Friday 5 November 2010

Is depression that bad?


As you read many of my little posts you may find yourself querying my mental health… quite frankly you would be right to do so. I was officially labelled mental many years ago but was medically determined to suffer from depression in my twenties. At this stage in my life many entertaining things happened and I can look back on them fondly and laugh.

Firstly I was one of those that as described as living with depression - an interesting category. It basically means at any moment you may decide to kill yourself but on the whole you are pretty chipper and carry on as normal. For me the bit that kept me pretty chipper was my ability to self harm with beautiful precision. Aha! Self harm, you may be thinking, an attention seeking practice carried out by teenage girls. Possibly but in the world outside of television drama a superb way of dealing with emotions that you have no way of being able to cope with but allows you to carry on as normal. Plus not something you want other people to know about as that lets others realise you may not be coping and at the end of the day if you weren’t living with depression, you would actually just be depressed and that isn’t the point at all. Follow? No, very few people do…

My choice of self harm was cutting myself in discrete places. For some reasons the pain and the blood letting allowed peace and calm to be restored to my world. I say for some reason because I haven’t self harmed for many years now and it is detached from whom I am and therefore in the same way of not remembering the misery of childhood, it is hard to remember the satisfaction of self harm. I tried it a good couple of months ago when I was fed up and it just hurt. How irritating. Not sure if that is due to mental stability or the aging process but either way it appears to be lost to me now.

So depression itself not being that bad? Well for starters when I did actually reach the stage of not living with depression and just being chronically depressed I lost my memory. Fantastic! It meant that most days I did stupid things and didn’t remember them. The most annoying thing is when you get better mentally your brain, very kindly starts giving the memories back… so there you are, feeling mentally stable and happy and content and your brain goes – blam, have a memory! Walking down the freezer aisle, picking up items for tea and you get a punch in the midrift that has your nearly prostrated on the floor as you remember the time that your husband asked you to cook burgers for tea and you couldn’t remember how to do it. You are magically transported back to the event and relive it in a way that a depressed person would just forget. I can feel the annoyance emanating from the man who has professed to love me through sickness and health and yet at this moment in time all he wants is something to eat after being at work and his slightly deranged wife is refusing to cook burgers for him. Rather than admitting to the actual predicament I am in I try the wheedling approach. ‘Could you not make tea please?’ Nope, is his steadfast approach, you do it. Can I lie my way out of this one? Erm no, because I am severely depressed and lying takes that extra bit of mental capability that is certainly not available at this moment in time.

So I had to confess and the humiliation nearly drowns me… and with that I’m back in the supermarket and decide to put the packet of frozen burgers that were about to be put in the trolley back into the freezer cabinet. I think we will avoid them for now.

Or another one that arrived at my mother in laws birthday party this year. It is normally a meal out with her husband, two sons and their partners. This year she has invited along a friend. Very nice lady, we sit next to each other and chat. As I sparkle and entertain, a little part of my brain goes ta-dah! I receive a stab of pain in my eyes as I arrive back several years and am sat in my mother in laws front room. The pleasant lady is sat in front of me discussing the fact that her dog is ill and she doesn’t know what to do when he dies. For some reason my demented mind decides to pipe up with ‘Put him in a curry’. Again humiliation strikes, but brain has plans. Everyone in the room studiously ignores my comment. Brain strikes again and I repeat the statement. I don’t understand why I am saying it. I repeat it several times. Exactly same intonation as if stuck on a loop. I no longer appear to be able to control what I am saying. I am still ignored… with the repeat statement sixth time on my lips I back in the restaurant, wondering how she is able to talk to me without wishing to stab me.

So no depression itself isn’t that bad, as long as you remember to kill yourself before you get better.

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