Living with Depression II

It’s been more than a year since I wrote a piece about my experience of life with depression and, to be honest, it painted a fairly bleak picture of existence but, to be honest again, at that time my existence was pretty bleak. Since then the world has moved on and so have I. My circumstances have changed, not completely, but quite considerably. And I feel like I’m finally on the up.

One reason for this is probably my medication. I’ve been on a stable dosage for well over a year and I have been more or less stable in that time. Mental health medication usually subdues your emotions so the benefit is fewer serious downturns in mood – I don’t really have periods longer than a couple of days in what I would call ‘proper’ depression. Of course, the flip side to this is that I don’t really experience many big highs, so I tend to be on a fairly consistent level, not really depressed but not really happy at the same. In the context of my past few years, that is excellent progress. I think being in a stable place emotionally means that I can take new challenges and difficult events in stride more easily.

I’ve also been in therapy with somebody who has really helped me to consider my depression in what feels to me like a rational way. And it isn’t just about thinking of depression more rationally, but thinking of life in general more rationally too. Lots of people would probably tell you that, before the onset of my depression, I was a pretty laid back kind of a guy and that the ever changing nature of our crazy world, and the challenges we’re all presented with from all kinds of different angles, were unlikely to faze me. This attitude was taken away from me by depression and anxiety. For probably 18 months the things that I previously took for granted could seem like insurmountable challenges. Walking to the shop, going to play football, even starting conversations with friends and family were, in my mind, huge events. In itself, that presents obvious difficulties in day to day existence. For me it didn’t just provoke these ‘surface level’ challenges, but also more deeply rooted ones. This, I now think, is why it has taken such a long time for me to really feel like I’m becoming myself again. Being somebody you don’t really identify as you constitutes a real existential crisis – as cliched as that feels to say. And for a long time I didn’t realise this was what was happening to me. Not only was almost anything incredibly difficult to even think about (never mind do) but it was such a massive change in the core of my personality that I couldn’t, in any meaningful way, understand what was happening to me.

Through therapy I have become much more clear minded about what the challenges I face are, and how my depression had really taken my knowledge of my self away from me. Now I can think about myself as something other than depression. I’m a man with ambitions again. I have passion for the things I had passion for three years ago. I hate Donald Trump, I hate Brexit and I hate Sheffield United. I love playing football, I love comedy, language, writing. I can identify things that matter deeply to me and, perhaps even more importantly, I can take a step back and understand the things that don’t matter and the things I can’t control and I understand that is ok.

The past happened, my depression happened and is still happening, although to a lesser extent recently, and it is something I will always remember, but that doesn’t mean I should dwell on it. Recently I have made a conscious effort to look forward to what might be to come. To carry the weight of my past mental illness into the future is a waste of energy that could instead be focused on something else. Dwelling on the past gives you less time to think about the present and the future – and that’s where the real fun is. From therapy I have learned to accept that I can’t be in control of everything – I can’t stop Donald Trump being a turmeric covered international incident waiting to happen and I can’t change other people’s decisions and opinions (although I like to think I’m very influential) and that is ok. If you can’t control events and outcomes why spend time wondering about whether you could, or how you could. I have also learnt through my therapy another obvious yet somewhat elusive truth – the past is gone.

Of course, it is good to look back, to learn lessons and to smile about good times but the past can have a power over us that it doesn’t warrant and hasn’t earned. We are often pulled towards over-analysing what has gone before but if we do that we make ourselves feel worse in the present and likely make the future seem a scarier place. My outlook on life now is vastly different to what it was a year ago and considerably different to what it has ever been. I try to look forwards as much as possible, to take the best available course of action to make my present, my future or myself better without being beholden to past events and feelings. I owe a lot of this to having therapy, and to my therapist.

In fact, I would recommend therapy to everybody. To really think about your outlook on life, to analyse who you is can be a really liberating and enlightening experience.

