A good year.

Well, for the next week or two, we’re all going to end up sitting down for a minute at some point or other and deciding for ourselves whether or not we’ve had a good year. Good is, incidentally, a bit of a bland label to slap onto something so complex.

Part of the way my mind has worked for a while has been to stick to the assumption that me and everything I am, do, and think is shit. But I was sitting in the passenger seat of my mum’s car somewhere on the A38 today when I had the realisation that… this year has involved leaps of progress that I am actually quite proud of.

Let’s not get too excited, mind you. I’m still a bit grumpy about living at home, but the me sitting here today has come a long way from the me sitting here last year. While it may be true that the metre sticks I measure my achievements against are different from many other peoples, I am proud all the same.

This year, I quit smoking. For ten years I was a polite addict, smoking away from others and not around children, but all the same my habit was setting me back, at its worst, £2,500 a year. I had absolutely nothing to show for it but an apologetic smile full of yellowed teeth, a morning cough and really smelly clothes.

Quitting was not easy – in fact, it never got easy until after ten months I finally gave in and had a cigarette. It was absolutely, utterly fucking disgusting, and not something I will ever be doing again. I still miss it though, which is so strange. But I am so pleased for myself that I finally quit.

This year, I finally went and saw a bit of the world that I’m so in love with. Going to the USA felt like coming home, even though it was my first visit. Turkey was brilliant, it genuinely felt like we were experiencing a different culture, and I loved that.

This year, I admitted I wasn’t well, and I went to the doctor. I can appreciate how, to many people, this doesn’t seem like a particular feat. To people with depression and other problems with their mental health, it might strike a chord. To people who know me – the idiot who never asks for help with anything, ever, and usually turns it down when offered – it’s probably about fucking time.

Finding the right medication for me has taken a long time. It has been difficult and frustrating, wanting so much for there to be an easy way. I call them my happy pills but that’s not true – happiness is still a battle that’s hard to fight even on the good days. All the pills can really do is help you realise that it’s worth fighting for it.  I know eventually I’ll need a lot of counselling too – and maybe that can be a goal for next year, when I feel up to it!

This year, I went to… the dentist.

Oh yes, six month checkups meant nothing to me. A heavy dose of dental pain went along with a heavy dose of painkillers (and the knowledge that you can safely take 600mg of ibuprofen instead of the 400mg it says on the box was such an enabler).

It’s not to say my teeth were particularly gross, but I was aware that I needed work doing. There were a few cavities I could feel with my tongue, and a few areas where I knew I’d need work done. But then one day, when eating pizza of all fucking things, sitting on Abbi’s sofa… a tooth broke. At the fucking front.

Luckily my mouth is pretty small, so even when I smiled it was barely noticeable unless I was pointing at it and making a sad face. (This happened often). But all the same, the day it broke, I knew it was time to man the fuck up.

I’ve found a brilliant dentist who I get on well with, which puts me at ease. He understands my nervousness, he drugs me up to the eyeballs and he talks to me like I’m a toddler who just did a poo in the potty. (“Well done, you did really well, I’m proud of you!”)

I would recommend him personally to anyone in Bristol, because to get a person like me comfortable enough to attend a dentist on multiple occasions speaks absolute volumes to him personally. So here – and if you call Bristol Clifton, ask for Dr Jason!

Anyway, all in all, my life as of right now isn’t as different as I had hoped it would get. I am still an idiot with a myriad of problems and issues and bullshit. But I am proud of the steps I have taken and the progress I have made, and I know they must seem small to anyone else.

And you know that they’ve been taken in fantastic shoes. Is there anything else that really matters?!

Sadness and everything after

Kaya Koyu, or Levissi to the Greeks who inhabited this village. It was abandoned in 1923 when the Anatolian Greeks were evacuated. Taken by me.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a good few days now, but the words never seem to come. I think too much at the best of times, and I can hardly describe the last few weeks as that. Thoughts that tumble around in my cranium, little snippets of quotes from sources that I never remember. “If you’re not lost, you’re found”. “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans”.

I used to think that one day I would win this silly battle with depression, but I’m not sure if it’s really something you can win. You just learn to cope with it a little better, one day you’ll get off your medication and hopefully learn to love the you that you are. There are alternatives to this outcome, but they are not worth considering.

One of the things I have struggled with most lately is how the chemicals that mush my brainful of cells together seem to think these other outcomes are worth thinking about. These dark thoughts that fill me, engulf me. It feels like a taboo, almost. I told my mother that I’ve been having really black thoughts, and she patted my hand and told me to go to the doctor, like you’d tell a friend who had missed her period to take a test. I told an SL friend, whose inworld name is Bette, and she was fantastic – the right balance of not over-reacting, but not being patronising either. I told writerJames, and he was brilliant too, trying to focus me on the brilliant things that there are in my world – like him! (He’s right!).

