My Diary- A look at where it all began- 28/11/2001

Here is the next instalment of my diary from when I was 18, the time I began my downward spiral into depression. Doesn’t mean all the entries are about being depressed though but I’m posting them all more for me than anyone else as I’m trying to work through where my Depression started and how it progressed. I’ve changed people’s names in this so I don’t annoy anyone but if you’re one of my friends you’ll no doubt see yourself in some entries just with a different name. Same rules of before, I was only a kind when I wrote this so excuse any cheesy teenage angst. It is what it is and I’m being very honest sharing such a personal thing so be respectful of that, Thank You.

26/11/01 (Wednesday)

Today has been another crap, dull day. Well as you can see from the white square of paper stuck to this page I worked on a reformed version of the lyrics I wrote yesterday . I did this at work and obviously it still isn’t finished yet. (There’s a piece of paper cellotaped to the page here which reads, and no laughing!):

I’ve been looking down the wrong end of memories kaleidoscope/Living through an illusion/fenced in by mirrors/each day reflecting the last/I’ve been so blind with my desire to reach my goals/That I didn’t notice the stars I’ve been reaching for/my stars/They’ve been dead all along.

I can’t run away from my life/Can’t stop existing in an endless loop of replays/ The colours are colliding and becoming granite grey/ The horizin dies on another day/ It’s time to step across into the next mirror/ into another universe of dead stars.

Mike (drummer guy, friend of Sam’s who offered to help us out) messaged me today saying to give him a call so we could get together for a jam. It could be fun but it still doesn’t change the fact we are in desperate need of a permanent drummer. It seems like a never ending hopeless case. There’s pleanty of good guys who are willing to help out and give us a hand, the trouble is they have their own band commitments to worry about too. We need someone just for us who will be Left of Deviant all the way through. We are in a rut and the only way forward is to extend our current two members. There’s not enough drummers to go round. I think there must be a world wide shortage. Anyway…

I hate work when the schools are off because the neds flock to the sports centre like salmon to a breeding ground. They don’t even use the facilities they just come to hang around in swarms and give cheek to the staff. And they call my kind freaks. I hate those arrogant bastards so much,

Oh, Natty just messaged me a slightly changed version of my ‘Utopia’ lyrics:

Who’s world is this anyway?/Who does this ideal belong to?/who’s abrasive sense of fun is this I live with everyday?/It must be somebodys utopia/somebodys sick Utopia/But I don’t think it’s fair.

Alright. I guess thats enough for one day.

November 25th 2011 (Age 18)

As promised in my previous post I’m going to begin sharing my old diaries from the time when this depression began. It’s pretty tough at times as we get further in. Some stuff I’ll need to edit out and some names I’ll need to change to avoid hurting other people but I’ll keep it as honest as I can. With this is mind please be mindful of the fact I was only eighteen at the time and there is a lot of teenage angst and poor me kind of stuff but underneath is real problems. So here is the first entry.

25/11/01 (Sunday)

I’ve been thinking. Thinking a lot about things. About how endless life is. Like a constant re-run, a cycle that just keeps going. About things that happened, things that will happen and where I am going. Will I ever get out of this cycle? I don’t think so. I’ve been thinking and the end result is a feeling of hollowness like everything has lost its colour and faded out of importance. What matters? There is no future for me, not in real terms, there is nothing but mirrors, each week an identical reflection of the last- time copies time copies time over and over until it reaches the horizon.

I feel like such a loser. Mam said something today that really brought it home. She said my exam results following the standard grade courses aren’t good enough and won’t get me anywhere. Shit, I tried so hard and felt I’d done so well, Higher Grades are no picnic after all, but now it seems I’ve been living an illusion, the stars I’ve been reaching for are dead. How can my B’s and C’s live up to my sisters A’s? So now I wonder do I have a reason to live? I would say not. I feel so low. I don’t think I can stand another day in that crappy dead end job. It’s so depressing. Why can no one understand? Why can no one help?

Shall we look at the facts and go from there?

