A dormant blog ready to be revived. The last time I wrote on here I was someone who had suffered crippling depression in the past. Now I am someone who knows that this is something I will always live with. Learning this makes for a long story, and I’m not sure how it will pan out, but I’m beginning with this post. As always, writing helps my soul. Healing requires new understanding, putting all the pieces together in a way that makes sense again. Writing does that, as I rearrange words on the page. Kate Gross, who knew about writing, told me it would: she was right.
I will write later about what I’ve experienced since my last blog entry. But for now what matters is that I am not Josie who has depression. I am Josie who is clever, vivacious, kind and strong, and who is learning to live with depression.
‘The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances’, wrote William Styron in Darkness Visible. I would add that it kills in more ways than one. Yes, depression is a life-threatening illness. In the UK, suicide takes more lives than traffic accidents, lung disease, and AIDS: it's the second leading cause of death among 15 to 34-year-olds. And over 50% of all people who die by suicide suffer from major depression. I say this to be really clear just how dangerous an illness depression is. But it kills other things too. It kills joy, love, hope, and worst of all, it threatens to destroy knowledge of who you really are.
My depression has taken a great deal from me: opportunities, relationships, perhaps the chance to have a family, perhaps the ability to be happy, lastingly. It’s taken the ability to feel no fear – to ever really feel safe. And it’s taken so much of my time. High prices to pay, and for what? What beauty comes from an injured life?
My depression has changed me. It’s formed me, as some recombination of all my yesterdays. Can I ever be myself again? And what is that, now depression is woven into the fabric of my life? Can I ever be separate from what I’ve lived through? Or can I live with the regret of all that it’s taken from me, and accept that it’s shaped my whole life?
Or can I accept that there is some value in this? That depression has left me with wonderful people in my life, people with the wisdom and capacity to see who I am and to stick around because of that. It has given me experience of the dark without which, would I have seen the light of life quite so blindingly? My depression has left me so desperate to attack life, bend it to my will, force it to be everything it can be. How desperately I want life life life.
Andrew Solomon’s stunning atlas of depression, The Noonday Demon, begins ‘Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who can love, we must be creatures who can despair.’ I am both of these.
Later: depression ‘degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.’
Why have humans evolved to experience depression? Is it an inevitable by-product of our unique ability to think, to create – of civilisation, of language, of stories, of love songs?
The relationship between my depression, my ability to love, and my ability to recover from love is so complex that I haven’t been able to unwind it. I have a heart-breaking power of feeling within me, passion and pain and it’s all wrapped together inside me. Chronic depression is a deadly dulling of feeling, but when it solidifies into the acute it suddenly becomes the opposite: a sharpening to total exposure. A protective shell gone, until I simply can’t hold all the hurt of the world inside me.
I’m a bit intense because I feel everything, the dial is just turned up. And this makes some people uncomfortable. Women aren’t supposed to be intense. We’re supposed to play it cool and pretend we’ve got it together. We’re not supposed to need. We’re meant to chill out.
It's hard not being easy. If it's the quirks and the bruises and the kinks that are our most interesting parts, who sees this?
I took an implicit association test, moving on from interestedly testing my unconscious biases regarding race, gender, disability to testing how I unconsciously view myself. I found I strongly associated myself with ‘sad’. But I don’t want that. It’s not me. I don’t want people to see sharpness and neediness and closedness and think these things are me. I don't want to come across as someone damaged or spikey or cold. I am so afraid of becoming a hard and brittle and bitter person. I want to say to the world and to myself that I am not these things. I want to be authentically transparent and happy in my own skin. I want to be someone who can walk into a room and bring a feeling of ease, humour and warmth with them. I am grateful for people who can see this is really who I am, but they shouldn't have to see deep like this.
Understanding mental health seems to most people to mean understanding how fragile it makes people. That totally misses the truth. I want the world to be able to see how strong I am. Managing resilience is an official professional competency at my work. I excel at it, but lots wouldn't think so, and I find that hard.
Nothing is ever broken – that’s the philosophy behind Kintsugi, the Japanese art of precious scars. It’s the art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, making something imperfect more beautiful for it. I find it hard trying to understand how I can be simultaneously both so tough, forced through years of toughening, and yet so delicate: strong as anything but in danger of shattering if caught at the wrong angle.
Rebuilding of the self from depression requires time, insight, and love. Once I begin to recover, I do so with new eyes. I notice energy and I bounce with the thrill of it. It's amazing when I feel happy. I feel light and I smile and I can do anything. I want to run and I want to fly. I don’t want to realise that it’s a long slow process.
