I Got That Summertime, Summertime Sadness: Fragments of Two Weeks of Severe Depression

This blog post is a fragmentary group of paragraphs that don't hang together. That's because I'm not 
hanging together very well. I could use a number of similes or metaphors to describe it.

Oh my God, I feel it in the air, telephone wires above, are sizzling...

I am a bag of marbles (I haven't lost them) that are clacking against each other noisily and awkwardly and painfully. I am a collection of smiles and tears and laughter and sleeping and wakefulness. I am lost. I am feeling nothing. I am feeling too much. I still am...but what I am I cannot say...

Here are some fragments. This is what I wrote last week, and below that what I wrote before.

Last week - Friday 14th August, 6:38 pm

This week was one of the worst that I've had over the last two years - nearly two years since I have been back in the UK and supposedly back to normality. It makes me sad to write that sentence, knowing that just over a year ago I came out of hospital and was filled with being rested, re-educated about the things I can do to support myself, and understanding what my 'rights' were as an individual, even if I couldn't define them for myself, and found it impossible to say what I needed at any level.

This week my husband went back to work and we gave up our enjoyable daily routine of working in our two different bedrooms/studies and 'not talking' but 'being' together in our one dwelling. I still work from home quite a bit, but have to try and find a balance between being in the office to feel connected to my colleagues and like I have a place in the world outside, and being at home so I don't have to see anyone, to feel disconnected from the world outside.

While I'm at home I stay with all of the usual trappings that entails: running (maybe, if I can get up and make myself do it), juicing, (on a good day, and if I hadn't broken my juicer like I did yesterday), making a list for the day (so that I can compartmentalise the tasks into small, manageable chunks and prevent myself from feeling overwhelmed by the entire picture by tackling one thing at a time) and then working through that list and postponing decisions on anything else until I reach the end of the day so that I can ensure that I reach the end of the day and then can do whatever I need to to feel safe, protected, and free from worry.

This week I couldn't cope. One of the things that I am most susceptible to with depression is the fact that I have developed over my entire life an inability to cope with separation from others. My subconscious (i.e. the bit of me that makes the decisions about how I'll feel about anything, which the rational me doesn't get a say in) smashes the alarm glass and sets off the sirens when I'm left alone by people who are a supportive presence in my life. Whether for this or for other reasons, I crashed back into full scale depressive symptoms:

• Waking up at 4 am without a hope of getting back to sleep because the 'On' button in my brain is stuck down permanently
• Loss of interest in doing anything other than making it through the day, in a haze of numbness where I can't feel anything
• Loss of appetite, so that even the nicest freshly-baked chocolate chip cookie might as well be cardboard going into my mouth
• Short term memory: I'm writing absolutely everything down because I can't remember what I'm saying. I frequently lose my thread mid sentence and can't get to the end of it without having to be reminded what I was saying in the first place.
• Low frustration tolerance. I cried in anger when I couldn't get the zip done up on one of my dresses. I was enraged when I dropped a plastic food box on the floor which meant I had to clean it. I felt inexplicably irritated when I realised we had run out of loo roll. 

And, for the last one, I cried and cried and cried about the fact that I was back down the rabbit hole of depression, with the medication and therapies that have been helping me to recover feeling like worthless placebos (which rationally I know they're not) and I cried because I was still alive feeling like this and there might never be an end to it.

Thursday 20^th August, 4:27pm.

I suppose I’m still alive, but …ugh what cost? At the cost of feeling absolutely crap most of the time at the moment. I hate to say that but the next thirty years don’t feel so great. Is there really any point?

I went to hospital last week and confessed I spent at least four days out of seven wanting to be dead. They worried about me and offered admission, which I didn't want, advised me to take extra sedatives, which I felt wasn't that helpful- feeling like "Let's keep her alive by making her even more numb to the world outside". That's not living in my book.

Yes, there is a point, I know, rationally, that it must be so. But I am still all of the above, numb, frustrated, short tempered, sick of it all. I might be useful at work and get through each day with projects on track and employees supported, but I come home or leave work and I feel empty. I have nothing much left for the evening except to feed myself and then sleep. I can manage to eat (although I don’t have an appetite). I can manage to talk a little with Mat (though I lose track of what I’m saying and don’t feel I have a good grip on what’s going on in the world or that I have anything interesting to say). I can perhaps write a few tweets, respond to a couple of texts, and try to stay connected to the outside world.

