Losing it

Bubbling away behind the scenes is a deep seated and mostly undisclosed fear of mine. The fear that my mind is not strong enough to fight the demons that afflict it and will one day snap, leaving me as no longer me, but some unrecognisable version unable to relate to the people around me, the people I love, the way I do now.

The trouble is, what's normal and what's not? Everyone has their idiosyncracies, little things they say or do that help define them. There is no set series of actions and reactions that everyone follows that I can hang my hat on as normality. How would I know if what I do is (or will be) taking me down a path where the me of right now would no longer recognise the me that emerges? I guess that is the key to the fear, that I will not know, I will be part of the change, all the time thinking I am the same, constant as it were, when to all those around me my actions and reactions slip further and further from the reality of now.

Some things I do at the moment give me cause for concern on occasion. I sometimes stop and talk to pussy cats and I am forever anthropomorphising stuffed animals. Do either of these things hurt anyone? No. Do they make me a bit daft? Yes. Neither of these is the point though. The fact is i know that cats do not understand me and I know full well that teddy bears are not real, but it is comfortable to pretend, it is a compensation for some of the harshness of reality. And there is the rub. I know that neither of these actions make sense, and yet I crave the comfort of doing them. I normalise the actions in my mind, I convince myself its OK to be daft. And don't get me wrong, it is totally OK to be daft.

The problem is, however, this process of normalisation. It is not just harmless, daft, eccentricity that is normalised. As an OCD sufferer, there are complicated rituals and compulsions that my mind normalises without my say so, on the quiet. There are some things I simply cannot do without performing a ritual alongside it. No-one else will have a ritual quite like mine (or for most people, at all) associated with that action and yet sitting here in the cold light of day it is absolutely the normality for me. It is what I need to do to leave the house, or cross the street or even say goodbye to a friend.

You see where my problem lies? My mind is already normalising the abnormal. Already I am doing things that go against my pure understanding of normality and replacing that interpretation with a new paradigm of normal. When does it stop, where does it stop? My fear is losing the things about me that I love, and that make others love me. I don't want people to have to understand me, tolerate me or pity me. I want the things I do to make sense and to some be absolutely magnificent. I want someone to know me as wonderful and there not need to be a 'but....' The biggest fear of all, though? That I have already lost it, I am already down that dark path and the kindness of those around me means they haven't the heart to tell me. The fear that long, long ago I stopped being me and now noone will ever be able to love the me that came into the world because he is lost, forever.

Its not a comfortable fear, but I know enough of mental illness to know the dangers that beset me.

She turns away

At times she will decline from view
And hide in life's long grass,
Leaving me to muddle through
Towards the bottom of the class.

Yet just upon the lowest point,
From her hiding place she'll spring,
My make-it-up life to annoint
And her treasured warmth to bring.

So thus we play it, to and fro,
Once here, then far away.
Collapsing as she turns to go,
Ecstatic should she stay.

Too flighty is my flippant heart
To keep her here, ensnared.
I've not the means to play that part
And see this circle sqaured.

With no possibility of parole......

Another of the facets of mental illness, and one which I have become accutely aware of, is that it carries a life sentence. Now I do not mean mental illness cannot be treated, or that it cannot go into hiding, but that it has been, is, and will always remain a factor in my life.

To look at it another way, it is not impossible to change my face or my body - not that I can conceive of any reason I should want to mind you! Any changes that are made under the knife of a surgeon or via intensive workout and the like are merely amendments to the core however, additions or changes to something whole and distinct. If I beef up my biceps, they still remain the arms that once held you, nothing can alter that fact. They remain the arms I fondly hope will wrap around a loved one once again. So it is with mental illness, any change to my behaviour or way of thinking is against a backdrop of the core me. OCD and depression alongside the heightened state of anxiety they bring are as much a part of Dave as my ridiculous face.

When I think about my state of mind, it is through the prism of past illness and experience. If I slip into a depressed state, I compare it to previous bouts of depression to see how deep, how troubling, how sustained it is likely to be. If I act on a compulsion, I do it in the knowledge of what it is, a need or compulsion within me that is always there, waiting to assert itself, waiting to fire up the anxiety and shoot that metallic taste into my mouth as adrenalin kicks in. My mood is set firmly against previous moods and feelings, it is the only way to make sense of, or understand it.

