What’s For Dinner?
By: Hans Bruins
Tags: Depression, Positivity, Mental Health, Personal, PTSD

What’s For Dinner?

Although I have probably had depression all my life, it is new in that way that it was just diagnosed not that long ago. From that moment I have worked to understand what it means to have depression. It is kind of an exploration for me. These are the journals of that voyage.

Just the other day I read someone’s story about his depression and how he got cured. You can imagine that the word cured piqued my curiosity so I read it with great interest.

Near the end, he wrote about relapsing after being cured. Now, that didn’t sound right to me. While I did recognize a lot of things he talked about, I also think that there are periods; there can be quiet and tranquil periods after being depressed periods. You could think that during such periods you were cured but, to me, it just seems that it has gone dormant for a while.

There are different types of depression and I can imagine that there are different treatments and solutions available and yes, maybe even a cure. However, depression comes and goes on its own accord. Personally, I think you can only talk about being cured if the depression has been gone and never returns.

What I did like though was that he shared a personal insight into how it felt and how a depressed mind thinks. I thought it to be a good idea to follow this example by sharing a story from my own life:

The previous week, my wife asked our middle one (daughter, age 5) what she wanted to eat for dinner. She is a picky eater so sometimes she may dictate what we eat, in the hope she eats also. After some consideration, she decided on hamburgers.

One problem: we had everything in the house except the hamburgers. So, my wife suggested that I went to the supermarket with my daughter and buy hamburgers.

I felt a little bit apprehensive and weighed the pros and cons. It had been a “bad” day, I was tired and going outside gives stress, driving is scary but the market was close and I needed just 1 thing. And also; I like hamburgers!

So, I grabbed the key and stepped in the car with my daughter. Since I could feel that I was already functioning on a low level, I drove slow and carefully. It was dark, wet and busy on the parking place and I was happy when we’d parked.

We then stepped into the big, bright and busy supermarket. My outer experiences immediately retracted to a bubble; it is an automatic defense mechanism where the outer signals are subdued because they are too much to handle. I also avert my eyes to the ground to see as little as possible of my environment. From this point, it is quite easy to start feeling down because you are not your great glorious self (whatever that may be).

However, a sparkle and light in my life was dancing before me on the market floor and she declared that she wanted to do the scanning of the products. So I followed her to the wall where all the nice yellow scanners hang. She could barely reach the touchscreen that gives you access to the scanners but she pushed/slammed on the right buttons and was eagerly awaiting which of the scanners would randomly light up. Luckily for her, it was in the middle and on the right height so she grabbed it and we went on to search for burgers.

My wife had drawn a little map so that we could easily find them. I plowed through the atmosphere and felt it slip past my arms; which was odd because I was wearing a big coat. When we reached the meat section we needed to decide on which type of hamburger; there was a choice for several. While dubbing about which one, I could clearly feel the edges of my bubble. We decided on the one with the NewYork flavor and then went for the cash desks.

Still plowing along in my bubble with the comfort of my daughter hopping around we reached the desk. Here I forced myself to act ‘normal’, smile to cashier and have a little chat with her, mainly provoked by the presence of my little daughter.

After that, we went for the car. Driving home in the winter darkness now was extra difficult because the bubble was still in place and in traffic, you need to have good awarenesses of your environment. So, I was battling my own defense mechanism to guide us safely home. Luckily it was very near and a very short trip. When I got home the bubble vanished after a while but was replaced with tiredness (the marathon feeling).

The NewYork flavored hamburgers turned out to be great. My little daughter refused to eat the burger meat but happily eat her roll with cheese.

As it turned out; that was what she really wanted, just a roll with cheese!