Unraveling and trying to keep it together at the same time

Saturday 2nd August, 07:28am

I'm up and ready in my running gear for the park run. I've carried on doing what I can through this - I've kept going to work (from home a few days and in the office some days). This is to combine the need to hide my tear-stained face from the world at times and my need to get out there and show myself to jog myself a little back into the norms of the day and try and feel something other than nothing as I do it. I've kept running every day, and although I cried (again. So much crying these last two weeks) in anger because I managed to fall on a rainy morning and injure my elbow again, as well as develop impressive bruises all over and not be able to run the 5 miles I was planning, I didn't actually break it x-ray confirmed) so I can go and do the park run this morning. 

I've put my makeup on and met friends a couple of times, which was a struggle but probably did me a lot of good. And I have rested with books, with my beloved Netflix, and eaten sandwiches at 5pm to close the day, heading to bed to read at 6 and shutting out the world so I can draw that day to a close and rest before the next one. 

And I have done other things: I've recorded another interview for the BBC, written an article for Metro online (watch this space for that) and applied to go on Campaign Bootcamp, in spite of not being accepted last time. 

#spoonie 

I'm recognising that my depression makes me a #spoonie and I need to select what to do and not to do when I'm really poorly. Unfortunately my social life usually is the first to go as I want to make it through work as a semblance of a normal existence. It's my choice though, and I choose how to allocate whatever energy or mixture of numbness and feeling comes to me on any of those days.

So, yes, I am alive, and I'm carrying on. I have seen from Twitter that a lot of my Twitter friends with mental illness are also having a really bad time. I'm hoping the summertime sadness will pass. As always I recognise how lucky I am to have supportive family and friends around me, and medical professionals who want to help me get better, not get (even more) lost. I hope I can write a more together post for next week. But I'll just settle for what I can manage today for now.

Food For Thought. Life (or Life With Mental Health) is Like a Box of Chocolates... #VictoriaLIVE

It’s been a busy week in the media for mental health, which is very positive as far as I’m concerned, but also gives me pause to, well, pause, because I’ve been involving myself in many of the discussions going on and probably need to take a break and make sure I’m taking care of myself.

Monday morning was a bit like Christmas in the world of mental health, and my present was a whole one hour and a half programme on BBC two dedicated to the discussion of many aspects of mental health. If you missed it, the Victoria Derbyshire programme featured both a panel of medical experts and celebrity-come-mindfulness-expert Ruby Wax, and is available on BBC iPlayer for the next month.

Victoria and me. Unfortunately this was the one shot I got.

I look happy. She...not so much

I knew what was coming when Mind contacted me about potentially appearing. An eye wateringly) (more like eye-rubbing-ly) early start and no make-up artists to make me look like I hadn’t been up since 5. Imagine for a moment if you arrived at the airport ahead of your long haul transatlantic flight, only to find that a film crew was waiting to catch your (eye) bags and pallid, pre-holiday complexion. Now imagine that being broadcast to thousands of viewers. And now imagine that you have anxiety and depression, which manifests itself as feeling hyper self-conscious of everything about you that is visible and invisible.

Me - in taxi at 6am and on set at 8am. 

Purple and Pink Hair meets Purple set and shiny forehead

(Plus, can you tell I'm depressed? See, I am, but you can't tell...)

I talk about my experience. And am shiny. You can watch the full show here:

Oh, the fun we had! 80 people with some kind of lived experience of mental health, lined up in the BBC café area (not open), drinking coffee, tea and eating chocolate biscuits. I like drinking juice as much as the next person, but there’s nothing like an instant shot of cheap chocolate covered refined sugar.

The master biscuit. I salute you.

Following that, I also contributed to a forthcoming Buzzfeed article – watch this space for that – and also then attended a workshop with @LatimerGroup to discuss ideas for a new advert for Time To Change. It’s so good to meet people who do and don’t have lived experiences of mental health and share our ideas for what would work as a concept to help people to seek help or just find out a bit about what mental health means.

