I’m tired.

Not the normal, I’ve got a two-year old and have to get up early kind of tired.  No, this is the really fun tired of Depression.  The kind of apathetic, bland, insipid tired that makes you want to do nothing but sit in a dark room and stare at a wall.  Except I can’t do that.

I have a job.  I have a family that counts on me.  I have a two-year old that just won’t quit.  I have commitments and bills and a fairly healthy coffee addiction that isn’t going to drink itself.

The last couple of days have been a little rough: I haven’t felt like writing, though I’ve tried.  I haven’t felt like going to work, though I have gone.  I haven’t always felt like I’m being “good daddy.”  My patience is thin, my attention is short, and the smile is a little strained.

It seems like the last few months have been more of a battle with this.  Perhaps I’m finally beginning to realize when it is Depression versus just not feeling great, or a migraine instead of an attack.

Another sad and ironic truth could be that in making more of an effort to talk about it, I could be bringing on more attacks.  Trigger words can be amazingly powerful things.  I know I’m having an attack way before I can bring myself to say the “D” word in my head, let alone to anyone else.  I will go out of my way to avoid the word; “I am fighting it today,” or “I’m having a rough go of it.”  You will never find a more euphemistic way of referring to such a horrible thing.  And this isn’t to strangers, this is to family.  Would it help, I sometimes wonder, if we called it something else?  “I’m feeling really bagel today.”  Maybe that would help get the idea across that I feel like a hole has been cut out of me and I’m slathered in Lox.  Ew.

Sometimes it seems like the conversation about mental illness is finally starting to open up. That the stigma, and the pain, might be looked past to help the person underneath.  But mental illness lies.  Depression lies.  It makes you believe that no one wants to talk about this, or that no one cares.  That you’re the only feeling this way, and that you’ll just be troubling people if you tell them about it.

National Suicide Prevention Week was last week, but it should be all the time.  The most stable among us, can sometimes be in the most pain.  Depression Lies.  Mental illness Lies.  Be somebody’s truth.