For the world is hollow

Sometimes, on days like today, the world passes by outside my window and I barely notice it. I find myself locked, deep in thought, a Chinese finger trap for the self, whilst images of supposed failures replay themselves over and over in my mind.

This is just one part of suffering from depression, or at least it is just one part of my experience of it. Of course, there is no intention on my part for things to proceed thus, it just sort of happens. The most innocent of thoughts can set the thing in motion. I might wonder why I had not watered the plants, or posted that package I meant to, but at the moment of thinking it, I can almost feel myself slap on the brakes, cast out the anchor and everything around me ceases to have much significance.

I have cranked the starting handle on another day of disappointment in myself. All those things I wish I had done, or promised to have done, or intended to do. All the dreams unfulfilled, all the difficult choices avoided come flooding out in a torrent. I become transfixed on all the things I haven't done, and wracked with grief and shame that I have let people down. It is the cruelest of illnesses that eats away at your self-confidence like this, but it is what I find myself fighting, week after week, month after month.

Nothing I tell myself can shift the guilt pangs and borderline self-loathing that accompany this part of depression. Worse than that, I am hopeless at sharing this (outside the safety zone of my blog) - I don't feel my issues are worth airing, or I don't want anyone to worry about me, about what I am thinking, feeling or suffering. Internalisation sets in, and is just as rotten and ruinous as the doubt and the guilt. Everything is crammed down, held in the very pit of my stomach. No-one need know I am unhappy, no-one need see or share in it. As hopeless as I am at dealing with the thought cycles, I am determined they shall not bring a moment of darkness to anyone's day.

Sitting here now and typing this, it all seems so easy - just let your loved ones in, just talk, just accept the innocence of forgetting to post a package. If only depression were not so cruel, did not take away from me moments of sharing and compassion I constantly deny myself. If only I could let myself collapse in someone's company and let them put me back together again. If only.... if only depression were not such a cruel master or I such a compromised servant. And yet it is, and so here I sit on another silent evening, a single fat tear running down my cheek as the only testament to the torture within.

Setbacks

Unfortuantely, the doctor has signed me off work again due to a renewed bout of my OCD flaring up. It is incredibly frustrating to feel like some really good progress is being made only to find myself locked into another cycle of pressure and reaction whilst the OCD fires up on all cylinders and catches me at my weakest.

It's not that I can't beat it, I know I can. No, scratch that, I know I will. It's not the fight at all, it is the knowledge that this impacts so much on all the other boxes that make up my life. I find myself wondering if the way to beat it longer term is not to feed it - take myself out of situations that might precipitate a decline. But why should I?! Am I really reaching a position where I write off types of career as inappropriate to my condition? Is that where it all leads - postponing or cancelling my aspirations for the good of the outcome of the fight? It seems wrong to be thinking this way, and yet... how to put it? And yet I cannot be someone I am not, anymore than the slowest can run the fastet or the youngest have the most memories. Perhaps winning the war long term means thinking laterally - make a strength of weakness, earn my crust a different way. Clearly I cannot go on the way I am.

Then there is the effect of this on my life goals and hopes. This gets in the way, forms a giant roadblock I can't detour around. Fighting this illness full time only serves to make everything else seem unimportant and bleak. There are times I feel terribly lonely, and I have realised (as I have said here before) that I want to share my little life with someone, but how can I possibly hope to do that when all my energies are focussed on this? More to the point, once I beat this outbreak, I meet someone and two weeks in the wheels come off again. I am already feeling guilty about letting someone down that I haven't even met yet. This is what it does to you, it yanks away the certainties you rely on, it weakens everything you are and forces you to spend your energy 'winning'.

I just wonder at the cost of victory. I don't want this being my everything, there are other fights I want to fight. I want to be giving of my energy to someone really special to me and I want my hopes to be for them, and not just my own medicine. I want my shoulder to be there for my family and friends, for everyone that I love. I want the decks cleared and the diary empty ready to be filled with someone who makes my jaw drop just by her smile. I want all these things, all these normal, credible, reasonable and laudable things. Yet they are on hiatus, once again, as I wearily go into battle one more time.

