Liquid Silver

It is difficult to be completely at odds with depression. The stops and starts it introduces to life’s journey can make me impatient and at times the entire journey appears to be derailed. Any commuter would get frustrated with that kind of disrupted schedule. But with each flicker of depression I have learnt something new and the journey, by consequence, becomes richer and deeper.

Alicia is a big protagonist of clouds with silver linings, and depression does not escape this outlook. When we fell in love, we loved as we thought everyone should. We abandoned life as others would have us live it, and stole from time to be together. Last trains to London, late starts, and early finishes… breakfasts rolled into lunches into dinners. It is how we loved and how we wanted to live. We held out longer than most, but eventually life would catch up with us, and do its best to shoehorn love into the twilight hours and weekends. Personality glitches would submerge me in work once again. Weekends and evenings would shrink, eventually becoming cancelled with such frequency that the announcements lost all notion of unpredictability.

I can recall with each depression the quest and hunger. It comes as the depression lifts as though a famine fading and a mechanism inside me drives for some kind of understanding and change. I have been someone once, who brushed depression aside, put it down as an anomaly and side-stepped any internal discomfort in a rush to get back to normality. What I felt normality held for me, I don’t know… but I rushed back like a wounded animal looking to conceal itself deep inside the moving herd. After many more wounds… I would return to the herd with less vigour and more scepticism about its ability to protect me from further attack. More and more I find myself at its edges looking at it and trying to understand it as something separate to me. More and more I see myself as something separate to it.

For a long time I have been someone who is aware of their choices in life. I make up my mind and I change it… it is plastic, and there is in those choices an exercising of freedom. I’m not indecisive unless numbed by depression. I have changed careers like other people change cars, resisted the trappings of a life’s magazines and sought out love, above everything. When a fire took from me a friend and everything I owned… I wasn’t ready to start just replacing it all. But life doesn’t let anyone off the hook that easily. The wiring in my brain, and may be the human brain, isn’t altogether ready for a life of contentment… and the world I live in plays to that fact. So every now and again I take a sucker punch and more recently those punches have had me down on the mat. I get up… and I learn a little about where I got caught out. How I was seduced or distracted by this and that, or how I neglected love. And I start again from a new position… not trying to figure out how to enjoy my time in the ring, but trying instead to get out of the ring altogether. To chase my own dreams. To keep my dreams my own. My Alicia, my Xavier, our life together.

Yesterday we stole time… and lived as we wanted to. A simple life, in each others company, with pennies in our pockets and smiles in our hearts…. And yes…. I have been taking my medication.

Inside Out, Outside In

I wish for two alternative worlds … one where I can either shake off this feeling of perpetual tiredness or one where I could stop wishing altogether. It does my morale no good feeling this way. I am a burden. I don’t think that is warped negative thinking. I just am. Alicia is bound to me by love and it must be a prison for her, constantly making up the ground that I am losing and being, in effect, a single parent to Xavier. How can anyone live with doing that to another person? But I do live, I hang about - linger, contributing nothing and draining the love and energy from the people I care about. And that is my punishment for being such a complete failure… seeing the people I love suffering because of my failings.

So that is it; that is what’s in my head. It takes no effort at all to prise the lid off those thoughts and let them loose on the page. So, time for some heavy lifting. What am I really guilty of? I’m glancing down my handout of ‘ten common thinking errors’ and I’m looking to identify which I’m plagued by in this instance. I don’t know how I’ll feel having rationalised it in this way… I don’t know if it will help. But I’ll give anything a try.

All or nothing thinking

I’m definitely seeing everything in terms of being good or bad with no middle ground or grey area.

Discounting the positive

Probably worse still, I’m having trouble seeing any of the positive… it is being filtered out leaving me with just the negative. My Alicia and my friends (new and old) are always trying to tell me that I’m doing well and that I should take stock of how far I’ve come. Walk before I run. But inside I know I tell myself they are being kind, saying kind things to help me get better and that I could be doing a lot better. That is how difficult it is to get through to me!

Jumping to conclusions

Alicia has done and said nothing to suggest that I am a burden to her. I extrapolate that from seeing how busy she is and how readily she sleeps at the end of the day. In fact Alicia gets positively annoyed with me when I suggest that I’m more trouble than I’m worth. For one, it is wearing to hear people talk in such a way but secondly she knows, and I know, that if positions were reversed I would do the same for my Alicia.

Minimising and magnifying

I’m exaggerating the importance of my negative thinking to the point that I’m reasoning my way into a justification for Alicia being better off without me.

Emotional reasoning

Because I am weakened, because it is taking time to get better, because getting better involves steps forwards and backwards, I see myself has failing even though others would not.

Ok… enough with the list of thinking errors. I have enough to work with here. I have in effect said to myself what others might say to me. But I haven’t troubled them… instead I have done it for myself and that must be a good thing. And it has helped.

Time to search the internet for clips of and an ankylosaurus, Xavier's new obsession. He’s sat beside me now as though queuing to use the lap top. We love ankylosaurs.

