Learning not to fear the year
Depression rightly brings up fear in many — after almost yearly depressive episodes, how do I learn to live my life without fear?
When I woke up this morning, I found myself counting out the months on my fingers. August, September, October, right the way through to where we are now — February. That makes seven months.
That is, seven months of good mental health, seven months without depression, seven months of leaving the house, seeing my friends, going to work and exercising regularly with ease and without the self-loathing, doubt and torment that fucks everything up. Seven months of being able to feel the full spectrum of emotions. Seven months of being able to feel love, a feeling you don’t realise you’ve missed until you’ve got it back.
Once I’d counted seven months, I subtracted it from twelve and — alone in my bed — whispered “five months to go”. A slightly pitiful image, I realise now I’ve written it out. Last time I’d checked there’d been five months to go still, so I was a little disappointed it wasn’t just four by now.
As arbitrary as it may seem — what’s a year other than something that humans use to give structure to time — the idea that I could be well for a year feels like an enormous deal. A year is always my goal. I’ve only made it once.
Since having been through five depressive episodes in the past six years, lasting for up to ten months, the new year coming in has taken a new significance for me. I’m optimistic, always optimistic — I honestly do see the excitement and potential in life and never more so than since I’ve seen the flip side. That is, the side where your mind feels like a prison, life is so stagnant it gathers dust and the imprint in the sofa that you’ve created, that your family walks past every day, reminds you all of how nothing has changed and who knows when it ever will. For life not to be stuck, feels incredible. However, tainting every new years day is fear — that this year will be just like the last, I will become unwell again and lose everything I’ve built back up since the last time. Because life does crumble down around me.
This post isn’t about that fear though — to understand why it’s there all you need do is read some of my other blog posts about what depression feels like and what it robs from people who go through it. Instead, this post is about the fact that, just as I fight the return of depression by taking life head on as much as I can every day that I am well, I fight fear too. Even if, just like depression, it wants to set up home in my head and fuck everything up just a little bit.
As I counted out my fingers in the half-light of a Sunday morning, unable to sleep, I thought — there must be a better way than this. Counting down the days, as though the passing of each is proof that my hope is justified, as though every day without depression is a case for it never coming back. Except it’s not. Deep down, I know that. I am not destined to keep getting depressed, but nor can I ever be immune from it. Though the time may pass, it actually means nothing. We may structure our lives around weeks, months, years but depression doesn’t — it heeds no rules. In fact, it actively delights in breaking every single one of them, probably while flicking a casual middle finger.
Yet, for the first time since I’ve realised that my depression can be recurrent, I feel the most hope I’ve ever felt. I believe that maybe, just maybe, I’ve got a handle on it, that the bastard won’t be coming back. Hope doesn’t kill fear, at least not for me — it’s like the unwanted guest at your party anyway but now they’re drinking all your booze and getting rowdy to boot. But hope does render fear powerless when it tries to surface and take over — hope leaves your unwanted guest silly drunk in the corner, voiceless, limp and harmless. That’s when we can laugh at it and humour heals wounds in my opinion.
But what does someone who has been through multiple and predictable “relapses”, someone like me, build that hope on? Well, mine isn’t just the wishful sort of hope, the one that we use to fool ourselves into thinking everything might just be ok when it’s possibly unlikely. My hope is one that sits on foundations of hard work, learning and a determination to change and to succeed stronger than any other I’ve ever felt. With foundations so solid, it gives me greater reason to trust in myself.
I’ve done so many things to fuel my belief that there may now be a brighter future for me — one where I can look back and say “remember when I used to get depressed in my twenties and early thirties? Gosh, that feels like a lifetime ago”. Of all of these many things, I believe there is one essential element that will keep me stable, a solid core running through me around which everything else is anchored. And that is: self-awareness. As simple a solution as it sounds, given that mental health issues and mental illness are collectively one of our greatest social challenges (depression and anxiety are the number one reason for people taking time off work in the UK, at a cost of £34.9bn to the economy), by developing self-awareness, we are too attuned to ourselves, too switched on to our surroundings, too in-touch with our needs to let anything derail us.
I always say, thankfully, it’s not rocket science. The things we need to do to keep ourselves mentally well, whether you’ve had mental health issues in the past or not, are all normal things that we learn to do in life to remain balanced. They’re built into our lives from a young age often. We must exercise, we mustn’t over-work, as human beings are sociable creatures, we must socialise, we must balance doing easy things that make us feel good with doing more challenging things that give us a sense of achievement. See, not rocket science.
The tricky bit is understanding yourself well enough — and when I say “well enough”, I mean on as deep a level as you can — to understand our own unique set of needs at any given moment in a world that shifts and changes around us, throwing seemingly insurmountable obstacles in our path. On the day that your boss tells you you’re fired, which of your weapons do you use today? And then which do you use for the next couple of weeks, because you’re bound to feel shit for a little while. That week where you feel unstoppable and like you could launch a thousand ships and have started a new project and want to work through the night on it? Which tool in the bag is most likely to moderate things and help you take it down a notch? And which level of hyperactivity is manageable and productive and which is going to end in a crash?
I always marvel at how long it takes to get to know ourselves. At the age of 16, we can learn an entire syllabus and regurgitate it for our GCSEs, something I feel I couldn’t even come close to doing now. Yet, 31 years into life and I’m still constantly surprised by things I learn about myself that seem so essential but have remained so hidden. I still haven’t mastered this thing I’m carrying around — this brain, this body — and I’ve been doing it for a bloody long time.
However, knowing as I now do just how crucial for our mental health it is to understand ourselves, I’m embracing — and actually loving almost every minute of — the journey. I couldn’t have done it quite like I am without my therapist, whose relentless optimism for me has been so instrumental in giving me hope. Through our work together, I’ve realised that the journey to self-awareness is one we all need to go on — our individual mental health is as unique as a snowflake, and we can’t just copy our partner’s homework, sadly. The answers would be all wrong, useless in fact, and I’d probably find myself once again sitting on the sofa for months, working on that imprint, gathering dust.
It’s a scary thought, that. That I could go back there. Six years on from when I first started facing such challenges, I understand that that fear will never go. How could you not fear something that has taken you lower than you thought you could ever go. How could you not fear the memories, let alone the reality. But I am infinitely more self-aware than I was and intimately more in-touch with myself. For me, building my self-awareness and understanding of myself has given me hope and a way to not fear the year quite in the way that I once did. And hope is more than enough.
“No hope is too little”
~ Guillermo del Toro
If you’re struggling with depression or anything I’ve touched on in this post, please speak to someone — and my DMs are always open on twitter.
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