1) I am ugly

2) I am going to be stuck in a dead end job for the rest of my life

3) I have no decent exam results

4) My only talent is writing and that won’t get me anywhere

5)I can’t seem to communicate with people

6) Nothing interesting ever happens

7) I am hopeless obsessed with someone I can’t have

Now for the positives:

1) I have some really good friends.

So we have seven negatives against one positive. Doesn’t life suck? I am so unhappy and have nowhere to turn. Mam doesn’t listen and says its all my fault and I don’t want to moan to my friends and make them miserable too. So what? What do you do when you have no direction? Where do you run when you are trapped in a corner? How do you break out of a solid steel rat run? I guess you never do.

I’ll try and take comfort in something I enjoy doing. Writing lyrics. (I’ve written some pretty terrible lyrics here but I said I’d be honest and share even though they are very embarrassing)

I always tried to do the best I could/ I always thought I was doing good/ but I was blind with dreams and hope/ So blind I couldn’t see where I was gong/ Until someone brought it home to me/and now I see/those stars I’ve been reaching for/ The stars I’ve been following, my starts/ They where dead all along.

When it all began

Recently I dug out a box of my old diaries (if you’re following my other blog you’ll see I’ve started sharing these childhood memories). They begin in 1995 and end in 2007. Funnily enough that corresponds with when I joined facebook which I guess has become my new way of keeping track of my life as it passes by. Anyway, I’ve just started sharing the 1995 diary month by month and it’s that of pretty much a normal child. I had a lovely life and a pleasant upbringing provided by Mother who made sure we were always entertained and experiencing different things despite us always being short of money. It was nice remembering how I happy was as a child when the worst thing I had to worry about was not making the swimming team at school and a couple of nasty girls saying my clothes were horrible. It’s been an interesting exercise as looking at the span of around 13 years worth of off and on entries I’ve pinpointed the year my depression started. And I was surprised. I always thought the start of my problems was when I was forced at the age of 13 to abandon my life in Newcastle to move to Glasgow where I found things quite tough. As hard a time as that was it was nearly five years later that you see the depression begin (though I was’t sure what it was at the time and appear terribly confused by the feelings I’m experiencing) and as lame as this is going to sound I have to admit it was work that started it all and probably work that is at the root of it to this day. Now I don’t mean that I had awful jobs. I didn’t. They have all just been your normal job. And I don’t mean people at work gave me trouble, they didn’t. Nor do I mean I am work shy and lazy because I’m not. I’ve worked almost solidly since i was 17 barring a year where I was in my final year of Uni when I relied on my husband for support so I could get all my work done. No, it’s none of those things but I’ll try and explain what I mean by work caused it. And this is coming directly from some diary entries when I was seventeen/eighteen describing my feelings at the time. I’m going to share the 2011 onwards diary entries in this blog rather than my childhhood diary one because from then on they go through some pretty dark times more suited to this blog. The other one I want to keep light hearted as my family and friends are having fun reading through it and I’d rather not taint it with the pain that followed.

Anyway, I’m off the point. How was work to fault and what roll did it play in the onset of a battle with depression that I’m fighting to this day? I’m an extremely creative person. I’m also fairly intelligent. I’m at my best when I have various projects on the go that give me something to wrap my mind around. At school I felt I had this. The variety and the challenges faced each day kept my brain motivated (despite like most kids I moaned about school constantly at the time). Then at seventeen I finished school and started working as a receptionist at a sports centre. That had never been the intention. My big plan was to go to art school but a horrible teacher in sixth year told me I was a rubbish artist because he was obsessed with art being abstract and I hate abstract art. Because I couldn’t produce his brand of art he saw fit to say I was terrible and ruined all my plans to go to art school. I’ve since realised of course that I’m not terrible at all it’s just that my drawings look like things rather than just being random shapes and splats of colour. So I just sort of fell into this job and almost instantly started missing school. Or rather missing the challenges school gave me, I went from having my mind stretched and exsersized in many ways everyday to doing menial, repetitive tasks that once learned required no thought process. It was a case of ring up a ticket for a fitness class or the swimming, take the money, give the change and repeat countless times a day like some kind of zombie. I really felt the effects of that and it’s been the same ever since. That’s when my depression started when the mental challenges and variety was taking from my life. It torments me to this day for thirteen years later I’m still working a job that is repetitive and offer very little in the way of new challenges or anything to excersize my brain. That’s what I say when I say work makes me depressed. If I could find a job that would let me problem solve and create and threw up different challenges and projects I could work on I think my state of mind would be a lot healthier. As it is I’m still repeating the same learned process with little variation day in day out and I’m so exhausted and fed up by the end of each day that I have no motivation to do anything.