Burning Bridges

I did manage to get out of the house to go and do an estimate this evening. But when I got there no one was home, so I dropped by my Father’s, given that he was nearby. He asked how I was and we got talking. I don’t know if he was expecting me to say that ‘I’m better now, thanks for asking’, but I’m not… I’m getting there.

My father is a Muslim, he believes in Allah. He’s worried that I’m putting my faith in a therapist, a fallible human being, and I think he would rather see me put my faith in God. ‘You’re thinking too much’ he said, ‘just say Bismillah’, meaning ‘in the name of Allah’. It’s a contraction of the Arabic phrase Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim meaning ‘In the name of Allah, most gracious, most compassionate". Muslims say this phrase when embarking on any significant endeavour and the English translation does it no justice. To return it back to its poetic origins, a fairer translation might be to say ‘With every breath that we breathe, may we be act on behalf of the Divine Presence, the Source of all that we receive’.

Faith, for me is a leap into the dark with the belief that God is there waiting to catch you. I don’t have that kind of faith. I don’t follow my father’s God. As much as my parents have done their best to bring me up as a Muslim, all I’ve gained from it is the ability to speak words in a foreign language without knowledge of their meaning. I am separated from them both by language and religion. What I gained from my parents in terms of moral guidance, I gained because of who they are and because they are good people. I think they’d have passed that on regardless of the religion they were born into.

There is an Indian Ocean between my experiences of depression and my parents’ understanding of it. In a way I have helped to create it by concealing my depression from them. I know I’m hungry for a world with more understanding… but I think I recognise that will take time; I don’t expect it of my parents. All I ask of them is kindness. Kind words and acts are great healers; I think we’ve all felt their power.

My father’s perspective is that I never had to be conscious of how to walk in order to walk, and in the same way I don’t need to be conscious of how I think and feel. He believes that by placing a spotlight on the processes that bring about thoughts and feelings I’m creating rather than curing the problem. I’m guessing that if he knew and understood the phrase ‘navel gazing’, it would have been levelled at me by now. Whether he realises it or not, he’s challenging my learning from therapy, and suggesting I substitute it with faith.

By contrast, I don’t see myself as able to walk effortlessly: I’ve suffered a crash and I’m learning to walk again… it takes effort. I haven’t faith in my therapist, it is not belief I have in her. I’ve worked with Judy before, she helped, I’m working with her again; chances are it will help again. I’ll keep writing… I hope he will read something of what I write; I hope that it will build understanding between us.

I love you dad. x

Discipline

I’ve just sat down with Alicia and we filled out a thought record together… a CBT technique that helps to get things into proportion. My fear has been the dominant emotion and it’s making my choices for me. I’m not going anywhere until I face fear. So I sit down with the form and read the headings in all the little boxes and I feel my forebrain gearing up… relieved to finally have some footing and contribute to this debate that has so far been dominated by my amygdala.

I’ve just glanced down at the dogs stretched out beside me as I write this. They are both curly white Bichons and Charlie is resting her head on Molly’s back. For a moment I am puzzled… Charlie seems tiny and squashed. Then I realize and chuckle to myself. I have muddled what I am seeing… unable to tell where one dog finishes and the other starts. Clarity is restored.

It’s a bit like that sometimes when I have trouble distinguishing between thoughts and feelings and muddle them. I can get things out of proportion.

So here is my thought record sheet. It isn’t pretty… or clever… but it is very practical and helpful, to me at least.

Situation

I’m trying to get to work… in fact just trying to leave the house.

Feelings

I’m dressed for work. I feel an intense fear; I’m glued to the spot.

Unhelpful thoughts / images

What went through my mind was ‘I’ve failed’; ‘I’ve let my customer down’; ‘I haven’t lived up to my word’; ‘I can’t be trusted to do anything’; ‘I can’t even support my family’. These thoughts are me responding to my own negative predictions about the future and I’m mind reading negative thoughts in other people. The effect is that my core beliefs are being activated… my buttons are being pushed and the mean things I’m saying to myself add up to me being worthless.

What’s the worst thing that could happen – other people could judge me negatively and I would have to deal with that. I could live with that.

Facts that support the unhelpful thought

Well, I haven’t been there all week; and I haven’t been there all last week either; I promised I would be there this week.

Facts that provide evidence against the unhelpful thought

I’ve almost finished the job; I’ve done a good job; My customer has been kind and understanding; she said ‘you take as long as you need Med, it’s cool’; she rang mid week to ask me to do some more work.

Alternative, more realistic and balanced perspective

Med is full of hope for getting better and he is up and down, so sometimes he misjudges / overestimates what he can do.  He needs to pace himself; he’s getting better; the job is almost finished; one more week won’t make much difference – it’s not the end of the world.  His health is the most important thing.  Beating himself up this way is overreacting – it’s not that big a deal.

Outcome

I feel hopeful and calmer, the fear is subsiding.  Next time I can avoid making promises, given that I am not that great at judging things at the moment. I could have mentioned how things were going on Wednesday when we spoke on the phone but it’s still not the end of the world.  I won’t set myself up with expectations and then beat myself up when I can’t meet them; I’ll just go with the flow.