Ups and downs

One of the worst things about the process of recovering from depression (apart from realising what a total idiot you’ve been, and how much your illness has affected the people you love, your career, your social life…) is the fact that it makes you question everything.

I haven’t felt that brilliant today. I’m not sure why. I’m tired. I’ve got a post-counselling hangover (of the emotional kind, not alcohol related). It’s been grey and rainy and the children have not been at their most amenable. To put it mildly. But I’ve felt generally a bit flat, tearful, heavy.

And it makes me panic.

It makes me think, what if I’m not getting better after all?

What if this has been a temporary respite, and by the time I go to bed tonight, I feel as bad as I did before?

What if this crushing weight, this monster, this bleakness is never actually going to leave me?

I shouldn’t be thinking like this. I *know* I am getting better. Despite being less than chirpy today, I have given my bedroom a thorough spring clean, read to my daughter, dropped a friend’s son home from school, cooked pizza and cakes from scratch. I couldn’t have done any of these things even a month ago.

But depression makes me think, what if? Always, always, what if?

This is what I need to tackle. I need to accept that even the happiest, most carefree of people will have down days. I need to accept that I will be irritable and morose at times, but that I can be irritable and morose without being depressed. I need to accept that actually, there are good reasons why I haven’t felt at my best today, and that most people would be somewhat gloomy after a day of rain, housework and stroppy kids.

I need to remember that refusing to allow myself to have feelings is, quite probably, at the root of everything I have been through lately. I need to let myself have those feelings – normal feelings, that everyone experiences. I need to accept them, recognise the reasons for them, and not panic that they are indicative of a slide right back to where I started from.

I am human. I can feel. I can be grumpy, I can be cross, I can cry. I can do all those things because of and in spite of depression. But depression doesn’t have to define me.

I won’t let it.

This much I know

Today, in my counselling session, I was reflecting on how much better I have been feeling lately. And it was a real eye-opener. Because right through this process, I’ve had this niggling feeling that I’ve been faking it. That I wasn’t really depressed. That I was attention-seeking, feeling sorry for myself for no good reason, just needed to pull myself together.

Therapy has helped me to understand why this is. My denial of my own feelings is buried deep in my history and runs through every aspect of my life. I feel I have no right to be anything but okay, and feel guilty when I am not. I end up hating myself for having emotions. I apologise for them. I apologise for myself. I feel single-handedly responsible for other people’s happiness. I don’t deserve anyone’s love or support or attention.

That, I think, explains a lot about what has been going on with me in the past six months or so.

This much I know now, though, now that I am – please God – coming through this episode of depression.

I wasn’t faking it.

I wasn’t attention-seeking.

I couldn’t just pull myself together.

Only now do I realise how unwell I have been.

For months, months on end, I struggled to speak to people in the playground, at church.

I spent hours lying on my bed or the sofa, trying to make myself move.

I couldn’t make eye contact with people.

I cried hysterically, disproportionately at the smallest things.

I avoided making social arrangements and cancelled the ones I had made.

I lay awake at night in a barely suppressed state of panic.

I couldn’t get my contact lenses in because my eyes were so tired and swollen.

I couldn’t summon the energy to cook for the children, and relied on freezer dinners.

I couldn’t be bothered to help Tom with homework or read to Katie.

I turned down work and quit my governor role.

I let the house fall to pieces around me. I didn’t mop a floor or change a bed for months.

I didn’t shave my legs or paint my nails, didn’t colour my hair.

I didn’t read.

I didn’t listen to music.

I didn’t laugh.

I cut myself, for goodness’ sake. To the point of addiction. To the point that it wasn’t enough just to scrape at myself with a dismantled razor or a kitchen knife any more, and so I ordered a box of brand new, shiny, single razor blades from Amazon just for that purpose. I locked my little daughter out of the bathroom while I was home alone with her so I could self-harm. One night, her cries disturbed me in the middle of a session. Reflexively, I rushed into her room. I dripped blood all over her carpet, her bed.

If I couldn’t cut, I pinched my skin hard enough to bruise. I deliberately burned myself on the overheating power outlet of my laptop and pretended I’d caught myself on the oven door.

I wasn’t faking it. In fact, I think I was probably a lot more unwell than I realised at the time, a lot more unwell than I admitted to anyone, to the doctor, friends, my husband.