It has been a great week for mental health, but I felt down as early as Tuesday and at that point I knew I had to make adjustments to make things work. I felt tired on Tuesday morning so benefited once again from my “reasonable adjustments” at work, choosing to work my full day from home instead of in the office, which helps me avoid a three hour roundtrip commute. I took a 1 hour thirty minute lunch break so I could have a midday nap.

(Note, this is against doctor’s orders, I’m not really meant to nap during the day.) I got to the end of the day. I got to my workshop, despite still feeling tired and starting to feel low because of the tiredness added to the things that make me sad from time to time – loneliness, stress, negative thoughts about friends, hating my body, hating my stupid illness, and so on. Love the thought process of depression. Really I do. I made it back in time for bed and slept. (And I had eaten four sliced of Domino’s for dinner. Carbs help with sleep. But if you’re reading this for health tips for eating, this is not the post for you!)

The pizza was healing.

I don't care what they say about additives.

These slices were just what I needed.

Sleep, enough medication and, yes, pizza, helped put paid to my anxiety and depressive mood in time for Wednesday, so I made it through the day with a run, full day of work, therapy, dinner and a movie (at home, though, I was pretty tired again!). And I ran again on Thursday and went into work (with cupcakes (see comment above. Not the healthiest week), had a (near) fight with a guy in IT who tried to order me around. (Note to all: this is never a good idea! Cue Jessica death stare con 5. That baby doesn’t usually emerge outside the classroom when year seven need to know to stop. To stop right now.) I had a series of good meetings (that’s because the team I work with are all so lovely) and then came home and rested again.

Mini oreo cookies. Small things come in beautiful 

(sometimes with gooey icing) packages

I have to try to take breaks even when my head is all over the place and when my body feels twitchy all over from the medication side effects or whatever else is going on. I don’t feel like doing it. I feel like stepping outside my body and outside my mind. How bad I feel changes from episode to episode, but this week I never reached the terrible place, not quite, because I was able to recognise enough in the calendar to see I really did have to stop frequently. Otherwise that terrible place might be here again. And it might come without my help, so I’ll do everything I can. And Forrest Gump’s mother was right about the box of chocolates, too, in case you’re wondering.

You said it Sally

It sounds so simple, take a break. (Have a KitKat. Oh, I don’t mind if I do!) If I’m honest, though, I’m just not good at taking breaks. I tell myself, go on, keep going, you can do it, just a bit more, just another hour, just another email, just another half a mile, just another phone call. All those “just anothers” add up to a whole lot of “too much” if I’m not careful.

Just another half a mile. Just another juice. Just another 'just'

On the flipside, I wrote an email to a good friend today where I expressed my frustrations at the things I can’t do:

“I remark on the things I still don’t do – like cooking for example – which I used to love and now find little energy left for after managing with work…”

Kind of ironic. I clearly haven't lost interest in food if this blog is anything to go by. But I reflect and I see that there are positives and negatives. Balance. It's about balance.

Details of this poem are here

I’ve said it before and I say it today: cognitive behavioural therapy is for me, in part, a constant process of trying to be more reflective and mindful of what I’m doing. It’s a double edged sword. I have to do this to get better; but doing it makes me feel terrible. If I can take joy in small things, I will. If I can notice that I got to the end of the day, feeling absolutely horrific, I still did get to the end of that day. (At this point I’d probably have buried my head in the duvet, into the pillow, having shut down the light in the room as much as I could, having cleaned all my makeup off, my mask, from my face, scrubbed my teeth so the mint taste distracts me, and having surrendered myself to bed and oblivion.)

Blurring into Oblivion

So here’s another end of the week. It was a great week for discussion on mental health. It was a terrible week for funding cuts. It was an alarming week for statistics on mental health and men’s suicide figures. It was a good week at work. It was an okay week for running. And it was a week. It was.

See you next week?

A Fat Lot of Good: January Drear and Diets

I made the catastrophic mistake of weighing myself on Monday. First day back at work and I added to that joy with a painful arm and a horrific number on the scale. And as the writer of this blog, dear reader, I choose to abstain from printing it here. Just know that I'm currently limited to a wardrobe selection of pyjama bottoms that have no elastic left in them, and a reindeer onesie I am supposed to put away after today according to Twelfth night traditions. Oh and some leggings. I am a wearer of leggings now. And giant sweaters.