But then, in the quiet of the end of the day, when all the people have stopped saying the right things, the only company I have is myself. As Grandma Death said in Donnie Darko – every living thing dies alone.

I would never do anything like that. Never. In a way, that’s why I feel like I can be as honest as I have been here. I am not an angsty teenager crying for help or attention. But these horrific thoughts are a very real part of a very, very common mental illness. Your inner monologue can be very hard to stifle.

Depression isn’t really something you recover from, and it’s not a battle I will ever win. I realise this now. I will relapse, like I am now. Like plucking your eyebrows, like breaking in heels, like dumping someone – it will always be painful, but every time you do it, you manage it a little better.

Hiding places

I feel a bit weird having the most recent post here still being me ranting on endlessly about depression, so let’s move it down a bit and replace it with a photo I took at Westonbirt a few weeks ago.

It makes me think of hiding places, the little pockets inside of us where we store the bubbles of memory and emotion that really matter. Sometimes they’re good things and sometimes they’re not, but they all go somewhere.

Can you ever really find a new hiding place when an old one gets found? I’m not so sure. But sometimes just hiding things isn’t enough. Sometimes you just want it to fuck off.

This makes no sense to anyone but me.

I has a sad.

When Abbi and I first discussed buying a web domain and writing regularly in a blog, I already knew that I would find it to be a helpful exploration of an issue that has been ongoing in my life to date.

There are many blogs about depression, many websites about mental illness, many people who are sad. I’m not going to try to educate anyone – I know as much as google and a few years of low level psychology class will tell me – but I would really like to write about my own depression, in the hope that one day I can look back on it and understand it, and myself, a little better.

The term “depression” is one I have always been wary of using. Before I had a doctor-provided diagnosis, or even acknowledged that my feelings may seriously warrant one, I have been annoyed by people who sigh and say “Ugh, I feel so depressed”. Some of them may have been genuinely depressed, I’m sure, but it seems to have entered colloquial vocabulary as a synonym for frustration, or sadness. Depression is not sadness.

It’s different for everyone, I’m sure. But this is me, and my experience of it. For me, it was like breathing thicker air than everyone else. Every breath laboured, every single moment of every single day overshadowed by this crushing feeling in my chest. Depression is not sadness, it’s helplessness, hopelessness. It’s feeling that nothing is worth doing because everything is empty, pointless. It isn’t laying in bed because you’re lazy, it’s laying in bed because the thought of getting up and existing in a world so clearly not intended for you to exist in, leaves you feeling so raw and vulnerable that you can’t bear to do it.

Depression is not being alone. It’s being surrounded by people and still wanting to cry without knowing why. It’s avoiding phonecalls and texts from people who genuinely care about why you’ve disappeared, and ignoring them for so long that they stop coming, and it’s feeling relieved that you don’t have to avoid them anymore. It’s not seeing anyone or anything of meaning or note for weeks on end because it’s agony to be social, when the first thing anyone ever asks is “How are you?” and you’re too emotionally exhausted to lie but the answer is too horrible to face.

There are a lot of people who feel as though treating depression with medication is the easy answer. As someone who made four doctors appointments that I didn’t attend, and two that I did attend but chickened out at the last minute and made up another problem when they asked me what was wrong, let me assure you that there is absolutely nothing easy about walking into a room, sitting down with a medical professional and saying, “I need help. I think I have depression”.

It’s the subtext in that, that makes it so difficult. It’s the things you don’t say, by saying that. “I’ve tried to have a life, I can’t, it’s too hard”. “I failed at being happy”. “There is something so desperately wrong with me that I think about killing myself for most of every day”. That is not a good conversation to have. It’s not an easy conversation to start. No one who takes an anti-depressant, does so because they think it will fix their problem.

But when your problem is that you can’t deal with life, you need something to make dealing with it possible, and that’s what these pills do. Almost all of them have side effects. These are not easy options. When you start to feel better, that’s when you can start looking at the things that have been making you feel this way. I’m sure that bit will be even harder still.

I’m starting to feel a little bit better, but I’m not there yet. As much as I may have really good ideas about the things that have turned me into this shell of a person, I’m still not ready to really think about them in any depth. Some things I can’t even say properly because I can’t force myself to use the words, so I think I’m still a way off.

This blog may or may not help me. It might just chronicle yet another failure of mine to deal with my myriad of issues. I hope not though. But one thing is as clear as ever, as clear as it has always been – I’ve never been alone while I’ve been trying to get better. Thank you guys for being my friends. I’m not sure that it was always worth it for you, but know that you were always appreciated.