One of the many things I hadn’t expected about depression was the way it affected my thinking. Everything in my brain slowed down. So slow, that paying attention to things I normally enjoy became impossible. I couldn’t concentrate on books; not even easy books I’d read before like Harry Potter. I could stare at the TV, but couldn’t follow much of the plot. I couldn’t follow conversation. This had a massive impact on my relationships. For one thing, I had nothing of interest to say - I wasn’t doing much, and I wasn’t even keeping up to date with that month’s boxset craze. But a bigger problem was the impact slowing down had on my communication.
I’m normally a fast-thinking, loud-talking extrovert, and I have lots of similar friends - we delight in talking over each other, thinking aloud, letting the conversation take us to new ideas. Admittedly this irritates my introverted husband - especially when we row - but it’s been an essential part of my social life since adolescence. The couple of times I tried to see groups of friends when I first became depressed - it only took a couple to drive me away in shame - I found it impossible to listen to what was being said, let alone form any kind of response. I sat quietly at the edge, feeling more and more distant and transparent; if I couldn’t act like myself, where had I gone? Thankfully I have lovely friends, who took to calling round singly, and taking me out for walks where we didn’t have to talk but could just be together. But it meant that joyous group gatherings and the sense of myself within a community got lost, for a while. It was much easier to stay in bed, communicate via text, or Facebook; typing can be done slowly, over days if needed. In fact, taking the easy route has defined my thinking when I’m ill. When I’m low, thinking becomes simplified. Because my thoughts are so slow, I can’t hold them easily in my head, I get lost mid-thought, find myself sitting blankly, having forgotten what I was thinking about. So simple, short thoughts, which are stated like facts rather than a mixed range of possibilities, become the norm. This is particularly unhelpful when the depression has made all my thoughts bleak anyway. Normally I can see that when things go wrong there are lots of reasons; I prefer the grey muddled explanations than the black and white certainties. Not so when I’m depressed. My brain literally can’t process all the information needed to accept the uncertainties in life. It can manage to see that something is wrong, and then tells me that it’s all my fault. Given how difficult thinking is when I’m depressed, I remember some relief at finding that I’d managed to link two ideas: A sense of satisfaction at working out that if my daughter was upset, it was all my fault because I was a terrible mother. What was missing was the more complicated reality: The stuff from school, the stuff about pre-teen hormones, the stuff about crying being a good healthy thing to do. Instead, I’d make the easiest link, that whatever was wrong was just my fault. It was easy to link things to myself. It was easy to see things as simple and clear. It was easy to blame myself. My brain liked things easy. In addition to the difficulties in concentrating, and the oversimplification of my thoughts, my memory was shot. This is easy to understand in retrospect; if I couldn’t concentrate on something, there was no way for my brain to make a memory of it. But at the time I couldn’t follow this more comforting reality through. So my difficult memory was just more proof of how crap I was. If I double-booked something, I’d cancel both in embarrassment as soon as I realised. I was heartily ashamed of my poor memory. And embarrassed. I’ve lost count of the amount of times someone has referred to a conversation I was present for, or an event, of which I have absolutely no memory. In fact, there are weeks and weeks that I can’t recall. If I hadn’t kept a kind of diary, in the form of poems and doodles, I’d have lost months of my life. And when I was low, when everything in my head was like a slowly swirling, chilly fog, when I was living in slow motion, numb to the world, this loss was just more proof of how easy it is to lose even little simple things (like keys), how impossible it is to hold onto the big complicated things (like relationships) and how easy it would be to leave. And again, I would feel some relief in the intellect involved in working out this equation, some proof that my intelligence was still there. I would study it, slowly, from different angles. It was a short enough idea for my shattered memory to hold onto. So I would repeat it. And remember it. And because I could remember it, it became more real to me than the things I was busy forgetting. Like the amount of times my friends had called, the sympathetic conversations we had had, the stuff going on behind the scenes to look after my family while I wasn’t there, the friends and family bringing meals, entertaining the kids. The complicated motivations behind all of this was more than I could conceive of at the time. I was mostly unaware of it. I only know about it now because people have said things since which my brain can now use to join up the dots of those missing weeks. At the time, I was dimly aware that my husband and kids were OK - not starving, not falling apart too visibly - and the easiest way for me to understand this was to decide that they could manage just fine without me. Which, again, came as a kind of relief. And again, was a simple enough idea for me to remember. So much for slow thinking. There was another side to my illness. Each time I start to get better (and generally on the way down, too), I get a rush of panic and anxiety. This is unpleasant, but there is a brief bit of time where