“I need something to help me cope” I said to him.
I was hurting all day. It was a physical as well as an emotional pain.
“I sometimes feel like not being alive is the only good option” I told him.
He wrote me a prescription and put it on the desk between us.
He said “at the end of our session today, if you still feel like you want the antidepressants take the prescription with you…”
The Rude Organ.
Learning to live with my own mind has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
The squishy grey organ in my head is a pretty typical example of the human brain. It does what it pleases most of the time. It’s lazy, unpredictable, and infuriatingly secretive. I’ve put up with a lot of shit from it, and even now, after years together, we still squabble and bicker all the time.
Sometimes my brain and I have serious fallings out, and it just stops speaking to me for days, or even weeks at a time. At times like that, I just want to scoop the fucker right out of my skull, flush it down the loo, and replace it with a nicer more polite organ. But I guess we need each other, because we’re still together.
Detour.
I am always traveling.
Some days I can hardly believe how fortunate I am to be living this life. I have to pinch myself sometimes to remind myself I’m not dreaming.
Other days I look around me and see how broken the world is. I feel afraid, alone and confused.
Most of what I write on Raw Safari is about the exciting, beautiful things I experience as I roam.
I made a conscious choice when I started this blog to focus on the positive and inspiring aspects of my life.
There are lots of reasons behind that decision. I want this blog to inspire other people to take risks and have adventures. I want to share my optimism about the world we all live in and the beauty of humanity. But there is another very simple, selfish reason I write from the point of view of an optimist:
I am a depressive person.
I tell stories about beauty and adventure because focussing on those parts of my life is central to my self care strategy.
Discovery.
I was diagnosed by a doctor as depressed in 2002.
I went to see him because I was unable to sleep.
I asked him for sleeping tablets, which he prescribed. He asked me to come back in a week and let him know how I was feeling.
The sleeping tablets didn’t seem to have any effect.
I went back to the doc and told him I was still struggling to sleep one or two hours a night. He asked me what was going on in my life and I told him about my recent break up, about how I was unable to get over my ex. I told him about crying randomly throughout the day: at home, at work, in the street. I told him how I would lie in bed at night, my stomach aching, unable to sleep, and weep for hours, and think about killing myself.
“How long has this been going on?” he asked me.
“Two months, I told him.”
The doctor and I talked for nearly an hour, and he told me he thought I was depressed, and that sleeping tablets might help to keep me going, but I needed to start managing my psychology, in a big-picture way.
I asked him to give me antidepressants. He said he would give me the drugs if I really wanted them, but he would like me to try therapy sessions first. I agreed. I needed someone to talk to.
I was at the point where I was ashamed to call my friends and family when I was low. I felt like every time I opened my mouth, self pity and loathing poured out, and I could feel people draw away from me when I was in that state.
My doctor listened. It was his job.
I spent about three hours a week in sessions with him, every week, for the next three months. Sometimes, I would call him during the day while I was at work, crying in the toilets. Sometimes I called him late at night, and on weekends and he always took my calls. I think he prevented me from harming myself at least once.
I had a friend who was on antidepressants. We played music together – loud, screaming music. I remember talking about the drugs with him once.
He said “yeah, it helps. It takes the edge off the lows. But I don’t get the highs anymore either. Everything is kind of… level.”
That scared me. I knew instinctively that the sharp corners of my personality somehow helped to define who I was.
I started making music because I needed to express pain. It gave me an outlet for emotional pressure. If I calmed the emotional storm, would I still be able to be creative?
In one session with the doc I was really desperate.
“I need something to help me cope” I said to him.
I was hurting all day. It was a physical as well as an emotional pain. I felt unable to control myself and I was ashamed of my fragility.
“I sometimes feel like not being alive is the only good option” I told him.
He wrote me a prescription and put it on the desk between us.
He said “at the end of our session today, if you still feel like you want the antidepressants take the prescription with you.”
He spent an hour listening to me talk about my suicidal ideations.
“I lie in bed and imagine different ways to die” I mumbled. “I think about shooting myself, but of course I have no access to a gun. Then I think about a drug overdose. I think OD’ing would be the best way. I can’t really imagine doing anything violent to myself.”
After two hours of pouring out all my bleak fantasies, I was feeling calmer. At the end of my sessions I often felt drained. Like everything had poured out of a hole in my toes and I was hollow. Completely numb.
I didn’t pick up the prescription when I left the doctor’s room and we never talked about it again.
Taking Control.
My sessions with the doctor were an opportunity to get the black ooze out of my brain but during those sessions he also taught me tools to manage my emotions.
He talked to me a lot about the concept of negative ideation.
