Live through this, and you won’t look back

Notes on feeling suicidal — and looking back

“Live through this, and you won’t look back”.

These words are from the chorus of a song by Stars called “Your Ex-Lover is Dead”. I recommend you listen to it (while you read this, if you’d like).

I was about four months through my first experience of depression in 2012 — it was to last five months in total and stopped me from working. I listened to this song that I loved, which I hadn’t touched in ages (I stopped listening to music, and reading, and writing, and everything). When it got to this line, “live through this and you won’t look back”, I cried. For the first time in day after day after week after month of numbness — a numbing feeling so intense I had forgotten how it felt to feel — after all that time, I cried. They say that when you’re depressed you cry all the time and often once you start crying you don’t stop. That’s not my experience — my experience was that nothing managed to penetrate deep enough below my skin to create any sort of emotion. Not happiness, not sadness, just emptiness.

I cried because I had spent almost every day for the past four months wishing I were dead. I didn’t want to commit suicide (though of course it became a back-up plan) but I sure as hell didn’t want to be here anymore. I would spend countless minutes thinking “if only there was a big red button I could push that would end it all”; I knew that I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment in pushing it. I had never ever dreamed I would be that person and the knowledge that I was was part of what brought me to tears.

I didn’t want to be dead but I wanted my old life back and I didn’t know if I could cope with this life — that is, the life of a depressed person who harboured so much self-loathing that she couldn’t bear to leave the house. But I didn’t know how to make the journey from “new me” to “old me”. I barely knew how to take the first step let alone fight for it every day — and that’s what it is, a fucking fight. To me, ending it all seemed like the best, perhaps the only, option. And in the absence of having the balls to do it (because I didn’t), fantasising about it was the next best option. My big red button, if only it would appear.

I cried partly out of confusion. Though it may be hard to imagine, four months into a depressive episode that would last five months, I still didn’t know what was wrong with me. Yes, I had ended up in hospital because of severe panic attacks that I didn’t know were panic attacks but felt so painful I thought I was dying. Yes, they had told me they were panic attacks, asked me some questions and sent me home with some anti-depressants and some incredibly strong and addictive drugs to relax me.

But as the weeks and months stretched on, I didn’t feel sure. My mind, my fucked-up-by-depression-mind, wouldn’t let me believe that this wasn’t just all my fault.

I remember being in my bedroom one day, listening to the lyrics of that song by Stars, feeling overcome with sadness (finally, some feeling) at all that I had been through recently. I had been expending all my energy on just getting through the day that I’d never stepped back and looked at the bigger picture. Someone who was so alien to the concept of suicide, now so used to fantasising about it for myself every day. I remember thinking in that moment: “if, Jacquelyn, you get through this and it turns out to have been a significant time for you, you will never ever look back on this”. You will never ever find yourself here again, you will never need think of it again.

How wrong I was. I didn’t know just how significant it would be — in fact it’s laughable that I thought it might not be. Nor did I know that depression would be mine to live almost every year for the next six years. As for looking back, I’ve looked back almost every day. I can’t help it. I can’t separate myself from the memory of the five depressive episodes I’ve been through, at times lasting for ten months. I can’t stop looking back, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t.

I message my therapist often (perhaps the boundaries there aren’t as rigid as they should be, I’ll give you that one). Frequently it’ll be my thoughts on depression — on a societal level, on a medical and healthcare level (and my limited understanding therein) and on a personal level, as it applies to my life. They’re normally fairly cynical and not altogether positive thoughts that I share, but always on depression and mental health. I often wonder: Jesus, Jacs, what if she’s just thinking — oh for goodness sake, just get on and get over it. You’ve got a life to live that isn’t tinged with sadness and the memories of your darkest days. Like I’m some rag that’s been tea-stained round the edges and I refuse to get cleaned up. She would never think that, but perhaps I think that of myself. Should I just get on and move on?

“Live through this, and you won’t look back”. But I continue to look back. I’ve written before that I “find a lightness of the soul in the darkness of the mind”. There is something about reflecting on that empty not-quite-sadness-but-there’s-no-other-way-to-describe-it absence of feeling that depression brings that makes me feel more complete. As though thinking about it profoundly, taking myself to the edge of it and peering over and in, now fortunate enough not to be feeling its hold within me any longer, grants me wholeness. Like it’s connecting with another part of me that I have for so long tried to ignore and forget and criticise relentlessly. It’s making my way along a long path of being at peace with it. I don’t know if there’s an end to that journey but I feel I’m on it — finally. And it’s by being brave enough to look back even when it hurts.

That hurt comes from all directions sometimes, but often it’s because I think there were opportunities to capitalise on critical turning points, where something could have been done — and in my case, never was. One of many sharp barbs I like to stick in myself from time to time, when it comes to my mental health. The belief that “I could have and should have done something but I didn’t. I could have done better”. Well, that’s the other thing about looking back. It’s a time to be proud, even when you want to look back and do nothing but berate yourself and tell yourself you were shit. I feel this pull every time I think about my past experiences with mental ill-health but I’m trying to change the narrative. By thinking about it and reading about it and speaking to others about it, I’m gradually teaching myself to just be proud — I was there and now I’m not. Who else’s doing is that, if not my own?

That song, by Stars, will forever have the power to bring me to tears — and remind me of the time that I cried when I felt that I might never cry again. That song reminds me that I’ve looked depression — and all its horrible effects — in the face and I have reached a point where I’m able to reflect on my experiences with a pride that somewhat counters my sadness and lack of self-forgiveness till now. For me, looking back to my past is how I’ll battle and survive my future.

I should mention, there’s another few lines in that song too that I think about:

“I’m not sorry I met you
I’m not sorry it’s over
I’m not sorry there’s nothing to save”

As I continue to look back on depression, when I didn’t think I ever would or could, I’ll feel just that — I’m not sorry it happened, but I’m certainly not sorry it’s done and that there is nothing of it left. Just my memories — and those are my fire.

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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