Depression Squared: Living the Fairytale
We are all drawn to a story with a happy ending. We like to believe that the ups follow the downs, that luck is alive and kicking, that merit will always find its reward. I have delayed writing this in hope that my own fairy tale will somehow emerge from the messiness of real life. It hasn’t.
It is more than a year since I began to share the story of my journey through Depression, a story which has already consumed years of my life. I wanted to give a true picture of what this often unmentionable illness looks like from the inside. I wanted to try to help myself to move on from what had happened to me and to journey on to the happy-lands of the future. By sharing my experiences I wanted to dilute their strength, to make them history, and to leave them behind. But in real life it doesn’t seem to work so neatly.
In the months of silence I have been able to start to live again a little, in small ways. I got behind the wheel of a car. I have celebrated with friends as their children got married. I have taught myself to cook again. I have started to tackle the corners of the house that have got out of control. I have tried to use the time that I have been given with the energy that I can find in order to share once again in the lives of my family and friends.
But the road back to the everyday only stretches so far. One sunny day I woke up to feel a breath of cold air run through me, and as day followed day I watched myself slipping back once again, able to do less and less as I spiralled towards what has become an all too familiar despair.
I sit writing this looking out at a view I know too well: The inside of a hospital department where I’ve been forced to return to attempt to move forward again. I try to believe the doctors when they tell me that I’m higher up the downward slope than in the past, but the drag down towards the bottom still needs fighting every single day, shutting out alternatives, sapping the energy to do other things, including connecting with those around me.
In the time I have been away, the hospital ward has not stood still. The bathrooms have been rebuilt; there are new plants on the patient terrace; the artworks on display have been replaced — although I spot one surviving sketch of mine from the last visit. There are new patients and staff. I welcome the friendly faces, who are unsurprised to see me back. Looping in and out of hospital is par for the course, they assure me.
One face is missing. He was in hospital every time I passed through the doors. We did not talk but would smile shyly in acknowledgement of each other. His face was creased although he was not an old man, and he only ever managed a half a smile. He was a talented artist, and also a human being overcome with pain. He seemed entirely alone, and no visitor ever came for him. He went through electric shock therapy repeatedly, but for him the effects did not last. No one discusses it, but I heard on the patient grapevine that in the time that I was away he took his life. I understand how he could have decided enough was enough.
It’s important not to give up, I hear again and again. It is just a case of looking at yourself and your circumstances differently. And I sit through conversations which aim to do just that. But to be in a war with yourself each day, to wait from morning to night to get to a point where oblivion can take over, can sometimes simply be too much. Four years of illness, and my memories have been stripped away, my brain turns only slowly when it works at all, my social skills are no longer intuitive, my proportions have changed and my appearance altered, all of it because of the endless war with Depression.
In lighter moments I dream of an exit to the sunny lands where Depression will be a monster left behind in the past. I take the pills and the other treatments on offer, trying to be the best student or patient I can be, hoping that by exercising the skills that have brought me success elsewhere I can somehow succeed here.
But it doesn’t work like that. Time after time I have hoped to escape, and time after time I have come back to hospitalisation. Meanwhile life passes on by. Talk of options goes quiet. They have, finally, run out, and there are no alternatives left.
I try to accept what is now reality: That there is no end, only times that are relatively better, and others when I need to knock on the hospital doors again. We all grow out of fairytales, even if a part of us prefers to believe in a world in which they are true.
