When is a writing blog not a writing blog?

In the case of this particular blog, the answer is: today.

Ordinarily, I write about writing. You can see it right there in the tagline. I’ve just done thirty posts for thirty days of nanowrimo (which you’ll find in the Recent Posts to your right), or let me direct you here or here or here or here if you’d like to take a pot luck stab at an older, more writer-y sort of a post.

Today’s post is about depression. If I was the sort of a person who understood Venn diagrams, I might use a Venn diagram here:

Blank space where a Venn diagram should be.

… with writers in one circle, and sufferers of depression in the other circle, and I’m willing to bet (all of twenty pence) that the overlap would be LARGE. It might even be XXL. Here’s a roll call:

Sylvia Plath

Ernest Hemingway

David Foster Wallace

Virginia Woolf

Anne Sexton

Primo Levi

 

And those are just some of the ones who, very sadly, didn’t make it out alive.

But I’ve talked before about writers with depression, and that isn’t the point of this post. The point of this post, as 2014 rolls to a close, is to write an ending to my own Depression Story, as detailed in my previous wafflings. 

Above all, what I want to say, as I pretty much said in the title, is that everything will probably be okay. Eventually. You just have to hold on. That isn’t to say it won’t be not-okay, again, at some point in the future (this wasn’t my first spell of depression, and, much as I hate writing this sentence, I have to face facts: neither may it be my last), but then, after that, it will be okay again and… I’ve just tripped over my own fingers writing this sentence.

But saying that ‘things will probably be okay’ is chocolate-teapot-ian in its uselessness if I don’t back it up with some rock hard evidence, right? So I offer the following neatly bullet-pointed list, containing everything I did to get better, and if it’s raining in your head right now you may choose to try some of the things on the list.

• I took drugs. Still take drugs. Specifically Sertraline (Zoloft in the US) at a dosage of 50mg. The first 24 hours weren’t very nice. I began to wonder if Sertraline was, in fact, a mega-dose of Blue Smartie. It was hard to sit still. I was thinking at twice, or even thrice, my normal rate, and the thoughts were universally horrible. If you’ve ever poached an egg without the assistance of an egg poacher, you’ll know that the water needs to be swirling, fairly dramatically, before you can drop in the egg. After 24 hours of swirling, I snapped my pills in half and took 25mg instead for a week. The water stopped swirling. The egg still poached, eventually. I also took Zopiclone, which helps you fall asleep, and (best of all) releases a dose of feel-good chemicals that your joy-starved brain can party with for twenty minutes or so before nodding off.
• I took ten to twenty minutes of exercise every day. This was usually a bike ride through the woods. Sometimes it was indoor exercise of the close-the-curtains variety (which has created an unduly masturbatory aspect, I now realise) accompanied by a cut-price DVD (not helping myself, am I?) of a go-get-’em American woman assuring me I’m the best, I can do it, etc (could I dig this hole any deeper?)
• I wrote down three new things every day that I was grateful for. They have to be new. You have to be actively beach-combing your day for the shiny shells amongst the crisp packets, condoms, and dog faeces. Even tiny things can be shiny. One day I was grateful for the wind on my face. One day I was grateful for seeing the beauty in a windblown stinging nettle. (NB: there were other things not involving the wind.)
• I focused on other peoples’ life stories (radio 4 has a good cache of this sort of thing, in particular their One to One strand), and looked outside myself. I listened to BBC reporter Frank Gardner describing the day he was shot in the spine and his subsequent life in a wheelchair. I read a book about living in North Korea. I reminded myself every day, several times every day, that, yes, some people (appear to) lead Charmed Lives, but those people are best ignored when you’re feeling depressed (unfollow anyone on Facebook, for instance – you don’t have to unfriend them; they need never know – who fires heavy photographic artillery of the My Life is Amaze-balls variety). Open your heart, instead, to the elderly man who’s had nothing all week but frostbite and shit telly for company, or the children who mightn’t eat tonight, or the factory worker who stitched this onto a Primark label:

• I learnt about radical acceptance. If your depression has a particular cause (as mine did) you may find this helpful. The principle is this: when things go wrong in our lives we have four options. (1) Solve the problem (if it’s possible to solve it). (2) Change how you feel about the problem. (3) Remain miserable about the problem. (4) Accept that you can’t solve the problem, but life can still be worth living. So if (1) isn’t possible (as it wasn’t, in my case) you must radically – by which they mean fully – accept that there’s bugger all you can do about it, and perhaps (as in my case) you can’t do number (2) either, because it isn’t possible to feel positive about some things, is it? It just isn’t. So, instead, you have to ‘turn your mind’ (as it’s called) by stopping the endless flow of Why me? This shouldn’t be happening… Perhaps God or Zeus or Paul Daniels will wave his most magic of wands and make this not have happened, if I don’t do anything else wrong, ever, for the rest of my life… You have to watch out for this shit, like red lights when you’re driving, and turn your mind to acceptance instead – for which the phrase shit happens comes in very handy. There were days when I read and reread the stuff on this site and then read it again, and I clung to those pages as Harold Lloyd clung to the hands of the clock in Safety Last. So, yes, although radical acceptance does sound a little mung-beans-for-dinner-and-breast-milk-in-your-tea, it’s actually just bloody wonderful.

• I asked for help. Sometimes it was horrible, asking for help. One GP leaned back in his chair, like the cock of the walk, while pondering whether or not he would give me the drugs I wanted. I sat for two hours in a Sunday morning emergency waiting room with my greasy hair over my face. I was pushy, I argued, I insisted. If you’re not in a place to be pushy yourself, find a friend or relative who is happy to go a bit postal with the medical service on your behalf. (Some friends actively enjoy this sort of thing and are only too happy to have an excuse.)
• I took fish oil. As recommended in this great TED talk from Shawn Anchor.
• I practised mindfulness. I didn’t realise I was practising it (I was told, years ago, that mindfulness meant staring at a raisin for a really long time, which, in retrospect, probably wasn’t entirely useful or accurate). If a piece of chocolate tasted sweet, I noticed that it was sweet. If my head felt comfortable on the pillow in bed, I noticed that too. My brain was a child that wanted to play in the Past Failures ball pool. Mindfulness was the parent who ushered them towards the All That Really Exists Is This Moment slide instead. (Alton Towers, you need one of those.)
• I watched videos about ballet dancers. Now, this one may be specific to me. But you can customise it. It’s soothing watching physical activity, especially if it’s set to music, and especially if men with shapely buttocks are wearing lycra whilst doing it. It gave my eyes something to focus on that was mentally undemanding.
• I took up knitting. This gave my hands something to focus on that was mentally undemanding.
• I played video games. This gave my hands and eyes something to focus on that was mentally undemanding.
• I swore a lot to myself. I borrowed a catchphrase from Withnail in Withnail and I, and I said it (silently or aloud, when alone) if I felt my mind drifting towards things, and people, that in all honesty it was better off avoiding. Some people have om as their mantra. Mine can be found at 1.21 in the link below:

• I watched ASMR videos on youtube. Relaxation videos don’t work for me: being told to relax is tantamount to telling me not to think of elephants. I need to secretly relax myself whilst my brain is distracted by people doing relaxing things. And if you think that’s something you’d like to try then read more here.
• I drank Complan when my mouth refused to eat solid food. I’d lost two stone in less than a month. It was time to take action.
• I talked to my friends by email when I couldn’t talk in person. 
• I googled depression and anxiety and sadness and read everything I could find on the subject. 
• I let myself cry when I wanted to cry.
• I took a break from work. A long break. As long as I needed.
• I had a few therapy sessions.
• I cuddled my daughter.
• I tried to watch funny things on TV.
• I read biographies when fiction was too much.
• When I was able to write, I wrote. When I wasn’t, I didn’t.
• I stayed alive even though I didn’t always want to.
• I wrote an occasional blog about being depressed.

And now we appear to have come full circle. To the best of my memory, this is everything I did on the way to recovery.

I’ve been thinking for ages now that I ought to write this post, because – thinking back over my annus horribilis as Queenie would say – it was posts like this that kept me occupied for five, or ten, or twenty minutes and five, or ten, or twenty minutes of calm sailing is all you can ask, sometimes, when the wind blows.

And now it seems I’m back to wind again.

There’s an awful lot of wind in my novel, too. But that’s another story…