“I don’t know if this is depression or not,” says Blake, “but it’s like there’s always a grayness over everything I do.”
Blake and I are preparing dinner together. The hubby and Michael are upstairs playing a video game and Blake has come down to help me with something in the kitchen. He had been upstairs with his dad and his brother and he is noticing how nice it is to have someone to play his new video game with. This causes him to recognize the stark difference between how he feels in this moment and how he feels much of the time.
“The thing is, for the longest time now, I’ve had trouble enjoying anything. Video games don’t even seem fun to me anymore.”
Video games are Blake’s long held passion. He doesn’t just play them; he dreams of them and plots and plans new ones. Many times I’ve caught him wandering around the family room, seemingly lost in a fog, a smile planted on his face. The smile broadens when he solves a problem in his video game planning process. That he’s saying now that video games don’t seem fun is significant.
“It’s why I haven’t played this game until today. My mind tells me that starting a new game will be too hard. There’s too much of a learning curve. It seems like too much to even try. The thing is, once I start and get into it, it actually starts to get fun and it doesn’t feel that way anymore.”
“Yes, that’s depression, and you’ve described it perfectly,” I tell him. “It colors everything gray. It tells us that things will be too tough, that we shouldn’t even try. And, yet, once we do the hard work of getting going, there’s momentum. You know, you’ve uncovered depression’s secret: if we can find strength to get going, it builds on itself and helps us to recover.”
Blake considers this for a moment, seeming to absorb it. I suggest to him that he may wish to tell his psychiatrist about the way he feels the next time they meet. He’s doing a nice job of communicating it to me; it would probably help his doctor to make decisions with him about his medication if he truly understood how Blake experiences his days. He nods and runs back upstairs to be with his dad and his brother.
Alone in the kitchen now, I am grateful that he is sharing with me. This is a new experience for us, his actually communicating, voluntarily, what he is going through. Perhaps it is another step in the direction of his taking care of his own mental health.
A sandwich I ate on our drive home. Blake happily ate a similar one, plus many of my French fries.
I pull into the Trader Joe’s parking lot and circle around a time or two. The lot is crowded with folks shopping for their evening meals and the rain is beginning to fall. As we walk through the lot, the water and dark sky mask the red blotches that have bloomed on Blake’s face from the tears he’s cried the entire short distance from his apartment. He feels like a failure – having left home four months ago to begin a new college career in a new city and dropping out after one semester.
“I’m completely unable to function,” Blake has told me on more than one occasion.
What I see differs from what he sees. I see success in having navigated the basics of day to day living. I see a future full of possibility. I see growth and more lessons that still can be mastered. But I also see something that concerns me – something I’m not sure my 19-year-old son is even aware of. I see his weight – or lack of it, that is.
Back at the Apartment
Before we leave Blake’s apartment, he phones his academic advisor.
“Um, hi. This is Blake Roberts. Is there anything else you need from me before I leave?”
As I stand behind him, waiting as he makes his call, my son’s almost-six-foot-tall frame comes into focus. And for a moment, it startles me. He is shockingly thin. His clothing hangs on him, making the weight loss look even more obvious. Did anyone at school notice that the clothes he arrived in at the beginning of the semester had become exceedingly large? He’d lost a good amount of weight before he’d come home for Thanksgiving. Has he lost more? It appears that way.
When Blake finishes his phone call, I focus back on our task of moving out. I file my observation away for later. How would I bring this up in a sensitive way? Would I even bring it up at all?
At the Store
Blake wipes his face and follows me into the grocery store. We’re here for food for the three days ahead of us. Because of food restrictions, eating in most restaurants is not an option for Blake. I want him to choose things he’d like to eat, but he seems uninterested when I point things out.
“Food just doesn’t seem interesting now,” he notes.
I know from experience that trying to force him to make some choices won’t work. Instead, I begin to pick things off the shelf and put them into my cart. I give Blake space and he wanders close by. After a time, something catches his interest. He picks it up, reads the label, and then adds it to the cart. Little by little in this manner our cart fills up. Blake pauses at an item – chocolate mint caramel popcorn (or something like that). He ponders it. I know he’s questioning whether to treat himself (something he rarely does).
“Can you add that to the cart?” I ask.
“Why?”
“It looks interesting. I’d like to try it.”
Blake seems reluctantly happy to comply. He puts it in the cart. We pay. We pack up the car, drive to our hotel for the evening, and unload what we need for the night. Before I’ve even shut the door, Blake has gotten into a bag of food. He eats with abandon. And I silently and gratefully take notice.
Are You Aware…?
Blake continues to eat this way over the next couple of days. He even treats himself to snacks at convenience stores we stop in along the way. Nearing the end of our second driving day, a day in which we’ve marveled at views and checked out historic downtowns, I decide to ask.
“Hey honey? I was wondering – are you aware that you’ve lost quite a bit of weight?”
“Yes,” is the answer.
“Was it intentional?”
“No,” – which is said in a tone that indicates he’s not offended, so I dare to dig slightly deeper.
“Was it because of mood, or was it because of having slept so much and missing meals?” I try to ask gently.
“It was a mix of those. Sometimes I was so depressed food just didn’t sound good. I just didn’t feel like eating. Some days, bed was the only thing that sounded good. It was like a warm hug and I couldn’t think of a reason to leave it – and I slept through mealtimes,” he answers.
“Thank you for sharing with me,” I say tenderly, and we continue on with some other topic.
Silently, though, I’m thinking what a thief and a liar both depression and OCD can be.
“Bed is the best thing in your life. Stay here! Feel safe and comforted. You don’t need to bother with such trivialities as eating. Ah, there. See?”
I imagine Blake sleeping through a day, tricked into believing that bed is best. When he can finally lie there no more and the cobwebs begin to clear, the depression takes the opportunity to dig in more and remind him what a failure he is. It steals his appetite, he mindlessly plays video games to numb the sting of the words his brain tells him about himself, and then it steals the next day of living by convincing him once again that bed is the only place worth being.
For now, Blake seems to be eating with regularity. Occasionally, he forgets a meal. I’m observing and trying to give him room to work this out. One thing I have noticed is that, like me, he seems to derive joy out of feeding others.
“Mom,” he says to me, “may I cook a lasagna for the whole family one night? I’d like to share one with you all.”
“I love that idea,” I say – and I do, much more than he will ever know.
OCD In The Family 