OCD is wicked. OCD stands no chance against me, but it is the price of my victory that makes me hate it the most. It is robbing me of time, and energy, and of someone's adorable smile.

Two steps forward, two steps back

I was going to write a piece today about the last few days and how I have been under the menacing gaze of the black dog, suffering a bout of the dreaded depression. However, I find the words are too bleak, the sentences too confused and my mood insufficiently recovered to do it the injustice it so richly deserves. So instead, a limerick.

The first thing I spotted in you
Was making me smile when I'm blue.
You make my heart leap,
That's the secret I keep,
And, oh, my love if only you knew!

unmentionable

Some days are difficult to describe. Today was one of those days. In every way I should be content. I have bought a new house, and have now got it just about how I want it looking. I have some land, finally, in which to spread my dreams out and a house that is big enough (just) to contain me and my odd and errant ways. I have a fabulous family who have helped me immensely this week to get things moved without breaking the bank (or my back) and life, as it stands on record as stated, is great. I should be content, but I am not.

That's the trouble with depression, it robs you of even the most basic enjoyment. It hides in the shadows waiting for when you are at your weakest - in this instance, happy, carefree and with a new house to focus my mind. It hides there, serpentine, and waits for the optimum moment to strike, to lash out and sink fangs into your joy and suck it all out replacing it with poison, angst and regret.

Sometimes it feels like there is no answer, that depression poses an impossible question and demands an immediate response, knowing I have none to give. Most of all though, it feeds on positives and sours them. It takes my pride and love for my family and turns it to regret and guilt that I am not happier today, this week, right now having been helped and loved so obviously and wonderfully by those closest to me. How can I not be happy today? The new house, my pride and joy, my little piece of England becomes a permanent worry, obsessing (as we OCDers love to so very much) about every little detail or thing that might go wrong and robbing me of the enjoyment I want to have.

Depression is filth, it is a wretched, wicked and unwelcome blight and I am damned if I will let it win. This is not me, this is not the way my life will go. Maybe, just maybe, this is the day it pushed me too far and now it reaps the whirlwind. Maybe.

Through the decades

I might as well say, before I start, today's entry isn't going to be light reading. I have hit the buffers somewhat, as I often do just after Christmas. Maybe its the inevitable comedown after the highs of the festive season, but it is what it is, and I feel how I feel.

I've been watching Every Number One Of The Eighties on MTV classic, and it made me wistful for that decade, as if transporting myself there would be the solution to all of life's problems - a decade when my memory would have it that I had no responsibilities (or responsibility) and everything was relaxed and fun. Of course, being who I am, and having the reflective nature I do, I couldn't let it lie there, and now find myself disecting the past and reflecting that it wasn't all I crack it up to be.

I look at things through the prism of what I shall charitably call 'my mental issues'. In truth, they are not some recent phenomenon (indeed I don't think I ever thought they were) - but of course, back there in the past they had no name. I was just Dave, not understanding why my mind worked the way it did.

I've spent a great deal of my life trying to hide parts of myself away. Always terrified of being questioned or probed about why I am doing something or what I feel the need to say. As a teenager it is not east to explain why you have to walk the same way to a location, and it was torture trying to undertake one of my little rituals without being seen and mocked. Looking back I cannot begin to really recall how much stress I was under, but there was always that numb sensation at the back of the mind that the floodgates will not hold out forever, at some point the world will burst into my bubble and I would be lost in it, unable to cope amidst the noise and the chaos when all I ever wanted then was peace and order. That's the thing with OCD, everything needs to be in order, just so. I used to physically recoil at, for example, a car backfiring. I was so wound into stress at coping that I was a ticking timebomb. It amazes me to this day that I held out so long before everything disintegrated.

As a young adult in the late eighties and through the nineties, again I suppose life was not as rosy as daydreaming about it suggests. Perhaps this was when I was first truly aware that everything was wrong. I've never been good at sharing pain, especially so to people I feel closest to. How do you tell someone you love that everything is wrong? How can you face up to them when you are blue and explain that it is not them, it really is not them, but that you cannot be anything but blue? Then of course I was still hiding rituals away to get me through. I must have appeared so distant at times as I tried to cope with it all in secret.

