When you’re depressed, nothing is normal.

A trip to M&S, a trip to the supermarket, a visit from a relative and Google.

A trip to M&S

I was supposed to be trying to challenge myself. If you can call going to M&S a challenge. The thing is, it was, for me. I knew I was supposed to be challenging myself but knew I hadn’t been — so I asked my sister if she needed anything from M&S. I knew the thought of walking through that shop, picking up the bits and pieces she needed and then standing in line at the checkout made me feel sick. Other people made me feel sick. Which is odd, really — I love people normally, they fascinate me. I think it was more the thought of me being in other people’s midst that made them a sickening prospect. I was the repulsive one, I suppose.

I had told my sister I would pick up what she needed, so I left the house — running quickly to my car in case a neighbour so much as saw me — and drove round the M25 to the M&S just outside of St. Albans. I’d left in a rush, the anxiety propelling me to fling on some shoes but then telling me to drive slower, slower, slower still. I never wanted to arrive.

Parked up in the car park, I went to open the car door and realised I couldn’t. All I could think about was the checkout queue. Standing side-by-side with other people, people I didn’t even know, as I limply clutched onto the underwear my sister wanted me to get her (really Nicola, of all the things — knickers?). I looked down, head dipped, eyes staring into the car’s footwell. Then I noticed my trainers. I’d thrown on my gym trainers, in my anxious haste. The running trainers that were almost too uncool for the gym. I don’t know why I cared about such things, but I did. After half an hour of trying to get out of the car, I left. “It was the trainers”, I told myself as I drove away, “I would have done it if it weren’t for the trainers”. Who needs knickers that urgently anyway?

A trip to the supermarket

I was back at the retail park just off the M25 outside of St. Albans. Out of necessity this time — I had no energy for challenges anymore. My parents had gone away for the month and I had run out of food. To clarify, I had run out of food over a day ago. I’d told them not to leave me supplies because I wanted to have to go out because I knew that when they left me my mental health was going to take a nose-dive because I had seen it happen before in me and I knew that I needed a reason to try to be normal. Try to be. Even if that reason was a hunger that hurt — it was still a reason. All of yesterday, though, opening the front door, stepping outside, getting in the car and driving to the supermarket had felt too hard. But luckily physical pain can trump mental pain. Only sometimes and not enough that I could go to my local supermarket; I needed to drive to somewhere I was a nobody.

I arrived at the supermarket. This time I was wearing the right trainers —that, or I realised that food was a necessity — and so I went in. Well, I raced in. I speed walked down every aisle I needed to too — no more, no less. Just the essential ones. I kept my eyes lowered to the level of the bottom shelf. I managed to raise them to reach for the milk but I almost caught a woman’s eye and the idea that our eyes might meet and she might see the pain in them and I the sympathy in hers was almost too much to bear but thankfully that didn’t happen at all and I gripped the milk and walked away. Milk, eggs, yoghurt, teabags, chocolate (for binge eating). It was hardly enough but I had to leave. That tingling feeling of anxiousness told me there was no time for more.

I got to the till. Self-service; talking wasn’t an option and thank god there was self-service there otherwise I would have had to abort the mission. I began to scan but… fuck, I’d forgotten the teabags. I turned briefly over my shoulder to look for the teabag aisle and this time I did meet eyes with a woman. She stared. My pain flitted towards her, an abused child crying out for help — wanting to be simultaneously seen but ignored. She looked sad for me. I couldn’t deal with sympathy. The teabags could wait. I left.

A visit from my Auntie

My auntie popped over to check on me. My auntie popped over to check on me because she only lives round the corner and Mum and Dad hadn’t really wanted to go away and leave me for a month anyway but I had made them and so I think it made them feel better to know that my Mum’s sister would be dropping by. Except I didn’t know they’d asked her to.

One day I looked up from my position of lying flat on my side on the sofa, facing the TV, that I was accustomed to adopting, say, oooh, I don’t know… almost every waking hour of every day —on one of those days, I looked up and I saw a white Seat parked on the driveway. I only knew one person with a white Seat — Auntie Caroline. They talk about fight and flight; depressed people don’t fight, they just do the flight. There is no fight left in a depressed person — it’s often why we are depressed in the first place and then so powerless to pull ourselves out of it. And so before I had had time to register what had happened, I found myself running through the kitchen and heading toward the utility room. The only room in the house without a window; where I could truly hide, be truly unseen. To be unseen was what I craved every day anyhow. Not invisible. Just unseen.