Yes it's been a stellar week so far. I'm officially on a diet and I know that ahead of me I have weeks of it to come if I have a hope of shifting all the stuffing I have oh so casually stuffed myself with. And I'm delighted that the gabapentin I'm taking as well as the other pain medication and the antidepressants are such a tonic to this diet, for their potential to make people like me, who are, quite frankly, depressed enough without their help, thanks, able to help us to gain weight. It's an overused word, I know, but, frankly, and not without my classic British sarcasm: awesome. And now we add to it the fact I mentioned in my last blog: that another operation on my elbow is needed, meaning more time without being able to swim (it's not the right kind of physio) and only walking as the exercise option. Or cleaning. And let's face it, I'm not writing a blog about being a domestic goddess here. The house is tidy because I'm living mostly in bed.

So, "We get it," I hear you cry. "You're unhappy. It's January. Get over it. (Whatever the 'it' is you wanna focus on. Just get over it. Already." And okay, I should.) But really, this is the best time of year to embrace being miserable. We're all at it. I can scarcely rouse myself from my bed to turn on my laptop in the morning without my eyes moistening at the thought of work. They stayed like that all day today. Moist. Moist when I ate my Rice Krispies (being carefully calculated as part of my get-thinner-even-though-you're-on-weight-gain-meds diet by myFitnessPal). Moist as I went for my lunchtime walk listening to Hard Times (depressing month cause for depressing literature) and moist throughout the rest of the day. Moist now.

Ugh Pills. This is what mealtimes feel like.

Why is January so hard when I can hardly tolerate Christmas and find New Year's Eve stressful too? I would have thought I'd be happy to have it over with. Perhaps it's all those additives and the hangover (both booze and booze-free) from the partaking that has left me in this sorry state. But it is a pretty sorry state. Thankfully, everyone else is miserable too, or so it seems. If August is the silly season for news, January is the dreary destination for deadly dieting and depressingly downcast outlooks. People are giving up or cutting back on the booze (me too), cutting the calories (me too) and getting on the treadmill again (not me too, worse luck). I spent most of yesterday wondering how much of my medication I could forgo for the sake of my figure (I'm an idiot. My arm hurt a lot today.)

Now I'm just saying roll on April. Which is the cruellest month, but by which time I'm hoping I won't need some kind of fat sucking device for my normal jeans to fit, and my darned elbow should be screwed firmly together and actually behaving itself. (I'm giving my body my sternest teacher-like stare.)

The only odd thing I can say amidst this depression is that I can read the most sad and haunting things at my bleakest moments, because it's not the sadness or the despair which is the worst time, it's the feeling that this will never end, and since it may never end, and there's a numbness, why not try poking myself with something really tragic. At twenty one I watched The Ice Storm in such a state. It was the perfect film to get over with while so morose. Today I am going to read a new book on depression, and think about last year when I was travelling back to New York to erase my life there. Unfortunately I think the real life element of the latter is too close to actual trauma, so I will look for fictionalised versions instead. Safer. Distant.

Not an answer to the question: "What's a happy film we can watch?"

I did talk about New York though, and being lonely there while I lived there, recently, so if you want to join me in embarking on exploration of a topic that's important, though not perhaps one to get out with the Christmas crackers or happy birthday music, you can listen to me talking at about 22 minutes in about loneliness on Five Live. They put it on at 00:00 on Boxing Day. I.e. in the small hours when we were all stuffed with turkey, it was already time to stop being cheery (or fake cheery) and start being dreary.

A Life Less Lonely, Radio Five Live

What I think we need is a #joinin for January. In fact that's it: #joininjanuary. Who can come up with the most sardonic tweet for jaundiced January? I challenge you, reader, to join me and cheer me up by telling me that your tape measure doesn't go round your waist either, and that you've got your old step out from behind the wardrobe / from the greenhouse where you were using it as a shelf for pot plants. If you've managed to slice open your finger as my friend Lucy has whilst being middle class using a mandolin (it's a dangerous way to live, the middle class life) or similar, then #joininjanuary. And by the way, I'm still eating a few nice things on my diet hoping not to fall off the wagon before the pounds fall off first. So thanks, Marks and Spencer, for keeping your Extremely Chocolately Roll in stock. I may only have a sliver, but it's enough to make my eyes water. In a good way.

