages… My elder sister thinks Norma is irresponsible. She doesn’t even care how our parents are doing..,” Mia said.

“It’s not that she won’t. I she can’t. Any contacts from others are threatening. When you have a migraine attack, any noises, any flash of lights would hurt badly. Phone calls and messages are like that. Especially messages to blame her or tell her to do something,” I explained. When I was depressed, every time I got a message, I felt like I heard a gun shot. Mia’s family bombards Norma with messages. “That’s the worst thing. I would feel like I want to cover myself with a blanket, in a fetal position,” I said.

“So what should we do?”

“Is she still seeing her psychiatrist?”

“I think she is,” Mia said.

“If so, just let her know you are there for her when she is ready to come out of the cave. Just send a message saying that you are thinking about her.”

Every time I talk to Mia about Depression, I am made to be aware how little “normal” people know how it feels. Many people around me have Depression with varying degree and we don’t have to explain to each other. We speak the same language of pain. It’s refreshing to realize it is not a universal state of being.

So I explained how I am when I am depressed.

“Norma is like that. She used to be very neat and tidy. But last time I visited her, her apartment was in a mess. She left dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. I thought she became lazy,” Mia said.

“It’s not that she is lazy. Depression is like having oven mitts on. It becomes very difficult to do anything with oven mitts on. Without them, it’s nothing to pick up a piece of scrap paper from the floor. With them, it takes tremendous time and energy just to do that. We see it and we know it’s there and we don’t have energy to pick it up. Then another piece of scrap falls on it, and another… Eventually we get buried in trash and can’t even move. That’s how Depression feels like.”

I don’t know if Mia understands. It’s damn difficult to clean with oven mitts on. So be compassionate to yourself. You are not lazy.