Depression Squared: Shades of Grey Revisited

There is no single day when you wake up and “feel better” from Depression. But some combination of tablets, treatment, and time does work for most people, including me.

Some things are learned — like trying to accept rather than fight the state you are in and the limitations it imposes. Others somehow just happen, and you catch up with yourself and notice that a tiny ray of hope has somehow crept into your messed up thinking, and spreads a warmer glow where once there was only darkness.

It becomes a roller coaster ride, of better days when life again of some sort seems possible, and worse, when that overwhelming sadness fills you up once again. But tiny step by tiny step, things shift. Until the worst days feel like a distant memory, and the new worst days are infinitely better than the old.

If only there were a magic formula to get there, or a recipe to stay there. There isn’t, but when progress starts it gathers its own inexorable momentum. Extreme despair retreats, and with it the carelessness of the self and others, and the lack of interest in all around you. Instead at first there is guilt and shame, and then these give way slowly to a sense of kindness and compassion for the self. It is possible to see the wreck that you have become and to start on the slow task of repairing body and soul.

There are no shortcuts — unfortunately. But being held in the safety net of a treatment programme forces a first stage of acceptance of being ill, and gives the time and space to start rebuilding. There is no effective way to hurry things, no certain way to judge the robustness of recovery, and passing through treatment too quickly can often see you back in care after only a short time on the outside.

It is difficult to choose life when everything is screaming the opposite, and it’s not clear that anyone actively chooses the darkness of depression in the first place. But I believe that you can choose to listen to, and to nurture, the initially tiny impulses for change, and to build the fire which can carry you out.

I say all this as someone still on the journey, all too aware of the limits of my control. The deepest of depths have started to feel distant, while the smooth sunny uplands are some way off. I cannot wish myself better any more than I willed my illness. So instead I do what I can: I try to ignore the darker thoughts, I keep myself busy, I take the tablets, I participate willingly in the treatment programme available to me. And I can hope that all that will continue to carry me forward, even at a snail’s pace, while trying to accept the bumps in the road.

It’s not easy to reclaim a life, or to find a new one, accepting that you may never again achieve what you had before. Depression doesn’t always stop. Sometimes it just becomes background and you are forced to accept that you may carry some level of illness and disability for the rest of your life.

I wake each morning to renew the fight, and there are still days when I count through the hours until I can legitimately give up and crawl into bed. But there are also days when I catch myself doing something new and notice it and remember how things used to be, before the clouds of Depression came down.

I see people leave treatment, strengthened enough to pick up meaningful lives again, and from time to time I hear news of people who didn’t make it. And so it started and so it ends in shades of grey. Only at this time, sometimes, the grey is translucent and almost pearl like, hanging a veil in front of the view, but still allowing me to catch a glimpse of what there may be beyond, where I hope to make it someday.