We've Come A Long Way

I’ve come so far I tell myself. And I have. Back when I was doing my post grad in Architecture the depression paralysed me, although back then I didn’t know it by name. I would curl up in a tight ball on my bed and breathe into the sheets, eyes shut tight trying to block the thoughts firing across my head.

It was years later that I had what people call a breakdown. It was as though the wheels of life just became jammed, seized up. I withdrew from everything, eating…my relationship…my job… my family. I became fixated on suicide and started to plan how and when and where. Concentrating on suicide was in a funny kind of way what was keeping me alive… because thinking about the anguish ending and knowing that I could end it, gave me some kind of hope and power over it.

Back then I got help from the Crisis Team. They saved my life. Much later they admitted that I came very close to being hospitalised, which in this day is not the preferred route of treatment unless you are a danger to yourself. I came back from that episode of depression with an anti-depressant that made me eat like nothing you’ve ever seen before! The crisis team had worked through the ‘signature’ of the depression; the subtle signs that would indicate to me or Alicia that the depression might be returning.

When the depression hit the next time I realized it was coming a lot earlier. The Crisis team had taught me to recognise it, but I didn’t know what to do about it! It was like depression was a train and the first time it ran me over… the next time I could see it coming down the tracks from a long way off but I could get out of the way. It was a really frustrating experience. I crashed again and life imploded. Once again I became isolated, cut off from everyone and everything. People were talking to me about my two episodes of depression like they were linked, but back then I argued fiercely that they were two completely separate things… I hadn’t a clue what had triggered the second episode.

One day I realised that there was something about me that I didn’t know how to fix… I had started to join the dots up and for the first time I realised that getting better would mean changing who I had been for the past 35 years. I didn’t know where to begin, and that made me see that I would need help. Judy was an amazing therapist.

By the end of therapy I had come to realise I needed to break with the old me… I left my career in teaching, I left behind my old habits… the old me… and I renewed my relationship with the people around me, almost starting again. In particular I started again with my mother… I started to see her too as a child who had been shaped by her experiences and as someone who harboured some unhelpful ideas about herself.

Now I was equipped with the insight I needed to understand where this depression in me stemed from… what triggers it, what happens when it’s triggered, how I can tell I’m not doing so well and what I need to do to keep myself healthy. I thought I was invincible. I was so deeply in touch with what was going on in me that I could see it in others everywhere I looked. I could see their insecurities surface momentarily, the way they undermined themselves, the part of them that betrayed them and shaped them into something they didn’t want to be.

I became then a new person, seeing the world an entirely different way… understanding better what it was that I cared about… Alicia and Xavier, family. It took a while for Alicia to get to know this person, she wasn’t used to me being so easy going. I could see how the old me had shaped her and I didn’t like it. I guess it’s what we do to survive in each others company.

This third time I’m so much stronger. The days when I retreat are much less frequent. I understand this animal so much more than before and although sometime I tire of the fight, I know I’ll win and I will certainly never take my own life. They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and in the long term that is true… in the short term it just wears you out. This time round though I’m bigger and better, because like never before I know how to call on the support of friends and family, I know who to push away and who to bring in close. I’m never in this alone… and for that I’m grateful and lucky. Here’s to us.