Depression is such a difficult thing to deal with because it is so hard to understand. It eats at the very central tenets of your being and takes over your personality. It drains you of energy and ambition and fun and love and leaves you feeling like an empty vessel. It is often said that we should treat mental ill health in the manner we treat physical ill health – a broken leg or a torn ligament. This, in my humble opinion, is bullshit. They are very separate things. It’s like saying we should treat a broken leg like we treat cancer, or we should treat diabetes in the same way we treat tooth decay. Of course there are universals like funding, training relevant medical professionals and the fact that all healthcare should be a universal right (cough Guernsey cough), but putting a cast on a brain tumour probably isn’t productive. Mental health illnesses present vastly different problems than do physical injuries or diseases and to say that we should treat these things the same is a criminal oversimplification. We need to treat mental ill health with compassion and understanding – two commodities currently very scarce. We need to treat mental ill health on its merit, not how we treat something else.

I understand the sentiment that we should view mental illnesses as just as important as physical illnesses, and I’m in complete agreement with that. But we shouldn’t treat depression like a broken leg because they are different things – we should treat depression like depression; the cruel, debilitating, confusing, vindictive, mess of an illness it is.

Thankfully it feels like I’m coming out the other side of my experience of depression and anxiety. There is a cliche along the lines of

I wouldn’t change the bad experience I’ve been through because I’ve learned from it.

While I would never say I wouldn’t change my experience of mental illness – quite frankly I’d kick it in the dick and have never experienced it if I could – I have learned a lot about who I am, who I want to be, what I love and what I hate and everything in between.

I hope this piece comes across as generally positive. It is hard to find the positives from two and a half years of quite crippling depression but I am doing all I can to do just that. I’m trying to focus on the future. I’m moving back to the Sheffield area in November and it will be a fresh start for me and I’m excited to see what the future has in store.

My parting thought will be this: the future can seem dark and opaque but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We tend to think of the unknown as scary and we treat it with trepidation. What I’ve been trying to do, and what I think has been really helpful to me over the past few months, is to embrace the future, to embrace the unknown as the almost infinite web of possibilities it presents. I don’t know where I see myself in a year, in five years, in ten years or in fifty years and I think that’s great – how boring life would be if we knew what was going to happen. The past is full of enough darkness, enough difficulty for me. I’m determined that the future won’t be.

There’s a Child in The White House

The world is a wacky place right now, and it seems like a large number of us aren’t even aware of the extent of the craziness. Either that or things have been getting crazier and crazier and, like when you’re outside when it goes dark, we haven’t noticed it happening and now suddenly it’s pitch black and we can’t find our way home.

The so called ‘Leader of the Free World’ is a third-rate comic supervillain who’s origin story is an explosion in a turmeric factory. He tweets (about not to) world leaders in all caps to show them that he’s a big boy not to be messed with because he himself does not mess around with those POXY LITTLE LETTERS. It’s easy to imagine the tango clown in important presidential meetings sticking his fingers in his ears, and going lalalalala i can’t hear you when somebody says something he doesn’t like. It’s often said that the world would be a better place if leaders had the mindset of children – I put it to you that we currently have a 72 year-old man-child holding the most powerful office in the world and it is going far from swimmingly.

It seems that every day Trump is doing something ever more thick-headed, almost as if he’s trying to prove what a colossal mess he is. He said, standing next to Vladimir Putin, “I don’t see any reason why it would be Russia” meddling in US elections, going against all the information obtained and presented to him by the US’s own intelligence agencies, instead choosing to accept Putin’s word that he didn’t do it at face value. Trump believed what he was told as if Putin, had he sanctioned election tampering would, like he had just been found in a game of hide and seek, have said you got me! well done Donny.

And, like you when you were eight, Trump tried to make up for his wrongdoing by telling a little lie – saying that, actually, he made a whoopsie and meant to say wouldn’t, not would. In my experience, it’s very unlikely that, if I mean wouldn’t, I would say would and, if I did, I would most likely correct myself rather than carry on as if nothing had happened. If someone asked me if I would like a cup of tea and I wasn’t thirsty I can say with almost 100% certainty I wouldn’t accidentally say ‘I would’. In the bizarre event that I forgot how to say the word in my mind and instead said a different one, I certainly would not just leave it be, let my friend make me a cup of tea, force myself to drink it and then the next day say to them that, actually, I didn’t want that cup of tea but accidentally said I would like it, rather than I wouldn’t. That’s one of the great things about speaking, you can correct yourself as you go, you don’t have to proof-listen to what you’ve said, then get your mum to also proof-listen to spot any errors your proof-listening missed before you submit your speech for the rest of the world to see.

