Inside Depression

I know how hard it is to reach someone with depression, and if it’s someone you love - it is desperately frustrating. It isn’t always obvious at first that what you are dealing with is depression… and that in itself can be confusing for everyone involved, as behaviours and attitudes change for the worse.

 

I want to take you inside depression, just for a moment, so that you can get past all the clinical descriptions out there and feel my symptoms… and so that you can love someone through their depression and resist their attempts to push everyone and everything away.

I try and talk about the chemistry behind depression in my page Everything I Know (Almost). Here I want to touch on the everyday reality for me in those dark days… it isn’t easy reading but understanding can be difficult to achieve without putting you in the shadows for a moment. Through it all, this is a story of survival and determination and with it hope for anyone suffering from depression.

Before I had therapy, I didn’t know how to deal with all the negative thoughts. They came thick and fast… pounding away at my confidence, self esteem and hope. It was my own voice in these thoughts, but it was a cruel and relentless message it delivered. About what a failure I was, how worthless I was, what a burden I had become. I wanted to run away from it… but how do you run away from yourself?

At first I found peace in sleep. It was no easy task getting to sleep. At night with the darkness to stare in to, my thoughts lit up like movies… playing memories of past failures and disappointed colleagues. When I thought about the future my thoughts persuaded me that it was to be feared, that only terrible things awaited me. The reaction of friends and colleagues… seeing me as some kind of freak… broken… wasted… undeserving… responsible.

Fear would change me… I stopped answering the phone, stopped answering the door, and stopped taking the little risks we take every day that make life colourful. I stopped making decisions. I stopped leaving the house. Eventually I’d stop leaving my bed. Fear would keep me from friends and family and places I loved.

The hamster wheel of thoughts eventually tires those little legs and then sleep becomes inevitable. And that moment, when my heavy, lifeless limbs sunk into the bed deeper than ever before, and my mind felt the first aesthetic effects of sleep… that was peace. Welcome, heavenly, peace.

In search of peace, I would turn to my bed… more and more often. My body would be tightly rolled into a ball or my head buried under a pillow, as though the thoughts were physical blows and I was protecting myself. But sleep never came easily in my bed, and my thoughts would keep me awake until there was nothing left of me to torture anymore.

My body was weak, my limbs heavier than usual, my muscles wasted… in my mind at least. I moved slowly… sloth like. My eyes were dark… and like windows on to my fear I kept anyone from looking into them. I retreated to my bed, in a darkened room, alone, as though preparing for death.

I would become more isolated, cutting myself off from the world and the people around me. It did no good to talk about how I was feeling, so I kept quiet, leaving only my eyes to do the talking. And those loveless dead eyes put distance between me and those who loved me. Sleep was never enough, and the torment was always too much. Eventually I would seek out another more powerful aesthetic. Suicide. Thinking about it, living it over and over again as a movie in my head… became the only sinew of hope in this decaying body. There was peace in sight, an everlasting peace. Somewhere where my thoughts couldn’t hurt me anymore, somewhere where fear couldn’t reach me. But suicide wouldn’t claim me… and I would learn to talk about it… so that I could defeat it with the help of others.

I was lucky, Alicia never left my side, never gave up on me, and she made sure through everything that I knew her love for me was unwavering. Some people battle depression alone, and it’s a mystery to me how they do it.