wabi wabi

For as long as I’ve tended this little blog, I’ve wondered how much of myself I should share and what I should keep… to myself (for lack of a better sentence).

When I started wabi, I was still reeling from a very unpleasant situation that involved my private online stuff, a previous employer, and their hired goon lawyer-with-a-threatening-letter-template. Furthermore, I was determined to create a space that showcased all the things that I had seen, heard, felt, smelt, and tasted that were good rather than dwelling on the wave of negativity and loss threatening to overwhelm me.

You see, I am prone to the blues. More than the blues, in fact. What Winston Churchill once dubbed “the black dog”: depression.

And I’ll be perfectly honest here, right now, and for the rest of this one post: two years ago, I suffered a nervous breakdown. I was twenty-five and too embarrassed — too intent on fighting it — to either acknowledge it or talk about it for a very long time.

It is true that over the course of the last two years I have lost a great many things important to me: my partner, my certainty about the future, my self-confidence, my foothold in the world. But I’ve never thought to do anything more than allude to it here. For fear of seeing the words on a public page, for one. For fear of seeming sorry for myself. For fear of judgment, too, I suppose.

Lifestyle bloggers just don’t admit to days spent in their underpants sobbing on the floor. They don’t discuss phobias, peculiar anxieties, and suicide ideation. They don’t mention, as they wax lyrical about the soft suede on a much lusted-after pair of ankle boots, that they’ve worn pyjamas all week. Or that, while they post a recipe for a luscious layer cake, they haven’t been able to eat a crumb since yesterday morning.

Something changed my mind.

In my bookcase, I have dozens of novels, cookbooks, and other non-fiction volumes stacked and shelved haphazardly from floor to ceiling. Among these brightly spined tomes is a number of thick, pretty books by Marian Keyes. If you’ve never heard of this sparkling, comedic Irish authoress, I have to wonder if you’ve ever set foot in a bookstore. Scorn chick-lit all you like — Keyes is a marvellous writer, funny and clever.

Although I knew that she had struggled with alcoholism and depression in the past, I had not noticed — so, had not given any thought to — her apparent hiatus from publishing in the last three or so years. But when I read this newsletter entry posted in mid-2010, it struck me as so gut-wrenchingly familiar that I was both immensely sorry for her experience and thankful for her bravery in writing about it. I felt compelled to comment.

I felt — feel — compelled to comment because the single-most bewildering aspect of experiencing a “severe depressive episode” is the overpowering sensation of aloneness. When I read that Marian had “been knocked sideways by a multitude of feelings, not just depression but agitation, anxiety, terror, panic, grief, desperation, despair and an almost irresistible desire to be dead” I felt, for the first time in more than two years, as if there were somebody else (somebody smart and funny and beautiful and otherwise lucky) who knew what it was like to be inconsolably depressed.

She wrote: “I’ve heard people describe depression as feeling like they’re living behind glass, of being numb and unable to experience anything, but for me, it has been totally different. It has been like being poisoned, it’s felt like my brain is squirting out terrible, black, toxic chemicals that poison any good thoughts. I’m well aware that I have an enviable life and there are bound to be people who think, “What the hell has she got to be depressed about?” But whatever has been wrong with me isn’t fixable by an attitude shift.”

Like me, she has a list as long as her arm of therapies that she’s tried.

I have seen psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors, chiropractors, acupuncturists, kinesiologists, and naturopaths. I have taken Citalopram, Avanza, Neulactyl, Seroquel, Cymbalta, and several brands and doses of benzodiazepine. I have supplemented with calcium, magnesium, L-Glutamine, Vitamin B12, organic sulphur, tissue salts, and various specific stress formulae. I have tried writing, walking, swimming, meditating, floating my thoughts down rivers, thinking positively, praying, traveling, working, studying, distracting myself, and fighting, fighting, fighting it.

Being an arthritis sufferer with a plentiful supply of analgesia, I have also tried escaping the pain both inside my body and my mind by bombing myself out on painkillers and (over)sleeping for days and weeks.

Initially it was anxiety that overtook my life. I believed, when I first got sick at the end of 2009, that I had cancer or a bad stomach ulcer. I vomited every time I ate. I felt agitated and queasy and just plain wrong. I subsisted on Gastrolyte ice blocks. I lost weight until my clothes hung off my frame. I couldn’t sleep without benzos or narcotics.

I was increasingly afraid of terribly normal things. First, I declined a job offer because I felt that I absolutely could not enter a new office. Then I moved home to my parents, where I wigged out over a straightforward 2000-word essay. I went to hospital for a few days. I got new scripts from a psychiatrist. Nothing helped. Lastly, I developed serious anxiety over my relationship, which was in almost every way a wonderful, serious, fulfilling relationship. I couldn’t understand what was happening.

I hid out at home. Like Marian describes, I woke up with a jolt every morning, wracked with sick nerves and dismay. Oh no, another day. Of this. I found it hard to study (I was one semester into my Master’s at that stage), and when I went to work as a tutor I felt like a fraud the whole time, pretending to be normal and happy and functional. I smiled and laughed with my students, then drove home with tears streaming down my face. I used to lie down on my bed and beg God and the universe to know why this was happening to me, why I was so crazy that I couldn’t fathom going to work for eight hours every day or see my boyfriend without wanting to throw up.