The hardest thing about this awareness is the bitter taste it leaves. Disability, whether it be physical or mental, can feel like a curse. Life can be terrbily unfair - unfair to those born at the wrong time, or in the wrong place, or unfair in the prevailing conditions of any given individual. For me, it is mental illness that defines much of my life. Whether that be joy at the symptoms losing their grip over me, or despair at a laspe into bleakness. What I am saying is that it remains a factor, always; I was born with it, I fought it, at times I defeated it, it is quiet, it is active, it is simply there - asleep or awake it makes no difference. It is. Terribly unfair, but awfully true.

So, I am left with but one conclusion - I have to accept mental illness as being as much an integral part of who I am as my hammer toes, the funny twisted bit of cartilege in my ear or my impressive Roman nose. Only by accepting it can I ever fully understand and deal with it. I cannot be me without accepting and understanding all of me. I have not been me for far too long, and it comes at its own price - happiness will always be false happiness when one is failing to accept the whole. It is the happiness of a fraction of the self, not a happiness of the totality.

And so it is, without any glee, I am Dave, I am 40 and mental illness is much a part of me as anything else. We start from acceptance, we move from there.

The Voice Within

For every voice there is a countervoice singing dischordantly. And so it is with me, because for as long as I can remember, there has always been an alternative voice speaking to me. It is another Dave, one who treats life very differently.

He is the Dave that gave up 25 years and more ago, the Dave that refused to fight, that buckled under the weight of depression. Very few of you will have met him, some of you will have heard him for occasionally this is the Dave that speaks for both of us, the one who gains the upper hand and control of the host. I feel the need to out him, talk about his background and reason, in case he ever begins to show up more often and with a louder voice.

He is the me that never really got hold of his drinking habit in his twenties and did things to his body that would constitute abuse in any polite society, the me that collapses into tears for no reason at the cruelty of the world. Think of him as the Dave that forgets people love him for who he is, and never want him to be something he cannot or will not be. For him, life is a lonely, bitter struggle against impossible odds, and he simply cannot feel the warmth of the arms that embrace him, metaphorically or in reality.

For all his negativity, I pity him, because he could so easily be me, mental illness is a lifelong fight and there are many times that both voices will speak. I can only ever take one road at a time, and the battle is to stay on the right track. His way is the simpler way, to give up, to admit defeat and let depression wreak its ruin upon me. It is so hard to explain in simple words how much pull that option has sometimes, despite the inevitable bleakness of the outcome, because fighting is tiring, and you can never win the war, only the immediate battle.

Of course, that is why I must never let his voice become my voice. I have to rage against the dying of the light, I have to gird myself and spring into action in every battle, no matter how hopeless or difficult it seems, because it is simply the only option that keeps me whole. I said I pity him, and with good reason, because for him the war is over, and there is only bleakness and despair, his demons cannot be bested and they will take him, piece by piece, until there is nothing left. However low I get, however desperate life seems, I am still fighting. I cannot begin to comprehend the horror of life as my countervoice.

In the short term

Another of the gifts that depression has given me is a chronic case of short-termism. What do I mean by that? I refer to my inability to focus properly on the longer term aspects of life because the short term keeps getting dominated by the black dog, and any attempt to plan the longer term gets sharply and rudely snapped into the here and now.

Take tonight as an example. For the last few days I have been on something of a high, content in my own way and getting a kick out of existence. That's usually a harbinger of a looming crash. And so here I am, writing my blog becoming more and more aware of an attack of depression settling in. Apart from the process of putting words to thoughts here, my entire concentration is upon depression. How deep are we going this time? How long will I be there? Why is this happening now, what was the trigger? And how do I counter it, what weaponry is to hand? In fact I just stopped writing for a few minutes to think over those very things. So, as you can imagine, this sort of short term thinking wipes out anything longer term. Next month, next year might as well be next century right now.

If I do manage to shake off the immediate long enough to think about the longer term, the black dog has other tricks to pull. The denigration and mockery of dreams. Who do I think I am to dream of this or that? The black dog wants it to be known that he is my sole focus and raison d'etre, the permanent war against depression is all that I need to sustain me. Or so the black dog would have it. The harder I try to dream, the more unreasonable and wicked the counter attack - the certainty of failure is thrown in my face, for so it will always be with me, he says. Why plan for a great romance, I don't love myself so why would she? Is that really the black dog talking, or have I slipped into my old habits of self-doubt? Either way I am thinking of the dog, and even those examples of long term thinking have quickly subsided in the gathering gloom.

