I read this quote the other day and it absolutely hit the nail on the head in terms of how I’m feeling at the moment:
‘Although I was still shaky, I knew I had emerged into light. I felt myself no longer a husk but a body.’
— William Styron, Darkness Visible.
The few days either side of New Year were really difficult as I reflected on the awful, awful experiences of the year just gone and looked ahead to the new one with trepidation; for a brief while, I felt pretty out of control, and slipped up with the self-harming.
But on the whole, I do feel like I’m mostly walking in the light again now. The past two days, in particular, I’ve woken up feeling okay – rather than being engulfed by a sense of dread as soon as I opened my eyes. And the way I feel in the morning often seems to set the tone for the day ahead.
The main difficulty at the moment seems to be the hangover that it’s all left me with. I’m intensely aware at the moment of feeling like a bit of a freak, the weird one in the corner, the one that no one really knows how to relate to. Depression is like this huge elephant in the room and nobody wants to mention it – even if I’m okay with mentioning it myself.
Why is it? Is it the stigma? I’m trying hard not to be ashamed of it, and to treat it like any other illness (no one would stigmatise me if I had a broken leg), but it’s not easy when other people want to avert their eyes and change the subject. It makes me feel like I *should* be ashamed of it, and by definition, of myself.
Is it that people are worried that if they talk about it they’ll somehow trigger me, set me off again? I’ll admit that some things *are* triggering – I had a hard time watching the suicide scenes on this week’s Silent Witness – but if I’ve brought the subject up, that means I’m okay with talking about it.
Is it that I’m just a bit too messy, too raw? That I don’t fit into the nice little Christian mum box? Even when we’re praying at Bible study, I sense that people don’t want to pray aloud for me. Maybe I’m reading something into the situation that isn’t there, but I detect a caginess, an unwillingness to call a spade a spade (or depression depression…), everyone hoping that someone else will pray it so they don’t have to.
I don’t know. I know I’m far from the only one in this position; mental health stigma is rife and as a nation, we are so far from comfortable in talking about it. It just makes life kind of difficult because – having tried to conceal my depression for so long – opening up about it was a big step, but despite everyone’s positivity when I did, it still feels like I shouldn’t talk about it.
I feel obliged to keep quiet, keep laughing, pretend that it doesn’t matter – when in fact it’s still a massive part of my life and, even though I feel fairly well at the moment, has left its mark on me and shaped who I am forever.
It would just be nice if people could say, ‘How are you feeling?’ and actually be willing for me to tell them honestly.
Lucy's Depression Diary 