I tried different ways around the problems back then. Drink was one way, something I relied on very heavily until I was about 30. Drink suppressed the immediate feelings, and offered temporary reprieve, as well as being a handy cover for my occasionally bizarre behaviour, but of course it is a depressant itself and only served to add to the spiral. It also has the side effect of making you act like an arse to the people you love the most sometimes. If that's you, just know that I am sorry now and I was back then too. It wasn't jsut drink though, I detested myself, or rather, I detested being ill and being permanently stressed and I tried so many ways to numb the feelings. There were so many ways I tried to be different so that I was no longer ashamed of being different, so that 'different' became my norm. What do you do when you cannot share the whirlwind inside? I actually feel tense at this moment thinking about it. How the breakdown of 2009 was the culmnation of (literally) decades of denial, hiding, transferral and stress.

Of course now the truth is out, my family and friends know I have been unwell, and I know the signs to look out for. However, still, in the back of my mind I know how hard it is to share the feelings, the rawness of OCD and Depression and I feel guilty at the thought of burdening anyone else with it. It's lonely, and the weird thing is, loneliness is the thing I am most scared of now. I don't want to be alone. So I have to find a way of sharing and it not causing consternation, or we are headed back to square one and I've been there before. It's not somewhere I'd recommend to anyone.

Under the veil

He glanced at the clock on the mantle, it was shortly after midday but he had no clear idea on which day, not since the fear had taken him. In his mind he positioned all the players in his life, where they might be, what they would be doing at such a time on any given day. Familiar faces brought some temporary repreive as did the thought of their everyday activity; so warm and usual, so comforting and normal. As briefly as he was comforted, however, he became painfully aware he was, in truth, home alone.

There was a strange stillness in the room, and he fancied he heard a muffled sound from the corner. A giggle? No, the sound was harsher. A cackle. Unmistakable, they were laughing at him again. Always the same, they mock him, they hide in the shadows and laugh at his pain. He had been terrified of them coming today. In truth, he had found it harder to suppress the sounds these past few days, or perhaps it was weeks? He couldn't recall. He used to be able to reason with them, to get some peace until she returned.

At the thought of her, the cackling stopped. She was his angel, the girl he had fallen for years before. She loved him despite the weakness of his mind, maybe because of it. The whirlwind abated when she drew near, her voice was soothing and her touch gentle. How could he tell her he felt so much weaker? How could he burden her further? No, she had a life to lead too, it wouldn't be fair to tell her about the fear. The cackling was back, this time there were more voices laughing, but the laughter was different, there was all of a sudden a heaviness to the air and a feeling of genuine menace. The air began to chance hue. He closed his eyes and promised himself this could not be, it was all a trick, their trick. The air could not change hue.

He slowly opened his eyes, but already everything was different. The air was tight around him, like a gauze wrapping. Every breath was a struggle. He was still in the room, but it had changed somehow. He could make out furniture, tables, the walls but it was through a haze. The edges of things had become soft, and the centre sharp and painful. 'It's all wrong' he whispered, and caught through the fog shapes moving. Children perhaps? No, they were cackling, they were here too, inside the fog, behind the veil, laughing and pointing.

He couldn't hope to survive in a world like this, he could trust nothing and hear no-one. Laughter and haze were all he could reason. The cackling swirled about his head like a furious drumming and shapes moved in the mists about him. He dropped to his knees. 'I can't see her face, I can't hear her voice', he cried out. 'He can't see her face, he can't hear her voice!' came a chorus in reply.

He curled into a ball and wept for what felt like hours. Slowly he realised the room was back as it was before. At least, it seemed so to him. He staggered to the chair and glanced at the clock on the mantle. It was shortly after midday, but he was not entirely sure which day. He was terrified.

A good airing

I had intended to write the short story today that I have mentioned in a previous post (the excellent idea), however as on so many other days, time has slipped through my fingers and I have found myself completely preoccupied with other thoughts.

