Wolves At The Door

Each day usually brings a moment of normality. Yesterday I had it mind to seize that moment and when it came Alicia and I reached for the leads and took the dogs out across the hills. Poor Alicia, she didn’t quite know what to expect and felt a little unprepared for the route we eventually took… through hedgerows and across fields, but she has a lot of heart. I’ve always liked hilltops. There is something about looking down at everything below me … so small and insignificant, that cuts through everything and brings a feeling of peace. We lay in the grass, I fed the dogs an ice cream, and we watched the clouds. In that moment, we were us again… and the world couldn’t touch us.

People say inactivity breeds more inactivity… and the walk we took certainly had the affect of stimulating me to do more when we got home. I got it into my head that I would cook up a fish supper… until part way through the hurdles I faced grew closer and closer and my legs heavier. I retreated to bed… having been defeated by what most people manage to do each day without even thinking about it. Not a big defeat, just a little reminder that I need to pace myself and be patient.

Lately I have wondered what would become of me if I didn’t have the support and love of Alicia. She wondered the same and asked me outright how I think things would have turned out. ‘I’d be living on the streets I say’ with a clinical certainty… and she agrees. The conversation makes us both angry at the world.

You see, mental ill health alone is really quite tolerable. But set it against the demands and expectations that we all face each day, and suddenly there is an audible sound of a ticking clock, pressuring me to get better at its ticking pace, rather than mine. It is a source of guilt. It robs me of the activities that might help me get better, replacing them instead with the duties and responsibility that rest on each of us, regardless of our capacity to respond to them.

I wonder how it is possible for so many of us to live with depression for so long… tinkering and medicating through infrequent meetings with well meaning GPs. I read that depression is second only to heart disease in the number of people it affects… and yet the tinkering continues and the resources to respond seem to be missing. Any other condition and one might expect a referral to a specialist and swift treatment. But strangely I, and others like me, are left to chance that there might be someone who loves us, who can take the strain and keep us from losing everything to a life of madness on the streets. Neither of us can make sense of that.

So I push worries aside, probably made a great deal easier with the medication, and don’t wonder if we will lose our home or have county court judgements made against us. Instead I just wait for my next moment of normality and plan another therapeutic walk with the pack.

Anyone Seen Mehdi?

I have been discovering how I get on with my new medication. Things are still in free fall.

This morning I found myself drifting in and out of a catatonic state. My movements slowed until my shoulders sank into my body, my back curled and muscles came to rest...slumped. Seemingly unable or unwilling to move, I would freeze… regardless of whether I was standing, sitting or lying down. I could hear Alicia moving in the room around me and sensed that her plans for the day were quickly falling apart. She talked to me and at times it didn’t seem possible to answer. When I could talk it was only to repeat what she was saying to me. She watched patiently as I stopped and started, encouraging me back into action each time I stalled. She helped to dress me, and somehow managed to get our family out of the door. She is made of strong stuff… I think they call it love.

Mornings like that remind me why I had to give up my job and become self employed. Employers don’t like ups and downs, and trying to maintain relationships with them just adds to the stress of working through depression.

There was a point this morning when I looked at myself in the mirror like a stranger, tugging and pulling at my face as though trying to get past the mask and see me again. It has been a while since I’ve taken any trouble over my appearance, and over the last six months my weight has ballooned. Don’t feel like me, don’t look like me… who the hell am I today?

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.

Fixed Smile

The medication seems to have kicked in, well at least I’m guessing that’s what it is. Each morning I’m finding waking that little bit easier… a good sign. The feeling is strange, but I’m not complaining. There is a buoyancy to my mood, and a sort of … I don’t know what to call it…. A feeling of… apathy… lovely, anxiety free apathy.


I say it is a strange feeling because there is plenty to be anxious about. I haven’t paid any money in for a little while… no idea what’s in the account but know for sure that it wasn’t enough to cover all this months outgoings. Had some letters too from creditors… the threatening kind. Also had a very big job, scheduled in as the next one, suddenly just cancel leaving the diary a mess. Financially, we are in a place where when things break… they stay broken because we can’t afford to replace them.


All this just seems to be washing over me today. I don’t seem to be capable of caring about any of it. Obviously, I’ll talk this through with Alicia and together we’ll see what needs to be done because I think we can safely say I can’t be trusted to take care of things!


Motivation is still low… Left to do things alone I don’t achieve a great deal. The tiredness continues… the second set of blood results should be in today so we can see what that thyroid has been up to. But best of all, I just don’t seem to care about any of it at the moment and that's a very welcome break.