Depression: Once you’ve been down in the hole, you can’t forget it’s there…
By Mic Wright
Last week was Depression Awareness Week — yes, yes, I know there are thousands of ‘awareness’ weeks but stick with me. People shared their experiences on Twitter with the hashtag #whatyoudontsee. This is mine…
Blank. That’s how I felt at my most depressed. Of course, there were brief periods of intense sadness, tears welling up unexpectedly and great waves of distress, but the worst part of being that down in the hole is emotional blankness; nothing seems fun and no jokes seem funny.
And the blankness translated to my ability to put words together. I worked at jobs where people whispered about how quiet I was, not realising that it was a product of a temporary storm of sadness and anxiety rather than an integral part of my personality. The people who know me would never class me as shy.
But in that most profound two-year period of despair, I attended conferences for work and disappeared into my hotel room at night, ditching parties for fear of having to speak to people, eating at fast food restaurants for fear of having to engage beyond the most simple of interactions.
My world shrank to the apartment I was living in, my computer and the small supermarket around the corner. Days and days passed where I only saw my girlfriend at the time and the guy who worked behind the counter in the shop.
What you don’t see is how mundane depression can be or how much it boils down to a growing inability to find joy in anything, to be able to function in the most minor ways. Depression in fiction tends to manifest as massive life changing disasters. In reality, it feels like a million consecutive capitulations, a domino effect of mounting despair.
When I was home, I spent ages staring at the blank page in front of me, gripped by an all-encompassing fear that whatever I wrote would be terrible and that I’d never be able to write something publishable again. That the internet has no shortage of people willing to tell you how terrible you are didn’t help.
The number of people freelancing and working from home is growing and that’s a big part of what you don’t see. In an office, you’ll probably have friends to go to the pub with, people who might notice you withdrawing into your shell. On Slack, email and Twitter DMs, that’s far from apparent.
And while you don’t see the struggle and the pain, you also don’t see what it takes to come out the other side. I only started to feel more stable and capable of taking on the challenges life presented to me when I accepted that I should go to therapy.
You don’t see what happens for an hour a week in an ordinary looking front room. You don’t see how the worries you have in the present can be unpicked and unravelled, with strands that stretch back years and years.
You also don’t see that some of the times when you were most exuberant were the crest of a wave before you crashed or that in future, when you’re happy, people will ask you if it’s happening again.
Most of all, what you don’t see is that once you’ve gone through one of those periods of intense bleakness, you always have a niggle in the back of your mind that you may fall off the tightrope again. Once you’ve been down in the hole, you can’t ever forget that it’s there.
But then, there’s an upside to that too. If you’ve found your way out — and that’s not easy at all — you can offer support and empathy to other people who are down at the bottom. I sat down to write this after I got a message from a friend who I’d talked to a lot before he headed to rehab again and who is now back and making positive steps in his life.
There’s a moment in The West Wing that has stuck with me every since I first saw it that I always think of when thinking about this stuff. Leo having encouraged Josh to speak to a therapist tells him a story about a man who falls in a hole:
This guy’s walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, ‘Hey you. Can you help me out?’ The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.
Then a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, ‘Father, I’m down in this hole can you help me out?’ The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on.
Then a friend walks by, ‘Hey, Joe, it’s me can you help me out?’ And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, ‘Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.’ The friend says, ‘Yeah, but I’ve been down here before and I know the way out.’
I’ve been down there before. I know the way out but I don’t assume that route will always stay the same.
Click the heart below to share this article if you like it. Don’t? Add constructive feedback by commenting.
Feature image credit: Sam Bald