'Preoccupied with other thoughts' is, as you might guess reading my earlier entries, my euphemism for depression. Depression is a rotten, sneaky and thoroughly wicked disease. I hate it as a whole, I loathe every aspect of it, but one of the things that most angers and upsets me is the way depression makes me feel, the havoc it wreaks on my emotions.

Sometimes I can stand looking at a winter wonderland and feel snowflakes gently land on my skin and slowly melt and I, in turn, will melt at the sheer beauty of the world even in the depths of winter; at how the snowy landscape, in it's own way, is every bit as beautiful as a cornfield playfully kissed by summer breezes on a sun-drenched July afternoon. Then there are depression days and I look at the same scenery and there is nothing, nothing but a yawning chasm where joy should be and a lingering and inescapable feeling of sadness for myself that I cannot feel as I should feel.

The sadness that depression imparts is not like the feelings one gets at the end of a tear-jerker, or watching the news show the world finding another thousand ways to let itself down. Depression sadness is destructive and long-lasting (indeed in the depths of it, it feels perennial), it absorbs anything positive around it and turns it into emptiness. When I am like this, I yearn to feel something, anything, to break the hold sadness has over me, but everything that would normally work will not - it either has no effect, or depression turns it negative, I become even sadder that something I love has not made me better, hasn't seen off the demons.

Then there is the guilt, the awful self-loathing and guilt that I cannot respond appropriately to loved ones or friends. Guilt that I don't speak up or cry for help and guilt when I do, burdening a happy spirit with my decline. This is all depression's doing too, a further twist of the knife and a tightening of it's hold on me. An ever-decreasing circle of sadness and guilt, a maelstrom in the water of life dragging me down and down and down. I would find it hard, perhaps impossible, to describe the blackness of the furthest depths or the bleakness of being there.

Why am I writing about this today? Last night I went out for Christmas dinner with my friends. It was a fabulous night, I thoroughly enjoyed it and it is always wonderful to have reason to remember why you love the friends you love. At one point I talked, very briefly, about being ill this year and I caught my hand shaking. My hand has never been a shaker, not even when I was a heavy drinker in my youth. It scared me a little to be honest, especially as I had left my medication at home and knew I had missed taking it and would not take any until today. In and of itself neither I suppose are terribly dramatic, but the seed of doubt had been planted in my head, and that is all depression needs sometimes.

Today I have been fretting about it, thinking about it, obsessing over it. I have already gone through a cycle of terrible guilt. I had a great night last night with 5 wonderful people and I hate that I have spent today musing on my illness. I hate the amount of medication I take and I hate how long I have been on it and will remain on it. Of course, when Bagpuss goes to sleep, all his friends go to sleep too, and Professor Yaffle, my OCD, has taken the oppurtunity to seize on my weakened resolve and state and I have found myself stuck in some weird little routines today. All part of the spiral.

I know it, I name it, I can write about it and I can hold on to yesterday and tomorrow as places where it has no hold. Right now though, in this moment, here, its not where I wanted to be today. It never is.

Blogging the things I find it hard to say

One of the advantages of regularly updating a blog which your loved ones often drop by to read is that it gives me an outlet to say some of the things it is hardest to say. I have never been good at opening up as anyone who knows me well could attest to, and its a trend that has got deeper as life has gone on. It is the price of living alone I guess that I have got used to bottling things up, or dealing with them here where no-one can see.

There are often so many things I want to talk about, but I can't find the right time, or the right words to do it, I am much more comfortable making people laugh and smile than letting them worry about me and how I am. Yet, in the cold light of day, all I am doing is hiding myself and postponing dealing with what troubles me which in itself has led to some of the problems of the last year and a half. Having said that, I don't want anyone to think I am constantly in turmoil, at least 95% of the time when I say I am fine, I really am, but there are always the other times, when I am really not. So, here in the sanctuary of the blog, is a taste of what I sometimes want to say.

Since the meltdown of last year, I have had to get used to some new realities pretty sharpish. For example, it worries me how long I am going to be on medication, I don't like my mental health being dependant on it. The tablets sometimes make me tired, not tired as in having a disturbed night's sleep, but weary, knackered, worn out. It makes me feel older suddenly, not something I enjoy. In fact, it terrifies me; I want to feel young and full of energy, otherwise I am hurtling in the wrong direction. I know the medication is doing a job, I just wish I didn't need it anymore.