Next I’ going to start working through sharing this time of my life where it all got a bit missy, so join me next time for the first look at where this all began.

“I Don’t Trust Him”

I haven’t posted for a while on here as I only tend to do so when I’m having a down spell. I was feeling pretty ok for a while but recently I’ve been experiencing a down spell to end all down spells.

This post may seem a little off the wall, but bare with me. I’ve been watching a lot of the television show “Sons of Anarchy” recently. I don’t claim it has any great moral or social merit, it’s just entertainment, nothing really deep or meaningful. However, the plot line around the suicide attempt of the character ‘Juice’ got to me a bit. More specifically it wasn’t the actual suicide attempt (though I was really upset when the episode ended right after he hung himself and I thought he was a goner) rather it was the way his ‘brothers’ in the club acted after they found what he had tried to do.

There was two phrases repeated constantly for many episodes to come by other characters when referring to Juice following his suicide attempt. These were ‘I don’t trust him’ and ‘he makes me nervous’. This struck a bit of a chord with me because right now I feel a bit how Juice must have felt. I’m usually pretty good at keeping a lid on my depression, hiding it, but recently more and more people have started to notice and pick up on how much I’m suffering and although I haven’t tried to swing from a tree (yet) I’ve confessed to a few folk in heat of the moment tear filled breakdowns that I’ve thought about suicide these last few weeks. Now I feel like people are always watching me. I know it’s not in a bad way, more like they care and want to see that I’m ok and not going to do anything silly (I’m not) but I still I get that overwhelming feeling that me and my illness are making people around me nervous and that they don’t trust me. I think Sons got it right in that no one wants to be around someone who is mentally messed up, we as unstable, anxiety filled individuals aren’t wanted because our unhappiness makes us unreliable, untrustworthy and ultimately, not capable of doing any tasks or jobs entrusted to us and generally not pleasant to be around. So yes, in summary, I feel a bit like Juice and I kind of wish I hadn’t been so battered these last couple of weeks that I let
my guard down and allowed my suffering to show, thus making people around me suspicious and nervous.

i

You’re not ‘Depressed’

Having a bad day? Seem like one thing after another has gone wrong? But it’s only today right? You know by time you get home and sit down and begin to chill out everything will be ok. You know tomorrow will be fine. Maybe if this you then you should really think for a minute about the words you use when things are not going your way.

You go to work and you’re given a really repetitive and boring task to carry out and you say, “God, I hate photocopying, it makes me so depressed.” Or perhaps you’re train is canceled on the way home and you say, “I’m so depressed, it took me an hour to get home tonight.” No, dear people, think about what you are saying and the words you use. You are most certainly not depressed because your favourite dress shrank in the wash. Why? What is the difference? Well for a start come tomorrow you won’t care that yesterday you were late home, and that photocopying won’t bother you anymore and you’ll probably go and buy a new favourite dress. To be depressed is to wake up everyday and feel crippled by this emotion that you can’t find a cause for, be it burned toast or loosing your keys, and you most certainly won’t forget about it and feel fine by time you get home, or by the next morning, or even the one after that.  You can’t be cheered up by anything nice people might do or say to you with the best intentions.