So we are left with three possible, and, rather inconceivably, almost equally likely reasons for Trump saying would instead of wouldn’t:

1. Trump was scared to say, in front of Vladimir Putin, that he thought Russia had meddled in a US election, so said would instead of wouldn’t, on purpose, out of fear that Putin would either wrestle him to the ground or poison him in a small UK town.

2. Trump actually believed Putin, so said would on purpose. White House staff were horrified, and, after ten minutes of trump yelling lalalala I can’t hear you with his fingers in his what I can only assume are disgustingly waxy ears, they convinced him first to wash his hands and secondly, that he really needed to backtrack on what he said because it might not go down that well back home.

3. Trump is actually still learning the English language, in keeping with previous evidence that he is actually six years old, and he hasn’t quite learned the proper way to negate his sentences and he made a mistake. Unfortunately the mistake was in a press conference in front of the world and not in his bedroom where one of his mummies (mothers not long dead ancient Egyptians covered in bandages) in his staff could correct him saying ‘that’s right Donny, I don’t see any reason why it would not be Russia either.

As I said above, my inclination is towards number 2. That Trump believed Putin when he said he didn’t do it, and after his speech was told by many of his staff that, actually, that was a stupid thing to say, and Donny, you fucked up and now you need to sort this mess out. So Trump resorted to something he has been so keen (so keen (so keen)) to avoid since he started running for President – fake news. Or, in plain English – he lied.

This is just the latest in a long string of childlike behaviour and childlike thinking for Señor Trump ( I bet he loves being called that). Without getting into debating the premise that immigration is bad (it’s not), Trump’s bright idea to stop those pesky Mexicans getting into America to improve their lives (how dare they) was, yes, to build a wall. If that isn’t evidence of a simple mind desperately coughing and spluttering it’s way into action, desperate to work just for a little while like your Grandma’s car the one time a year she takes it out, then I don’t know what is.

So it seems we live in a world where a man displaying all the attributes of a child, right down to his tiny hands, can come to hold the highest office in the most powerful country in the world. There is a long list of reasons why this happened, from his appealing to people’s worst instincts with his policies to corporate funding in American politics to the justified unease people feel towards the way our world is heading.

But it’s always good to laugh about things like this because, if we can’t see the humour in this frankly ludicrous charade, then we’d all be very miserable – and that’s coming from a man with depression and anxiety.

The World Cup: My Experience of Supporting England

England are in a World Cup semi-final. I can’t believe I’m ~~saying~~ typing that. Only once in my lifetime have I been able to say we’ve got to the semi-final of any major tournament – in 1996 when I was 2 – and when I said it then it probably sounded similar to how I said it after arguably too many drinks on Saturday night.

Supporting England at this World Cup has been a joy. Watching the team in a pub full of friends and strangers all hoping for the same result is a magical feeling. To share the euphoria of England’s first penalty shootout win at a World Cup with everybody singing and drinking was incredible. The power to unify massive groups of people for 90 minutes is rare and it is special.

It is safe to assume that the people in the pub with me when England played Colombia would not agree with me on Brexit, on feminism, on local and global politics, on Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, on whether Coldplay are any good and on how they like their steak cooked, or even if they think eating steak is ok in the first place. But for 90 minutes none of that mattered because England were playing at the World Cup, and we all really, really wanted them to win.

When Eric Dier’s penalty went in and England won, beer and cider went up the walls and on the ceiling and on the floor and on everybody, questionable 7 minute chants about German Bombers being shot down reverberated throughout the room and grown men gathered in what can only be described as a giant, multi man royal rumble of a hug to celebrate a historic moment.

These moments are, of course, better celebrated with others. Being in a pub for the football is like being in the audience for a comedy show. You can completely immerse yourself in the atmosphere, share the amplified emotions with your peers and be free to experience the moment to the fullest.

Whatever happens on Wednesday, this World Cup has been excellent. To see people so unified in what they want is a reminder that there is something out there that unites us all, whether it’s a love of football or a love of Scrubs, and these things are worth celebrating, even if we only do it once every 4 years.