Other People

Since I’ve been blogging I’ve discovered a world of people out there… struggling, writing… figuring out their particular depression. Each story a personal one… each journey unique. One blogger I discovered had an entire page dedicated to her medicated history and in twenty years had experience of over 30 different anti-depressants! Another tells the story of how she dumped her psychiatrist in favour of another, only to find some years down the line she has been referred back to him for more awkward, unrequited analysis. Stories of loneliness, hope, frustration, medication, childhood… discovery…….journeys. For all these bloggers, whether they realise it or not… their blogs chart a journey.

I wish I knew about these blogs before, a long time ago, when depression cast a shadow on me and my family and took us into its storm. To read these blogs is to have a map, not altogether a map of the terrain you are on, but a map of something similar. Whilst I might not have been able to foresee my own sequence of despairing valleys, exhausting climbs and enlightening hilltops from the journals of others, I would at least have gauged the scale of the journey and packed a little more than a few digestives. One of the tests that depression presents to us is its blend of progress and setbacks. Hope becomes a tease. The innocent among us arrive in their GP’s office one day, collect a script and then wait two weeks for something to happen. I have yet to read a story that ends there… but it is how many begin.

The blogs I warm to are the ones that are just telling it. They allow you for a moment to swim in their warped stream of consciousness and reflect… sometimes with hope and sometimes without. They write with a vulnerability, and an intimacy that comes from their understanding of themselves and the complex task of being human. I admire them for not being afraid to paint the fragility onto the canvas and resist the temptation to adjust the lighting.

The more we all write and talk, the more I discover that each of us is trying hard to be someone we can live with, tripped up by our vulnerabilities, teased by our insecurities and frustrated by our bodies. There may not be depression in all of us, but we all seem to know the recipe. I’ll bet that if it isn’t depression you’re baking you’ve been busy cooking up something else that isn’t too good for you.

Maybe that is why so many people say ‘I can’t believe how honest you are in your blog’. Because it’s familiar. Because the cracks that depression forces open in us are the very ones most of us work so hard at concealing. Because the flaws that drive some to depression are the similar to the flaws that have others pedalling hard.

When I first started this blog, I spoke about how important it was to work through depression with others and talked a lot about friends and family can support the fight in such simple ways. So often depression makes us withdraw and without others we become helpless. I posted a link to this blog to a few people I know… people who I think are sensitive or kind or supportive. People who either themselves experienced depression or knew someone who had. The truth, an interesting truth, is that half of them responded, half said nothing.

There is a vulnerability to being human that by and large goes unspoken. There is a tradition of taboo associated with depression that has something to do with that old and animal fear of vulnerability. But there is beauty in that vulnerability that we deny ourselves and others… by suppressing it and keeping it caged. I learnt something about the taboo, and fear and the awkwardness of others when I wrote this blog. I understand now why there are more people with depression that secretly read blogs, than those who write them. I understand too, why I will continue to write this one.