The word depression has become far too misused and misunderstood and as this can’t be undone I would love for our delightful affliction to be renamed. I’m going to use an example that will require me to use words that you may find unpleasant, but it gets a point across. Who remembers a long time ago when people with certain mental disabilities, cerebral palsy and the like, used to be called ‘spastics’? I’ll bet you cringed at that word didn’t you? It’s not a pleasant phrase to us now I’m sure but not too long ago this was the proper term for people with these disabilities. The national charity over here to help the mentally handicapped was called ‘The spastic society’. Yet no one uses that word now because mainly that word became so overused as an insult that you really couldn’t use it to describe people with a mental disability because people’s uses and perceptions of the word had changed entirely. It’s similar with depression. It’s not used as in insult of course in the was ‘spastic’ was but it has suffered the same misuse on such a large scale that it too has lost all of it’s original meaning. To come out and say one is depressed is to be looked upon as weak and stupid or worse still that you are simply having a bad day and will be fine by tomorrow. If we want people’s attitudes to change we need a new word. We need to stop being lumped in with the people who had a nasty customer shout at them at work or left the house and forgot their wallet. We need to be recognised for what we are which is people who are not well! People who are suffering! People need to start taking us seriously!

Overheard Converstaion

It seems depression as an illness is fair game when it comes to jokes and generally slagging people off for suffering. Today I was pretty upset by a an overheard conversation about someone who had been signed off their work with depression. I won’t relay the whole conversation but basically it sounded as if someone was having a bad day and made the flippant remark about how “I can’t be bothered, maybe I’ll get myself signed off sad for weeks like (insert name of person off with depression)” to which the rest of the people sniggered and nodded in agreement.

It seems an ongoing thing. People get away with it everyday. I’m tired of people making out that people suffering from this at times crippling illness are just being lazy. You here remarks such as “Oh well, that person can’t be that sick can they, they’re facebook status said they were out and about today, that’s not what sick people do.”  So I suppose to feel better we should sit in a room like hermits moping, getting steadily worse so that our return to health end up taking longer.

I was signed off with depression once for two weeks and I felt so guilty for not being at work I went back early against my doctors recommendations. There’s times were I really feel I can’t cope and should probably be off but I now refuse to go to the doctors incase I get signed off again and face these insults and accusations of being lazy and just wanting an extra holiday. Now when I hear conversations like the one I heard today I can’t help but wonder what people say about me behind my back. Guess I’m lazy and just at it too, eh? Horrible to think that the majority of the world treats us like lazy scivers when what would really be nice would be support and understanding. You know, like the kind you’d give someone if they signed off and suffering with some kind of physical ailment. You would never be allowed to get away with openly suggesting someone was being lazy if they had a heart attack or were in an accident. No, they’d be given all the support they need to get better, no one would question why they needed time off work.

Once again I find myself desperately wishing that attitudes towards mental health would bloody well change!

Depression and Suicidal Thoughts

Not a topic for everyone really, suicidal thoughts. Not a nice thing really is it yet so often so called ‘depression’ (if you read my last blog you’ll know I hate that word but we’re stuck with it) often seems to go hand in hand with this kind of thing. Funny really, that I should think such things when I can truly say with the utmost sincerity that I do not want to die, I do not want my life to end. It’s complicated. Maybe like many it’s not really a wish for death but more a wish for an escape from depression. That’s what we are searching for. A life without this sorrow.

Yet it is messy and difficult to explain. I am terrified of dying. It’s a morbid fear of mine that will creep up on me sometimes out of nowhere and I’ll stop what I’m doing and suddenly think ‘my god, one day I will simply not exist, this life, this body will be no more, these thoughts that make me who I am will be gone forever.’ Then I get panicy and afraid for a while. Odd then, given this fear, given that I do not want to die, that I find myself going through times when I have a down spell where I think constantly about ways in which I might end my life. And I mean constantly. I see possibilities everywhere. I’ll be sitting in the car on the way to work and I’ll find myself wondering what it would be like to open the door and throw myself out. I’ll be waiting at a train platform and I’ll imagine throwing myself in front of it. The simple act of washing the dishes can leave me looking at the kitchen knife and wondering how it would be to slit my wrists. Then there’s hanging, overdose, gasing yourself, all of these things keep popping into my mind. How easy would it be simply to exist one minute and then be gone the next and never have to deal with another down time ever again. 