Kindness helps. Matt Haig, in Reasons to Stay Alive, talks of kindness as an active way in which we can see and feel the bigger picture, knowing that we are not the only person who matters in the world. He’s right too.
I will write later about what I’ve experienced since my last blog entry. But for now what matters is that I am not Josie who has depression. I am Josie who is clever, vivacious, kind and strong, and who is learning to live with depression.
‘The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances’, wrote William Styron in Darkness Visible. I would add that it kills in more ways than one. Yes, depression is a life-threatening illness. In the UK, suicide takes more lives than traffic accidents, lung disease, and AIDS: it's the second leading cause of death among 15 to 34-year-olds. And over 50% of all people who die by suicide suffer from major depression. I say this to be really clear just how dangerous an illness depression is. But it kills other things too. It kills joy, love, hope, and worst of all, it threatens to destroy knowledge of who you really are.
My depression has taken a great deal from me: opportunities, relationships, perhaps the chance to have a family, perhaps the ability to be happy, lastingly. It’s taken the ability to feel no fear – to ever really feel safe. And it’s taken so much of my time. High prices to pay, and for what? What beauty comes from an injured life?
My depression has changed me. It’s formed me, as some recombination of all my yesterdays. Can I ever be myself again? And what is that, now depression is woven into the fabric of my life? Can I ever be separate from what I’ve lived through? Or can I live with the regret of all that it’s taken from me, and accept that it’s shaped my whole life?
Or can I accept that there is some value in this? That depression has left me with wonderful people in my life, people with the wisdom and capacity to see who I am and to stick around because of that. It has given me experience of the dark without which, would I have seen the light of life quite so blindingly? My depression has left me so desperate to attack life, bend it to my will, force it to be everything it can be. How desperately I want life life life.
Andrew Solomon’s stunning atlas of depression, The Noonday Demon, begins ‘Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who can love, we must be creatures who can despair.’ I am both of these.
Later: depression ‘degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.’
Why have humans evolved to experience depression? Is it an inevitable by-product of our unique ability to think, to create – of civilisation, of language, of stories, of love songs?
The relationship between my depression, my ability to love, and my ability to recover from love is so complex that I haven’t been able to unwind it. I have a heart-breaking power of feeling within me, passion and pain and it’s all wrapped together inside me. Chronic depression is a deadly dulling of feeling, but when it solidifies into the acute it suddenly becomes the opposite: a sharpening to total exposure. A protective shell gone, until I simply can’t hold all the hurt of the world inside me.
I’m a bit intense because I feel everything, the dial is just turned up. And this makes some people uncomfortable. Women aren’t supposed to be intense. We’re supposed to play it cool and pretend we’ve got it together. We’re not supposed to need. We’re meant to chill out.
It's hard not being easy. If it's the quirks and the bruises and the kinks that are our most interesting parts, who sees this?
I took an implicit association test, moving on from interestedly testing my unconscious biases regarding race, gender, disability to testing how I unconsciously view myself. I found I strongly associated myself with ‘sad’. But I don’t want that. It’s not me. I don’t want people to see sharpness and neediness and closedness and think these things are me. I don't want to come across as someone damaged or spikey or cold. I am so afraid of becoming a hard and brittle and bitter person. I want to say to the world and to myself that I am not these things. I want to be authentically transparent and happy in my own skin. I want to be someone who can walk into a room and bring a feeling of ease, humour and warmth with them. I am grateful for people who can see this is really who I am, but they shouldn't have to see deep like this.
Understanding mental health seems to most people to mean understanding how fragile it makes people. That totally misses the truth. I want the world to be able to see how strong I am. Managing resilience is an official professional competency at my work. I excel at it, but lots wouldn't think so, and I find that hard.
Nothing is ever broken – that’s the philosophy behind Kintsugi, the Japanese art of precious scars. It’s the art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, making something imperfect more beautiful for it. I find it hard trying to understand how I can be simultaneously both so tough, forced through years of toughening, and yet so delicate: strong as anything but in danger of shattering if caught at the wrong angle.
Rebuilding of the self from depression requires time, insight, and love. Once I begin to recover, I do so with new eyes. I notice energy and I bounce with the thrill of it. It's amazing when I feel happy. I feel light and I smile and I can do anything. I want to run and I want to fly. I don’t want to realise that it’s a long slow process.
Kindness helps. Matt Haig, in Reasons to Stay Alive, talks of kindness as an active way in which we can see and feel the bigger picture, knowing that we are not the only person who matters in the world. He’s right too.