Darkness Visible, and the Black Dog: the Advent of Winter

Deer and darkness.

I've fallen out of sync with my usual blogging flow of posting something on Friday night, thinking that people can read it at leisure on a Saturday before they get up if - like me - they grope for their iphone/tablet first thing and wake up slowly with the news and a view of the world from bed before lauching (or lurching) from bed into real life: dressing gown, front room, kitchen, Rice Krispies...contemplation of other activities...quite possibly leading to a return to bed.

The reason for this - my being at odds with my self-determined schedule - is, I think, the time of year. I have never been very happy in the darker months. The incipient dullness and bleakness which approaches in October becomes darker and danker still in November, and today on the 1st December it has reached a state of osmosis with the world outside.

The black dog. It can be stronger than me in the darker months.

Even when it is dry the air is close to dampness. Old houses feel particularly heavy with the moisture each brick contains. In New York the iciness is cold and dry, and one's skin sucks in moisture or makeup in an attempt to build any kind of barrier against that unrelenting chill; in the UK the dampness is what persists, and icy blasts not so much a worry as the continual feeling that any minute now a cold, or, worse, flu, will strike us down to a diet of Lemsip, vitamin C, echinacea and Night Nurse, with a little soup and toast tossed in for sustenance.

And in addition to the above, if, like me, you are living with depression (to a greater or lesser degree, mine being relatively well and my mood good at present) things are often harder.

I have a black dog. He lives with me and we know one another well.

When I was 28 I fell down on a freezing and damp January night and put out my hands to catch myself on the cold concrete ground. Many years later my left wrist, which bore the brunt of the impact, aches in the cold and I start to sympathise for aged aunts from my early childhood, who would blow over their tea, clutched with reddened, wrinkled, swollen-knuckled hands and tell my mother eagerly about their rheumatism, their bunions, corns and arthritis while I sat on my assigned chair, tried not to move at all and consumed my one allocated biscuit. I am continually amused at those elderly conversations where these unsavoury topics were considered just the thing for polite company, even though the elderly aunts were the first ones to point out faults in others for conversational exclusion zones and faux pas.

I am split in two at this time of year. Part of me loves the dank coldness, particularly in the park. I am listening to the wonderful Martin Jarvis reading David Copperfield - unabridged. Martin Jarvis's sonorous voice with its amazing ability to voice each character with a different personality brings to life so much of this tale, and the fact that it is inhabited in a world of candlelight, unspoiled countryside scenes and the same sorts of bricks and buildings that would hold in that moisture seem the perfect companion for my walks, particularly when I am squishing through a muddy field in the late afternoon mist, sharing my space only with the odd scampering squirrel or the deer, their pelts darkened with the rain and lateness of the year.

Deer. They even manage to play rugby! I do well to get outside.

This year I cannot run because of my back and arm, which are much recovered but still aching (and aching more in the damp and the cold). Therefore I try to get out into the daylight to assist in the rehabilitation process but also to turn my face in the daylight and try to absorb every vitamin benefit it proffers. I have a daylight lamp for emergency use, when my spirits threaten to drop down in line with the fading light, but for now I am trying to get my only exercise and my only daylight together, walking during those few hours.

Injuries: A Pain In The Neck, No. Arm

The other part of me wants to stay in with the door firmly closed to visitors. Although I love the park and the mist and the melancholic landscapes, I look out from my bed onto the outside world and see grey. I see the sky as white as clay and it repels me. I wrestle between bed or walk. And this is not just a fight between positive exercise or needed rest, it is also a tug of war in my mind between feeling justified in eating all the good things that come at this time of year, or not. Mince pies, with their pastry cases so innocent looking, but capable of giving a sharp and thorough tummy ache by their inability to be digested; chocolates of all kinds, and, most delectable of all, the Christmas snacks and accompaniments, my interest in which is directly proportional to the percentage of pig in their recipes.

This is in fact, cauliflower cheese. With bacon and black pudding. #doingthingsproperly.

Today, bed is winning at present. It is so grey, so damp-looking outside, and I have another interview to do - on loneliness - this afternoon. It is appropriate, that subject. This is the time of year when I can most relate to that subject after sad, solitary weekends in New York walking in the frozen park and comparing myself in all of my obsessive loneliness to every group or couple. But at home with my husband not far away I am not lonely at all, so the pain in my arm can be coped with, the greyness all round tolerated very well. And the biscuits consumed in moderate proportion. For now.