But I’m safe because I know that death is not really what I want. The reason: why it’s because I love my life and despite all the crap this illness brings this is still my life and I sure as hell don’t want it to end. Not now. Not ever. When I come out of a bad spell my life is great. I just wish to God these terrifying down times would stop. It makes me angry sometimes that such a good life has to be thwarted by this blemish that creeps up and hold everything good hostage until it decides to leave again. I know it can’t last forever. It never does. But sometimes it feels like it will.

Me and my depression

I think depression as an illness should be renamed. Anyone can get a little ‘depressed’ at times but having the illness that shares the same name is a far cry from feeling a bit down or being upset by things that are happening in your life. It be-littles what people who suffer from this go through to liken it to people feeling a little ‘depressed’. Naming this illness with the same term we use for when people are a bit down just causes confusion and lack of understanding. There might be less of the ‘pull yourself together’ and ‘what have you got to be depressed about?’ attitude if we told it like it is, i.e. that it an illness which is not  always caused by outside influences. An illness not an emotion. The emotion part is simply a symptom.

 

That’s not to say the life events and circumstances don’t play a part. Of course they do. People get exasperated with me when I get upset over silly things and then they’ll say things like ‘so you were lying when you said it was an illness, it IS caused by you getting upset over something that’s happened.’ Well yes and no. I’m going to be perfectly honest and try and explain my depression. It will be near on impossible for those ho’ve never suffered to understand but I’ll use comparisons that might help it to make a little more sense. I understand this crazy illness must seem like the most illogical and incomprehensible thing ever to those who’ve never been there. 

Let’s start with how it feels on a day to day basis. So, I will go through times when I feel fine for weeks, even months when I’m lucky. I’ll enjoy my life, I’ll rise to challenges and I have the ability to deal with what’s thrown at me. Then out of the blue I’ll feel it coming, that crippling, horrible pain that will leave me an emotional mess in the weeks that follow. I know how it will go. When I feel it coming I know what to expect. I know that everything that comes in a normal day will suddenly seem like mountains. Tiny challenges that the week before would have been trivial and easy to handle will suddenly become huge hurdles that I simply can’t overcome. Even making everyday decisions like what to eat will suddenly leave me feeling helpless, useless and totally out of my depth. In summary, every little thing will become a problem. And I mean everything. 

Yet there will be no allowances made. If I had another illness and was unwell for a while you would be accommodated, there would be measures in place to make your life easier until you felt better. Not with this illness. I’ll use a really basic comparison to try and explain how each day feels during a ‘down’ spell. Imagine you have broke your leg. You’re feeling pretty crap. Little things you found so easy the week before, like walking up the stairs or even just standing, are suddenly impossible. But no one would expect you to do these things. You wouldn’t have to get up each day and walk up stairs or drive a car. You’d be given time to feel better again. With ‘depression’ it’s like getting up everyday with a broken leg and being asked to stand and walk as normal while creating the illusion for everyone looking on that you are ok. For that is what people expect. You get up, you got to work, and you put on a fake smile and pretend everything is fine because to do anything less is unacceptable. It becomes exhausting. It’s harder than I can explain. It’s so tiring and by the time you get home at night you’ve nothing left to give, and you break. Then your family suffer because you have no more fight left in you.

 

The other thing I get asked a lot is ‘well, you seemed happy enough when you were on that day trip/out for that meal etc  the other day. How is it an illness if you don’t have it at these times?’ That’s not true. I always have it. So again we go back to the broken leg analogy to try and explain. So you break your leg. It hurts. You are in a hell of a lot of pain, but you get given some painkillers. The pain goes away when you take them. You feel a little better. Doesn’t mean you don’t still have the broken leg. You do, of course. Time with family, holidays and days and days out are like pain killers to me. Take me away to the country for a day and for a while I’ll feel a bit better. It’ll still be there, but the symptoms are some what relieved. Take away my days out and my family time and you take away my medicine. It’s no different from taking away painkillers from a person with a broken leg.

Well that’s just the surface of it. I could go on but I won’t. I hope this at least helps some of it make sense to someone and if you’re living with someone with depression please try and understand. As a whole we need to change our attitudes to mental health problems.