my thinking starts to speed up; I can concentrate, and I can start to remember stuff. Experience hasn’t yet taught me not to get excited at this point. So when it happens I think “yippee”, I start to feel capable, I start to get busy. Unfortunately, each time there is also a moment when my thoughts turn poisonous, and I am suddenly pray to wildly racing horrible, scary thoughts, visions, tastes, impulses. Which I can’t switch off. I find myself with commitments - only recently made - to meet up with people, to get back into the communities I’ve been missing. I have the drive to drag myself along, but once again I can’t concentrate on what’s happening when I get there. Because the thoughts are too constant, or because too much of my brain is busy trying to suppress them, or to notice them mindfully. None of which is conducive to hanging out with people. Occasionally I can distract myself from the thoughts by listening closely to what’s going on, but this is normally only for a few minutes. So my contributions become patchy, I get embarrassed, and I end up hiding away again. At this point, I’m a bit more aware of the complexities of my relationships, but I’m still tending to look at things darkly. I realise that people are trying to support me, and that they’re trying to be helpful, that they’re communicating about me and sometimes trying to co-ordinate their efforts to maintain our friendship. But I imagine this involves impatience, that they find me irritating, and that they’re fed up with my inconsistencies, that they’re embarrassed by my ill-timed, slightly desperate jokes. Essentially, I imagine that they share my own feelings about myself. Sometimes I might even realise that I’m maybe projecting my own thoughts onto them. But frankly this is no reassurance when I’m still unable to step, imaginatively, outside my own head. I still can’t think well in the abstract. My thoughts are so noisy, that I forget that other people are listening to different noise. I can’t properly understand another person’s experience as different to my own. I’m thinking faster, but I’m still taking the easiest path - and it’s far easier to think that other people think a bit like I do. So although I may remember the concept of projection, and realise that I’m victim to it, I don’t really believe it. It’s too difficult to accept that my thoughts aren’t factual, that they may be irrational. Since my thoughts are also quicker, and stronger, than they were at my lowest, it’s at this point that anxieties and embarrassments at how I’ve been acting around my friends starts to keep me up at night, or to flash into my mind as soon as I was up, at 2am, and stop me falling back to sleep. I start cancelling things, inventing physical ailments, so that I can avoid further embarrassments for myself, and for my friends. I carry on taking the pills, and doing the mindfulness practice, and slowly things improve. I notice that my brain is starting to join up the dots, and my memory is a little better, but this growing ability draws attention to the bits that still aren’t working. I can’t seem to make the simplest decisions. In fact, deciding what to wear, what to eat, what to do, causes immense panic: There are too many factors - weather, fashion, nutrition - for my brain to weigh up. It seizes under the strain. I find myself shaking by the wardrobe, or frozen in the supermarket aisles. This inevitably affects my relationships. If I can’t decide what to wear in the morning, then I reason (and I feel kind of proud of myself for being able to think so logically) that deciding what to wear on a night out - which always causes me some consternation - will be nigh on impossible. If I can’t decide what to eat, then I definitely can’t plan a meal out with friends (which I’m reluctant to do for fear of embarrassing myself, anyway). The result of all this is that I only see people if they organise it, and if the imagined strain of missing it is greater than the imagined embarrassment of attending; or in other words, if I’ve cancelled once too many times already, and I can see that they are starting to question the length of my “flu”. Inherent in this equation is an increased ability to imagine other people’s reactions to me (well, at least my imagination is starting to work again). As well as realising that they aren’t always falling for my little white fibs, I notice that their experience of the times we meet up isn’t always the same as mine. I realise that I may have seemed relatively “normal” around friends. I can see that they didn’t notice my internal churning, that the violence of the continued assaults from my scary thinking isn’t playing like a film across my face. I can play “recovery”, and I can get away with it. But this is an incredibly lonely realisation. The knowledge that my own reality is so different from the reality my loved ones are experiencing is isolating. I’ve handled this in different ways, at different times. Sometimes, I face it out, pretend that I’m still that extrovert I used to be. I describe my thoughts - not quite as fast or as furious as they happen, but enough to give an idea. I admit my memory lapses. I turn finding myself stuck by the fridge, failing to decide what to cook, serving toast and cereal again, into a rueful joke. This at least turns my struggles into a story; I can shape it a bit, knock off the edges, add a bit of black humour. It takes a very strong-stomached friend to take some of these stories. Thankfully I have them. But neither I nor they are always up to this approach. So sometimes I fall back on trying to squash it all down, pretending it’s gone away, that I’m fine now, that the work I’ve put into trying to get better has paid back in full, rather than in a disappointingly piecemeal way. Which is