Of course, I do need it, and that is why I have had to come to the hardest state of affairs to accept. Emotionally, mentally, I am vulnerable. I suffer from mental illness, I cannot rely on my emotional state to get me through. There were times over the last few months that I wasn't sure I could trust my responses at all. I have spent years building up a hard outer shell, almost impervious to outside influences without realising the real attacks were coming from the inside. There were so many times I could, I should have let people in, and I am so sorry now that I didn't. It has been a tough transition to begin viewing things emotionally through the prism of OCD and depression but perhaps now I can understand better some of the stranger reactions I have had over the years to people, and events.

The biggest mistake I have made was a few years ago accepting it was my lot (and considering it the best option for me) to live alone, that I would make a poor life partner for anyone. If I have a biggest regret in life, this is it. It's not the best option, and as 'easy' as I might find it on a day to day basis, it really isn't. It's not so much that I am currently single, it is that I have somehow deleted the files in my databank that deal with communicating love and romance. Sabotage of the self. It eats at me, it really does. I hate that I have become petrified of confessing to feelings. It annoys me that I just referred to discussing my feelings as 'confessing'. I can write poetry, but I can't tell someone I think they are fantastic and they make my heart skip a beat or ten? I come home at night to darkness and silence. What sort of fool am I to have decided that was best for me?

So, there we have it. Some of the things I wish I had said years ago, months ago or weeks ago on those occasions when 'I'm fine' is a bare-faced lie. I really should have said more, more often. I am sorry I was too foolish to do so. Love you all.

Fear

Sometimes you have too much time to think. I think I have had too much time to think lately because I have been thinking about fear. Fear is very sneaky in that it uses being thought about as a way to get a toehold and start that niggling, nurdling and burrowing it does into the subconcious and suddenly from thinking about fear, I am afraid.

I've never been scared of things, or people. I have always been most scared of myself, of what I am or what I might be, of the things I could do, or would do or even sometimes will do. Fear of myself is my nemesis, it is the antithesis of everything in me that smiles, and makes those around me smile, it is selfish and introverted and deceptive. It feeds off every perceived weakness and provokes weaknesses that were never there before. Fear is, quite literally, the thing that has driven me to just about every poor choice I have made, it is the source of my mistakes and many of my regrets.

Yesterday I wasn't afraid, and the world was as it always is for me; soft, slow moving, friendly and entertaining. However, somewhere between falling asleep last night and typing this blog entry this evening, fear got in and started causing mayhem. Every thought I am having as I write these lines, or in moments of contemplation between paragraphs, it is there, just off to the right, just out of eyeshot but brooding, laughing and plotting. I can't blank it or ignore it, all I can do is beat it, send it away, not be scared any more. That is the rub, however, what do you do to beat fear? Today's answer might not be the same as yesterday's, or last month's.

For all the time it sits there, wallowing in it's own insipidness, it will cheapen everything I am. All my plans will be worthless or doomed to failure, all choices will be fraught with danger, every decision will be the wrong one - even when it is the right one. ESPECIALLY when it is the right one. I find it terribly difficult to put into words what it is to be scared, I am trying here, but it isn't easy. Giving fear physicality and a location at least helps me to start to understand a little better and I will find the right response. I will find, at some point, what set fear running and I will deal with it, dissipating the presence off to my right and setting me back on my merry way. The usual Dave with the usual jokes and the usual smile.

Right now, however, I am scared and I don't know why, and I hate feeling like this.

And the flipside is unchecked mania

Thought it was time for another piece all about what is is to be me. The deconstruction of a legend, or something similar. I have written previously on my blog about the OCD I suffer from and the depression it has caused over the years. On the other side of depression though, and just as troublesome, is what I call mania.

Mania is the emotional opposite of depression, but they are definitely siblings. It is the state I find myself in when the emotion is pulsating and forcing its way out of me, everything needs urgent evacuation or it will fry me from the inside. There are times when I just have to react, dramatically, to events around me - whether that be to shout at the TV news or to laugh outwardly, loudly and embarassingly at a sub-par joke, as if the laughter were the vocalisation of anger at the paucity of the material.