The past week or so has seen me feeling calmer, more positive, more normal than I have in a long while. I’ve enjoyed work. I’ve shaved my legs and bought new nail varnish. I’ve begun a total spring clean of the house, stripping all the beds, sending bags of stuff to the charity shop and sorting out the disaster area under the stairs. I’ve immersed myself in books and rediscovered that ‘can’t put it down’ need to keep reading even though I know I have to be up early the next morning. I’ve cooked from scratch, defleaed the cat, found a cheaper home insurance quote and packaged up Katie’s pre-school photo to post to Ian’s senile grandmother.

None of these things are a big deal. But just a few months ago, none of them would have been possible. I was too depressed. Too ill. I realise now that for several months, I was only just functioning. I realise now that I was probably far closer than I, or anyone else, knew to not functioning at all.

I wasn’t faking it.

Of course, recovery isn’t going to be a straight-forward thing. I know I will have dips. I know that, having now had three periods of significant depression in my life, I am at high risk of a future relapse. But I have something that not so long ago, I didn’t have at all. I have hope.

I am savouring this time of energy and enthusiasm and positivity. I am appreciating all the ordinary stuff in life that ceased to matter in the depths of my depression. I can get pleasure again from the smell of my line-dried washing, the satisfaction of a piece of work finished and finished well, even from having the strength to mop the kitchen floor.

With the benefit of hindsight, the self-awareness I’m gaining from counselling and the biochemical stability induced by my anti-depressants, not to mention the love and support of my dearest friends, I am recovering. And although I didn’t know how ill I was at the time, I know now that I am so, so fortunate to be coming out of this depression in one piece. Changed, scarred, but okay.

It could so easily not have been so.

And I thought I was faking it.

Ten things I will do for me each day

1. I will make time to read my Bible every day and to pray about what I’ve read.

2. I will write a small and manageable To Do list and tick things off it. Even if it’s just a couple of work emails, or renewing the home insurance. 

3. I will moisturise face and body before bed.

4. I will read something – if only a chapter.

5. I will make sure my toenails are painted.

6. I will give myself a few minutes each day to live in the moment. To enjoy the feeling of sunshine on my skin, or to walk at toddler pace back from school and pick daisies with Katie, or to appreciate how the woods at the back of my garden are changing day by day.

7. I will clean or tidy at least one area of the house. It drags me down when it’s a mess, and when I’m down, I lack the motivation to do anything about it. It’s a vicious circle, and one that I could avoid if I spent just 15 minutes each day keeping on top of things.

8. I will eat well. I will drink well. I will start looking after my body.

9. I will make sure I have at least one conversation a day with someone who makes me feel positive, whether that’s face to face or online.

10. I will end the day by giving thanks for all that has been good, and asking for help and strength with anything that has been bad.

Calm

I haven’t felt like this for ages. 

Months. Six months. Maybe more.

For the first time in all that time, I feel calm. 

Not wildly happy. Not on top of the world. Just calm.

Normal.

For the first time in months, I am not waking up with my first thought being how awful I feel.

I am not spending my time forcing out smiles and laughs.

I am not frantically messaging people late at night, desperate for support.

I am not constantly thinking about what I can use to cut myself.

I am not lying on my bed in a catatonic state.

I am not wondering if actually, I am going to end up killing myself.

I just feel normal.

Normal isn’t an artificial construct. I’m not Pollyanna happy. The kids are still driving me to distraction. I am still more than ready for wine o’clock at the end of the day. But that makes me realise I’m not faking it.

I am just – okay.

Today, I have shouted at the children. But I have also worked and enjoyed working.

I have (accidentally) dropped a plate on the floor. But I didn’t lose it, and just cleared it up.

I have supervised homework.

I have washed our bed linen.

I have bought paper for drawing on and pretty shoes for Katie to wear in the summer.

I have taken the kids to McDonald’s (so shoot me…) and counted the minutes until my husband got home.

I feel like – well, just like a normal mum. A normal, work-at-home mum on Easter holidays. Slightly frazzled, definitely looking forward to the start of term, but okay.

Just okay. Not perfect, but okay enough.

A week ago, I was wondering if I would ever get back to how I used to be.

Now, I think I’m as close as I used to be as ever I will be.

The past months have changed me, without a doubt. They have scarred me inside and out. But they have made me stronger.

They have made me more self-aware as a mother. 

They have shown me that there is an awful lot that is really very good in my life.

I am calm.

I like calm.

Anticipating

I’m feeling a bit scared. I have felt really good over the past few days. Normal. Content. Yes, of course I have yelled at the kids, and sniped at my husband, but all within a normal context.