It has not always been this way. I used to dream, I used to plan things in 1, 5 and 10 year segments. And then I failed just once to follow through. The black dog never forgets a weakness he can expose, every plan became that plan, the one I didn't follow through. It is repulsive to be this way, I deserve better and, more importantly, the people I care about deserve better. The thing is, if I managed to gain the upper hand and start planning the future again, I honestly don't know what Dave I want to be. Dave the adventurer, Dave the lover, Dave the carer? There is so much untapped potential, but to tell you the truth, the black dog knows, and now you will know, that I am almost as terrified at the prospect of fulfilling potential and I am of never managing to do so. I am just a little bit scared that if I spend too long in the longer term I will lose myself there as a place that will always be better than now.

As I have said before, many many times, depression is a wicked and cruel illness.

Of sorrow

I wanted to write a little today about one of the facets of depression I find it hardest to deal with (not that any of it is a particular breeze to be fair). Specifically I am talking about sadness. Not the sort of sadness that comes with bidding farewell or anything by Dido, but a deep, underlying and seemingly permanent sadness deep within that seems to afflict everything once depression takes hold.

It can take many forms, one of which is to colour everything black. When in this frame of mind I have no need of the Stones to tell me to paint it black, everything is already there. The world is in a permanent sepia picture from long ago, faces are contorted into false smiles or grimaces, and everything, but everything is forced, false and unsatisfying. I hate it when sadness is this overt, it is a world where the good guy never gets the girl, heroes go unheralded and all of life is conducted under a cloud, a looming threat of disatisfaction, with whispered promises of ruin on the breeze.

For me, when things are overt like this, I find myself seeing sadness all around. The tears of a child that has lost their bear, the hackneyed ending to a drama on the box, whatever it is, it becomes to me a painful sorrow that is hard to take. It is as if the depression within me reaches out to feed on the sadness, I can feel the loss of the bear, it touches me. No, that is not right, actually it assails me, the sadness invades me and sets up camp. In the end I become like a sponge that has taken on too much water. I am drenched in sadness and inevitably it floods back out again in tears or worse in fevered mania, a state of being I desperately try to avoid inflicting on the world or those I love.

However, it is when sadness is not being overt that it is at its most pernicious. There is a core of sadness, hidden within that corrupts all other feelings, perverts normal, natural reactions and mocks the fleeting joys we have in life. It is as if sadness will not permit me to experience other emotional responses in the raw state, and wants all interraction viewed through its prism. So it is that I find myself laughing at a joke, but choking inside that humour is built on misery, or smiling at a photograph and yet within in a world of pain that I can no longer feel the hand I am holding in it or experience that day again. It becomes a second voice within that counters my reactions. The last word on the matter is taken by it, and of course that last word is sorrowful and bitter. I said it was pernicious, and so it is, for when I am under its spell, it will not let me enjoy the simple pleasures of emotional reactions.

Sometimes I read through my blog, and other writings I have jotted down in my life, and there is a thread. I see it everywhere, I see it in almost every poem I have ever written. There is a wistfulness in what I write, a wistfulness for the hope that is shut away behind the sadness, a deep regret that I struggle to feel the emotions I set in poetry, a longing to experience them without taint as I do when depression has subsided.  Those poems read very differently when depression is in town and the sadness takes control and I forget what it is like to love and laugh untrammelled, uncorrupted by sadness.

This is why joy experienced outside the confines of depression is so very precious to me. Indeed, if I tell you you have made me happy or make me happy, believe me that you have given me a gift I treasure above all others. You have given me true joy, something that in those dark times of depression I find myself wishing for every single day and yet always feels just out of reach. I couldn't ask you for anything finer.

How she became my muse

She began as a wondrous composite,
Of all beauty I had seen.
Amongst constructs, the most apposite
To reign as the poet's queen.

And then, on a wistful, wandering day
There stood before a vision.
Such slender grace, head turned away,
My heart felt it's first incision.

As time slipped by, I caught her gaze,
More often than I should.
I fast lost count of all the ways
I'd love her, if I could.

Her face would soften when I came,
Hair framing that sweet smile.
I'd try to grin, but blush with shame,
As I invoked the crocodile.

No other girl leaves me so dumb,
So rooted to the spot.
My beloved muse she has become
My forever to have not.

For thus it is when so inspired,
So totally in awe.
The gods in cruelty have conspired;
Her hand holds another's paw.