Read I Had A Black Dog or read more about it here.

It's the Economist's Crisis of Depression Summit, Stupid. Let's talk; Then Let's Act.

BBC Breakfast Feature on Depression in the Workplace 25th November 2014

Yesterday I appeared on television and spoke on the radio about my experiences with depression; two television pieces were broadcast, one on BBC One (Breakfast) and the other on Al Jazeera. Luckily the two for TV were recorded last week and on Monday. I say luckily because a spot which I reckon was about the size of Mars and just as red appeared out of nowhere on Monday night. By Tuesday morning had I gone out into traffic cars may have been confused on my high street and would have stopped at will - my own personal temporary traffic light right there on my forehead. Thank goodness a face for radio was all that was required. And today when I ventured out I made liberal use of the concealer options in my makeup bag. I wouldn't want to scare children. Halloween's over after all, and it's almost time to put up Christmas trees and all things sparkly. Not time to see massive zits on people who are really FAR TOO OLD to be getting them!

The pieces covered the Economist's Global Crisis of Depression Summit, which was held yesterday to discuss the £77 billion cost of depression to the work place. My contribution was one of a patient - someone who can speak to her own experiences and talk about the support measures I'm aware of. Many others gave expert opinions, from an economic, political, and medical / scientific standpoint. I truly believe this is such an important topic to discuss.

Depression in the Spotlight

This issue is personally linked to me and I'm personal invested in it as a sufferer, but when I think of the difference between my first understanding of mental illness, developed in my early twenties when I first suffered with depression, and now, I'm glad for the progress that has been made, but very much not content with the extent of the progress made.

I'm not a scientist but know a few, and know that where the brain is concerned complexity takes on an entirely new meaning. Research to cure depression and develop drugs with better effects and fewer side effects will continue to take many years. I've been on five different kinds of anti-depressants, and am only able to survive and sleep properly helped by my fantastic GP and a cocktail of other drugs which counteract the crippling side effects.

However, I also know what it's like to deal with change, because change is something I've experienced - we all have - and managing change is what I do for a living. This is where I feel angry. Work place stress is massively high, and yet there is still no parity of esteem. It's great that we're talking about it, but that's just a start.

BBC London 94.9 25th November 2014

02:13:00 - 02:19:00

Why has it taken us so long even to get to this point? And I think that we're at breaking point with these figures. A good friend from school I haven't spoken to for nearly two decades messaged me yesterday to say she had felt a similar feeling of dread waking up at four in the morning. She said, "writing the above made me cry on the train." I've been there. I've not wanted to go into work and have had to make up an excuse to delay my arrival while I try to stop the tears that are ruining my makeup and my perfectly applied facade of healthiness.

Me unmasked and masked. Because you would never see anything on the lower tier.

I now do feel supported at work, but that doesn't mean that I won't get ill, and doesn't mean that everyone at work will understand (or everyone outside of work, for that matter). I hope that doing a good job at work will supersede any depressive episodes which may or may not come in the future. But I am lucky. I've read too many messages and statements by others saying, "Don't tell your work that you have depression / mental illness. Ever." "I told my work about my condition and my boss understood, but my colleagues didn't and eventually I had to leave."

Talking about the 4am dread of depression.

Today I'm really tired and a bit low. It comes and goes, and I have tried to rest to get through it. Not interesting, but true. Therefore this angry blog post is also going to be a shorter one than usual. I will defer to my televised and radio-recorded self to say what I feel about my own experiences. And when I go to sleep tonight, ahead of the American festival Thanksgiving,

Preparing for Al Jazeera Interview, Monday Night. Pre-spot!

I wish buying tolerance for depression was a special black Friday deal. I wish that were true. I will be thankful that 99% of people around me support me and what I am doing, and pray that we can all become a bit more forgiving and tolerant of this ubiquitous illness, so that next year we can be thankful for improvements for those people I know and those I don't who are living with mental illness in secret for fear that they will be stigmatised. I want to see that change so that people can speak out just to say that something is wrong - even if they can't articulate it as clearly as they would like. Secrecy and shame are poison, and have to stop.