Tomorrow morning, I have counselling. And this scares me. I don’t want to go.

I don’t want to go and pick apart my life again.

I don’t want to go and come out feeling broken again.

I don’t want to go, because just going to counselling means I’m all messed up.

But but but, I know I need to. I know there is still work for me to do. I know that if I walk away from this now, I will be letting my demons beat me.

I thought they had gone. But when my friend was upset with me because I’d been out to the park with our other friends, and invited her, but she was working so didn’t come, I felt awful. So guilty.

My default mode is ‘bad person.’ Which I am, of course I am. 

I feel like the worst sinner of the lot.

So, tomorrow. More counselling. More introspection. You know what I would like? I would really like to cry. Get everything out. But it’s all locked in.

I’m scared.

Happy days

Today, I was in the park with my friends, my children’s friends. We were keeping half an eye on the kids as we sat in the sun.

It dawned on me, while Lindsey was doing a child inventory, that I hadn’t seen Tom for a while. ‘Not sure where Tom is,’ I said.

At that point, I heard an unmistakeably loud voice yell, ‘HELLO!’ and looked up to see Tom at the top of the climbing pyramid.

‘Oh, there he is,’ said Lindsey and I at the same time. And we laughed.

More to the point, I laughed.

Properly. Uninhibitedly. I laughed because it was funny and because there was nothing to stop me laughing.

The beginning of this week was awful.  On holiday in a place that holds such happy memories for me, all I could think about was being so unhappy. Then we got home. I felt calmer, momentarily, but then two bad nights’ sleep and quarrelsome kids put me right on edge. When we went to see our GP to get Tom’s hayfever meds on Tuesday, and he asked how I was doing, I had to hustle the children out so they didn’t see me cry.

Wednesday, I woke up with heart pounding, hands shaking, this unexplained sense of anxiety and things just not being right. Lindsey and her children came round for lunch and I threw myself into preparing for that. We sat in the garden while the kids played, and we chatted as always, but I felt like I was strung out, pulled thin, trying to hold it together.

Then yesterday. The first time I’d seen my parents since my last, life-inverting counselling session. It was okay; I didn’t feel consumed with rage and anger and disappointment. But neither did I want to be close to my mum, chat with her, be on side. I left her to it with the kids, sat in the garden and distanced myself.

Will it be like that forever? I don’t know. But I feel it has done me good to see her and get through it without a massive emotional meltdown or confrontation.

Today, I sat in the sun, in the park, with my friends. My children played with their friends. It was easy, laidback, chilled out. And for the first time in weeks, I didn’t find myself referencing everything against my depression. There was no, ‘This is nice, but it won’t last.’ No, ‘This is all a brave face, and I’m still the same underneath.’ I just didn’t think about depressed me.

How wonderful it would be if this was the end.

 

On holiday

It was supposed to be fun.

Good.

Happy.

Family time.

We needed it.

Instead, I’ve spent the weekend in meltdown.

So very sad.

Being in a place where I’ve always been so happy has made me realise how far from happy I am now.

And I’m scared.

I want to feel happy again. Laugh, smile, giggle, feel light. 

What if I don’t? What if I can’t? 

I can fake it with the kids. To a degree. 

But I hurt. I really hurt. 

I feel lonely. Frightened. Both.

I don’t want to do this any more. 

Now I’m wondering

What I don’t understand is why now.

I am beginning to understand why.

But why now?

This time last year, I was really happy. Yes, there was the niggling blog stuff, the niggling friendship stuff, but I felt good. I was losing weight, I was content with how I looked, I was enjoying work and my family.

I wonder when this downward slide started and I know that up to the start of the autumn term, I was fine. Cloud nine fine. Loving life, really. I look at photos of last summer – the garden, the park, France, my kids – and I can see that my smile was genuine.

So where did it go wrong? And why?

Assuming the issues have been there all along, why did they creep up on me at a time when everything was so good?

Was it Tom’s dodgy parents’ evening?

The party that I wasn’t invited to?

The bout of sinusitis that wiped me out?

This is what I need to unpack next. How I could have gone from so good to the worst I’ve ever felt, so quickly and for no apparent or immediate reason? Why did it have to happen when I was so up?

And you know – it scares me. Because if I can plummet so suddenly from probably the highest point in my life, how can I be confident I can ever recover? I’m medicated and in therapy and still, still, my smile feels so strained. I can’t sleep. My nerves are in threads, my heart races and self-harm is always on my mind.

What if this is the way I have to live from now on?

What if this is it?