just another way of getting onto the spiral of failed commitments, and increasing depression. The only silver lining I can find about this is that at least I’ve lived it before, now, and I know what’s coming if I carry along the loop. I’m better at stopping, at stepping back before things get completely foul. If that means that I take to my bed for a couple of days, to play my mindfulness scripts on repeat, then so be it. If we’re living on toast and cereal, well they have vitamins added, we’re not going to starve. If I don’t see anyone for a week or two, well they’re used to this now, as well. The next time I get started on climbing out of the pit, I’m never buried quite so deep; I’m always feeling just a little better than I was the last time. I guess that at least I did always expect that mental illness would be foul, and that recovery would be hard. I’m still learning its realities. I’m glad in a way to be on a repeat journey; the first time along this path was by far the hardest. I can start to see now how my emotions, thinking, and the things I do, link up. I’ve realised that knowing how all this connects in theory (I mean, it’s not like any of this is a new idea for me - I’ve lived around mentally ill people all my life, I’ve taught anxiety management techniques for goodness sake) does not mean that I can apply this knowledge to myself, when I need to. I know that this is partly because my thinking is just not working properly at those points. So I’m preparing. Each poem, each doodle, each piece of writing I complete, is a letter to myself in the future. A little map. I’ve been there before, and got out far enough to have some perspective on it. I’ll get out again. And throughout all of this, I’ve maintained at least some relationships. So if I’m not feeling good enough about myself to make the effort for my own sake, then I’ll make it for the people who are out there, waiting for me. I’m incredibly grateful for their patience. (And for my families love of toast and cereal).
0 Comments
It began with a series of everyday, middle-aged cliches. Stress at work, no time to rest at home - days stacked upon each other so quickly that I didn't have time to notice the foundations crumble. And when I finally noticed the cracks emerging through the plaster, I set to repointing rather than putting in the supporting joists that were needed.
I've always been great at maintaining a brave face, but as my inner self crumbled away I accepted the pain from keeping up my rictus smile as nothing less than what was due to me. And the colour of those days covered my eyes, so that whether I turned behind me, or looked to my future, all I saw was covered in dust. And the days kept passing. Until one day, I sent my husband and kids off on a jaunt, and took myself off to try to find a patch of colour to call my own. I searched the city streets and parks, but my favourite haunts offered no comfort. I hit the shops, hoping that the cheap thrill of consumerism would offer me a brief lift, but found only the jagged, static notes of a growing panic which wouldn't die down. And then I found myself on a hospital trolley. Even there, I kept my mask of denial firmly in place. Once I'd been reassured that the children were sorted for the night, my main concern was how I'd manage to let work know that I may have to swap my days around, to get some rest. I was genuinely astonished when a pleasant, bearded social worker (I idly assessed his skills and decided he'd be an asset to a team and considered a move into managing acute social care teams) looked me square in the eye and tore down all of my facades. He told me in no uncertain terms that I either went to a mental health unit voluntarily, or under section. This news sent a whirlwind through the heart of me and spun the pieces to the far corners of the dingy room. Although, strangely, no-one else seemed particularly surprised. The following week is mostly lost to the dark. Flashes sometimes break through, and steal my breath in a rush of fear. The hand of the fatherly taxi driver who took me on the sixty minute drive to the unit holding my notes to pass over. The grave face of the sweet young doctor as I struggled to articulate my history. My husband's careful, calm exterior, which I knew contained a seething mass of shock. The absence of my children ripping like a raw pain through the fog of the days. Fellow patients mistaking me as staff (the health professional in me expressing itself in my stride, so it was only as I drew close, and they saw my face, that they realised their mistake). The long hours of tears through the gloomy days and wakeful nights, hiding behind my curtains, listening to the rattle of the blinds separating me from freedom hiding the summer passing me by outside. The first splash of light came in the shape of a fag break. As a non-smoker I hadn't realised that I was allowed out for these. One of the women in my bay had been keeping an eye on me. She'd sussed my rookie status, and seen quickly past the remnants of my façade. She'd helped me to find towels, even though she couldn't wash. She'd come to hug me when my sobs wracked the ward awake in the long exhausting afternoons. And now she took my hand, put her right-hand headphone in my ear, and dragged me outside to listen to rock music in the sun. We head-banged carefully, keeping time so that the ear pieces didn't dislodge. The light warmed my face, and the swifts shot like arrows through the sky. A smile found my lips, worked it's way inside. It came to me that I'd hit my rock bottom: I always feared psychiatric care more than prison. And I realised that it wasn't that bad. I'd survived it. I'd even made a friend. |
AuthorJo used to described herself as many things; currently, she is ArchivesCategories |