“When you dwell on your problems you are just making that knot in your head tighter. That is what I call ‘negative ideation’ he explained to me. “Like your thoughts of suicide for example. By focussing on that fear you are actually strengthening the connections in your brain that create it. Your mind is a tangled mess of negative thoughts right now. You are anxious about so many things and you feel unable to manage any of them. You need to visualise that mass of anxiety and just draw out one issue to deal with at a time. Picture it as a thread. Draw it out, straighten it and then put it away. You can’t solve all your problems at once. You need to do it one thread at a time.”
For the first decade of my adult life it had never occurred to me that the way I thought was unhealthy.
What did I have to compare it with? I had always thought that way.
Working with the doctor, bit by bit, I got better at controlling my conscious mind. When I started to think cyclically, to go over a problem or a painful memory again and again, I would deliberately focus on slowing my thoughts and being still. Just being aware of what my mind was doing helped so much. After all, you can’t fix a problem if you don’t know it exists.
After a couple of months of regular therapy sessions, I started to get my day to day life under control. Knowing I could get through the day without crying was a huge relief.
I started to be able to sleep better. I had to keep the TV on all night but at least I slept. I always watched ‘Seinfeld’. I’d put a video on, with the sound low and by three or four in the morning I’d drift to sleep with Elaine, Kramer, Jerry and George babbling away in the background.
I was not happy. But I was coping.
I started to make some changes. I stopped playing depressing music. I realised there was a vicious circle going on, where I was feeling sad, writing sad songs, playing sad songs and feeling like shit. It was like I was deliberately reinforcing my negativity with music. It was another kind of negative ideation. My songs were a misery mantra. I actually stopped playing music altogether for a long time.
I stopped doing drugs. I stopped smoking. I started to exercise.
One night, six months after my first therapy session, I slept for six hours. I woke up the next morning and I knew something was different.
I was winning.
I stopped going to sessions with the doctor.
I moved to a new city and I started to get my head straightened out.
Understanding.
I can say with enormous gratitude that since 2003 I have rarely experienced depression as severe as that first time – the kind of depression that is paralysing and makes you want to die. But depression is always part of me, I now realise and if I don’t manage it, it can take me down quickly and unexpectedly.
At least now I understand what is happening and I can deal with it in a way that minimises harm and gets me back into a better place quickly.
Being a depressive person doesn’t mean I am perpetually miserable. Actually, having a manic personality often gives me intense excitement.
I have to manage my brain though.
Sooner or later the down phase is going to kick in and then it’s up to me to keep my life together until the cloud lifts.
My depression is part of me. It’s always going to be there, just like my hands, my feet and my face. How I choose to live with it, the way I experience it, is up to me. It is still difficult for me to manage but I believe I can and I do.
No one seemed to talk about depression until pretty recently.
It used to be one of those ubiquitous undiagnosed diseases like influenza, asthma and cancer once were.
Depression is so common, so much a part of the human condition, that a lot of cultures still just try and ignore it, I think.
But we all cope better with our problems when we share them. We can learn from one another’s experience, too. When we hear other people talk openly about depression, it helps us see our own struggles more objectively.
I don’t understand depression and I think that is true of most humans. What I do know is that being depressed is a little different for every person who experiences it.
For me, trying to think objectively about what it feels like to be depressed is very difficult. In a way, one of the hallmark symptoms is a difficulty with thinking in general and an unwillingness to think. It feels like I want to sleep and stay asleep. I think that is what feeling suicidal is. It isn’t a desire to die. It’s a desire to sleep deeply and indefinitely.
Another symptom that is correlated with depression, for me, is psychosomatic illness. I always get nasal congestion. I feel lethargic. I get headaches. My libido declines. I had a pretty bad depression phase two years ago, during which I convinced myself I had throat cancer.
There doesn’t seem to be a real pattern to my emotional highs and lows.
Sometimes I will respond to stressful situations by becoming energetic and resourceful. Other times, in a similar situation, I will find myself sliding into a pothole and feeling like I can’t move forward. Even when my life is going to plan and things are comfortable, I can unexpectedly lose focus and drift downward.
I’ve learned that there is no real value in trying to predict my emotional condition. It’s a much more successful strategy to just ride the waves. Sure, I’ll get dumped on my arse sometimes but at least I’ll keep moving forward.
It turns out that managing my life – achieving happiness – starts with managing my own mind. Ultimately I think that’s a really positive thing. I’ve learned that my happiness isn’t something that I can get from anyone else, or any particular set of circumstances. The difference between being miserable and being happy is all about the way I think and what I choose to think about.
So, what do I think about?
I think about the next adventure!
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Happy trails amigo!