It wasn’t until another change in my medication nine months later that I gradually woke from this nightmare into the next. My anxiety mellowed to the point where I was rational and “myself” again. But, by this time, my relationship had ended and I had gained more than twelve kilograms of weight. I felt horribly unattractive and desperately alone and stupid and guilty.

I couldn’t forgive myself for what had happened and what I had done to those dearest to me. I couldn’t excuse myself for the rifts and changes in my body and my life. I was less anxious but profoundly more depressed.

So, depression has been my faithful companion since that time.

It is no stranger to me. I suffered my first bout of depression in my early teens, after contracting Malaria and Dengue Fever simultaneously (during my family’s last year in Papua New Guinea). My physical and mental health was hit-and-miss for years and years after that. At the end of my first year of university, when I was twenty years old, I weighed only forty kilograms and had to drop a subject because I simply couldn’t cope with everything on my plate.

I know the numb type of depression; however, the feeling-awful type of depression is more familiar to me.

Depression, to me, is a feeling of nastiness that inhabits not only my mind but my body. I hate being awake because it feels disgusting from start to finish. Like Marian, I have counted down the hours until I can go to sleep again. Suicidal thoughts — wanting life to stop, to go away — have resulted from that extreme sense of discomfort all over me, all through me, so that being alive feels intolerable, impossible. I have probably contemplated ending my life more than half a dozen times.

It feels as though your spirit is no longer supple and strong, but thin, weak, and brittle. It’s difficult to manage any stress or grief or disappointment. Every molehill is a mountain. You have no reserves.

And people are so full of criticism and advice. If I had a dollar for every time somebody chastised me about my attitude, I would probably have about $500 extra in the bank. Everybody wants me to try this supplement or that doctor or some other therapy involving magnets or crystals. I’m supposed to sleep properly and eat properly and exercise properly and occupy myself properly every day. But when you’re severely depressed, concentrating on doing more than one of these things at once is intimidating and difficult.

It’s like being asked to juggle seven china plates when you can barely throw a ping-pong ball.

I write all of this not for the purpose of melodrama or for the response of pity.

I write it because I think it’s important for others — even one other person — to know that they are neither crazy nor the only individual on the planet to have ever experienced these thoughts and sensations. It was with relief that I read Marian Keyes’s post, and I hope that this post, as dark as it may be, might offer somebody else relief and hope.

Let me tell you that any prolonged period of stress in your life can grind you down, whether you know it’s depleting you or not. If you’ve got something like that going on in your life, get rid of it. It’s not worth it.

For me, it was undiagnosed illness combined with a job that made me miserable. I’d also started post-grad study and had no spare time. Any little thing can be the last straw. You can become anxious or phobic about anything. It’s a chemical pattern in your brain, but it can subside over time if you let it.

Don’t expect everybody to understand. In fact, expect a great many people to let you down when you need them the most. Do not doubt that your depression is as bewildering for those around you as it is for you.

In writing all of this now, I have to admit to some bitterness. Sometimes I indulge that small, mean part of myself where I wish that the people who judged me, didn’t wait for me, left me, or gave up on me could live just a day or two of my life over the last couple of years. I wish they could know what it is like. But to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, not for a second.

Right now is bad. I have suffered a few knocks in recent months and I don’t bounce back as I should. I feel often as if I hate myself. I cry at night and when I’m in the car and sometimes in odd places, such as the bathroom when I’m brushing my teeth or in a supermarket aisle when I can’t remember what I came for.

There is a lump in my throat much of the time, and I feel worn out. So worn out.

But I want to end this on a positive note if I can. What helps?

Good sleep.

Magnesium. Lots of it.

Finding somebody who understands.

Someone asking, “How are you?” and really meaning it and really caring about the answer even if it’s not a happy one.

Small gestures of kindness. A text message. An e-mail out of the blue just to say hello. A cup of tea made the way I like it. Unexpected little gifts. A compliment. A tender hug that lasts for more than two seconds. An invitation to come around, no matter how “messy” or “boring” your house is. No matter how busy you are. Affection from cats and dogs.

And no advice.

Being there, just giving the impression that I’m worth it. And expressing silently, through that action of being there, that you know I will get better in time.

That helps.

And writing does help, too. Getting all the gunk out of your system is great, but not all the time, not every day. This blog has kept me going because it is a) something I have chosen to do with discipline and regularity and b) a place to indulge my thoughts and feelings about everything else — especially the good stuff.

I won’t be writing about the black dog often. It’s my sincerest hope that my faithful companion may one day leave me.

So, yeah, I might sometimes write about clothes and jewellery and lip balm and all manner of ridiculously unimportant things. I make no apology for loving poetry and song lyrics and polaroid pictures. I believe these things to be part of what spurs me on to try another day. Beauty. Pleasure. Making acquaintances and friends across the world of people sharing a similar set of interests. These are all good things.

Depending on how you use it, a blog has power. I hope that, most of the time, my blog has the power to inject some purpose and happiness into my day and yours. But I also hope that this post possesses some power: the power to cause somebody to stop and think, the power to generate some understanding and empathy about a disease many of us suffer from but are too afraid or polite to talk about.

In the words of Marian Keyes: “Thank you again for all the love. I love you too.”