dawn of the black sun
May 1st 2009, 3:44 pm
I’m depressed.
Not the ‘feeling a bit down in the dumps’ type, though. No, I’ve got the whole works which this time round has been veering wildly between paralysing hyper-anxiety and doom-laden lethargy with matching panic attack and screaming ab-dab accessories. At least that’s how I was 10 days ago until I left work one day and didn’t go back; at that point it was really bad and I had difficulty dealing with simple everyday things, like talking to people. Or being near them.
Now, in this enforced absence from my 9-to-5 job, my head has levelled out to a certain extent and the physical symptoms have pretty much disappeared. Not entirely though, and it’s only in the vacuum of not having to do anything that my stress levels have subsided to reasonably manageable levels. I’ve managed to avoid medication so far and that’s how I’d like it to stay; I came sorely close at one point last week and was all set to get a prescription from my GP but I want to handle this without resorting to pills.
In my head though, that’s a different story. Taking work out of the equation has helped take a huge amount of pressure off myself but the basic problems are still there. I can feel them even now, squirming around inside my brain like a bag of puff adders, whispering dark thoughts into my inner ear. And I’m worried – worried a lot – about what will happen when, inevitably, I go back to the office. It doesn’t take much to set me off at the moment and I’m scared that my ability to function in any kind of work environment has completely evaporated.
But I didn’t want to be writing this. I’d rather be writing something more creative, like a short story or a radio script (or at least I’m kidding myself I’ll get round to doing them one day soon), but there are so many voices shouting for attention just now that I literally can’t hear myself think. I’m hoping that by exorcising at least some of the demons broiling inside me, I might be able to have the mental capacity to do something else.
I’m getting ahead of myself, though. I’ve had depression a few times (or ‘black dog‘ as Winston Churchill apparently called his affliction. Appropriate, but given my interest in cosmology and science fiction, I think ‘the black sun’ would be more up my street), although not at this magnitude since 1998. I like to think I’ve been pretty clean since then, but there have been a few isolated, short-lived incidents which fortunately didn’t last long. It was only during that instance 11 years ago (and what a drawn-out and painful process that was) when I realised it was depression and was able to get some help. I’d been miserable on and off before that (more on than off, sadly) and it’s only now that I realise I must have been suffering from depression for years before that, even since I was a teenager. Or maybe earlier. From this distance it’s hard to tell, but I remember experiencing a lot of the same symptoms I see now – extreme tension, a physical inability to speak, a sense of complete and utter worthlessness – so I’m fairly confident in my self-diagnosis.
Possibly it’s hereditary. My dad suffered for many years – usually in silence, so even my mum didn’t know – and while his was a more extreme bi-polar situation (perhaps it got to that state because he didn’t have treatment until his mid-50s), I’m inclined to think there’s something that’s been passed down. Whether it’s genetic or I picked up certain behavioural traits from him, however, I’ll probably never know.
And I guess I thought maybe I’d seen it off after the last severe bout, that I had become stronger and more resilient to the crap life keeps coming up with. But I guess not, and it’s been a shock to realise it’s still inside me, that I can’t cope with life’s crap, that the buttresses and supports I erected before the turn of the century have all but crumbled away.
So I’ve been seeing a therapist. I’ve only had a couple of sessions and it doesn’t feel like anything inside me has changed yet but it’s early days and it’s good to talk (even though he says ‘It sound like you’ve been having a really tough time’ and I think ‘You must say that to everyone’). Even though I’ve had counselling before, I went through a period a few weeks ago (after I’d painfully acknowledged that all was not well and I needed some help) of being shit-scared. It was irrational, I know (and when you’re dealing with depression, what isn’t?), but I was worried about what might be unearthed. Not false memories of abuse, nothing like that, but truths about myself I’m not facing up to, and the damage they might do to my relationships with other people.
But how things change because now it doesn’t feel like a session once a week is enough. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the stuff I want to talk about and I’m worried I’m going to forget something, something that will come and bite me in a few years time because I haven’t dealt with it this time round. There are a couple of factors – namely lack of confidence and self-esteem – which underpin everything else, but their tentacles are wrapped around so many aspects of my life (pretty much everything, I guess), warping them into so many distinct variations on a theme that at the moment, it’s one big ball of tangled, knotted wire in my head. It feels like it will take some time to unpick and work through, so hopefully writing things down will help the process. Maybe I’ll even put it on my barely-used blog – I find it extremely difficult to talk about what’s going on inside my noggin so perhaps putting it out into the public domain will get things flowing. Stephen Fry has practically made a career out of it (or at least one facet of his gargantuan polymath career, which would equate to one normal-sized career for anyone else), although I can feel the fear-fuelled indecision mounting already. I mean, what if anyone actaully (gasp) read it…
[Looks like I managed to overcome that little hurdle.]