Door closed behind me, when the doorbell sounded, I knew I was safe. Safe because I didn’t have to be confronted with the gaze of someone who cared for me, but cared for the me that wasn’t the me that would be standing before her today. Or yesterday. Or last month. Or for the next seven months. The empty me. People think they want to help a depressed person, but do they really? Do they want to stand before someone, talking at them but their words thudding hard against a lifeless object that only makes shit disappear. There is no reflection in a depressed person. Just absorption and a dullness.

The doorbell rang five times and I stood shaking in the utility room. I knew this wasn’t right but I didn’t care. That’s how I let myself off for putting minimal effort into life most days too — I knew it wasn’t right, but I didn’t care. Shortly after the fifth ring of the doorbell, I heard a car engine start and the Seat pulling away. I waited a minute. I returned to my place on the sofa; 2 missed calls from Auntie Caroline. Dismiss notification. Then I had a thought. I went to the front door and bolted it from the inside and then I returned to the living room and pulled the blinds down. She had keys to the house. The door stayed locked from the inside for the whole next day — just in case.

Googling

I had taken to using the desktop computer in the spare room upstairs. It was a break from the only other two spaces I would inhabit — my bedroom and the front living room. Sometimes I would google recipes that I knew I was never going to make as I couldn’t seem to make myself do any cooking. I just waited for Mum to create something every night. Sometimes I would play games made for children on the Cartoon Network website. Sometimes I would just stalk my friends on social media because I didn’t see them anymore anyway and so it was stalking because they didn’t know I was watching. And sometimes I would find myself on forums. Forums where people discussed the best ways of committing suicide. Sometimes I couldn’t deal with all the depressive chat around it because it made me realise I was the person I had never wanted to be — hopeless and bathing in my despair. So I would simply google “best ways to commit suicide”. Then scroll. It made me feel better. Once I had decided that I would throw myself in front of a fast train, I felt somewhat calm because I could see a way out — there was an end in sight. Should I want it. I wasn’t sure if I did want it though. Because wanting to die is not the same as wanting to kill yourself. Nor does suicidal ideation mean you want to actually commit suicide. But it’s all par for the course with depression anyway.

To this day, I don’t know if I ever wanted it enough to go through with it. But I don’t know what I would have felt like after six further months of a life basically unlived and neglected. All I know is that, when well, I have told myself I never will. That’s all I have to cling onto.

I didn’t want to die anyway — I really didn’t want to die. I just didn’t know if I could carry on living.

Nothing is normal

When you’re depressed, nothing is normal. But the only way I could survive it was by telling myself that it was. That this reality of mine was the one I should be living. That I couldn’t live another and that, even if I could, I didn’t deserve much more than this shitty, poor excuse of an existence, anyway. I was so totally lost to myself. I’m not even sure where I went to. But drifting through each day without the bit inside that makes you you, really fucks everything up. It had all become so routine that often I would only be reminded that I was actually living when a particularly searing pain would strike. Pain was a constant, but our bodies and minds are good at becoming accustomed to pain. So it was only the sharpest of pains that reminded me I was still here.

There was a time when I wasn’t numb to it. Back then, before it all became so run-of-the-mill, I used to search my brain over and over. Where has she gone? Has she gone? What happened to the me I know? I had no answers. Quickly I became the search party that gave up the search because it was all so futile. I’d forgotten what the girl I was looking for was like anyway. Plus, I didn’t know if I was even that fond of her to start with. The alternative, this alien I was inhabiting, was a shitty alternative but I felt a complete absence of agency. Like the dent I was able to make on life, on my own life, wasn’t even a dent at all — I could only brush the surface of life and even that was exhausting.

What’s normal? I don’t really know. I don’t even know who the normal me is, it’s happened so many times. But I know that when I was depressed, nothing was normal. I couldn’t make any of it normal. I didn’t know how. And so I gave up. I gave up every time.