It is not, however, just the big and outward gestures and signs of mania that are troublesome to me. Mania is the little man with the stick who pokes and pokes and won't let up at every opportunity. The force that makes me go that little bit too far, further than my comfort zone in what I say or do. I find myself telling lurid tales just that little bit too lurid for polite company, I am telling tales to shock and I know it. It makes me crave the reaction, sate myself with other's raised eyebrows or disapproving looks. Mania gets off on disapproval, mania is typing these words right now.

I want people to be shocked, I want them to recoil, I want the damn mania (and just who do you think made me type that? poke, bloody poke). It feeds the depression, it is fuel, it is a diaretic for the soul, the two of them are so in cahoots, it is surprising I have ever managed to present a sober and level headed front. At least, that is how it feels when I am manic. Of course it subsides and of course I then find my level.

Why write about it? Well, the mania has coloured parts of my life just as much as the OCD and the depressive episodes have. Every time I have fallen in love I have committed myself to it (at least to my internal satisfaction) completely, the buzz from it is narcotic and I feel it's withdrawal for a long time after the details of her face have faded from memory. In that sense it is helpful - when I get withdrawal pangs when someone goes away, I am normally already starting to fall. Mania is what made Friday and Saturday big nights out in the nineties - hang it all out there and let the weekend blow your mind. It felt like the only option - be out of control and let the emotions rip their moorings.

Mania makes me write poems that illiterate - lest the words miss out on a welcoming world of wonder. Every word I write or say has a purpose when I am manic - it is crystal clarity to depression's haze. This whole piece, by the way, was conceived in a flash on the A47 - one moment's complete overreaction to undimmed headlights and I was writing the why all the way home in my head.

When I am depressed, I don't know how to know myself, when I am manic I HAVE to know myself - a different type of raw necessity - evacuate those emotions and ride the wake behind them waiting until it all subsides into the crushing lows in the immediate aftermath. There's truth, there's truth without reason and there's reason without truth, and I spend my life juggling all three.

I am Dave, and I am manic. And this is an evacuation in words.

Monochrome World

One thing you might notice if you stop by my blog regularly is that I try not to take life too seriously. I've always used humour and I'll be very honest here, it is a useful shield. That is what makes the contrast with my illness and depression so stark and painful.

Humour is levity and light and I can find little wrong with the world when I am laughing with it, or at it. However, when a bout of depression strikes, it is like a shadow descends over everything and emotion is drawn out of the world as if it were a poison. It is worse than sadness, it is the absence of sadness or happiness, an empty yearning for some sort of emotional response, but the emotion will not come. I have sat and stared blankly at the TV screen when a comedy I would always enjoy is showing, but even classic gags that would have me rolling on normal days wash over me without registering. My face will contort into a phantasm of a grin, a cruel mockery of real enjoyment. Or I will catch something sad on the news, or a moving film and watch dispassionately. At times I have felt a tear run down my face but inside I have no feeling of it - it is merely condensation.

People seem unfamiliar and drab as I desperately scramble to build a cocoon to hide in, they have no impact and are empty shells, vessels drained of all content. A collection of words and movements I long to hide from. Open the window and everything is coming at me through a muffler, the clarity of individual sounds rolled into a constant dull hum, even noise cannot escape the bleakness, it is being strangled. My surroundings are the same, but the colour and vibrancy have fled, leached out by the depression, a pencil sketch of what was a magnificent watercolour.

That is how it is, day after day, living a film noir, forcing myself to do a bad impression of emotional investment into conversations and all the time feeling hollowed out, ruinous. The irony is, I can't even get angry about it as emotions are stuck on the event horizon, inaccessible. In the world but not of it, distant and utterly alone. Then it passes, and I wake one morning as if the previous days hadn't happened and the colour, sound and laughter flood back with the tears.

So, that's really why I use humour - self-diagnosis. If I can laugh, then I'm OK for today at least. That's something I guess.