How the Darkness Spreads

I’ve written a few posts now about how depression effects me but I thought this time I’d write how it affects the people around me. I kept to my word, next time Henrik came online I brought a few things up and the events that followed really highlighted how hard this condition can be to other people.

It turned out, the email I sent those many months ago explaining why I thought it would be best to cut contact for a while, the email I exposed myself and everything I was feeling, the email I had worried about every day since I sent it, he didn’t read. His explanation was, and I’ll quote:

“I meant to, but I had sort of this walls are coming down on me, felt cramped, like shit piled up on me, so I never did. Are you mad at me now? I mean, it sounds pretty egotistic, but I just didn’t have the energy to focus on anything but what I was doing just there and then.”

It hit me then, the amount of emails I had sent him in the past when I was at my lowest, the amount of times he had listened whilst I vented out and cried, the amount of times he talked me out of taking the pills that were beside me. This isn’t easy to deal with, he never asked for it, it had to reach breaking point at some point. What makes it harder is the fact we are so far away from each other. He has told me in the past that the thing he finds hardest about all this is the fact he can’t just take it away, he can’t even be in the same country as me let alone the same room.

He has been going through a very rough time himself and no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t blame him for not reading the email, the ones he has had in the past have been hard to read to put it lightly. This condition doesn’t just emotionally drain you, it drains the people who have to see it too. They worry, they get upset, in some ways it becomes contagious.

I was pretty sure before that I would carry on hiding my depression, despite how much I know it doesn’t help me, and this has just confirmed to me why I should. I don’t want people to worry, to get upset, to share this burden, I can’t do it to them. What scares me now is that as Henrik and I’s conversation went on it became increasingly clear that with everything going on in his own life right now I can’t rely solely on him to get me out, it’s become too much. This means that either I find another person to share this with or I try and deal with it on my own and no matter how much my head screams at me not to, I know deep down that it’ll be the latter option I go for.

Back to Business

It’s about time I got back into this blog writing. I have been back home from my job for about a month now and I have to say the weeks since being back, I’ve been feeling, well...good. Getting constantly abused and knocked down by members of the public whilst you stood on the street in all weather for at least 8 hours a day, usually more, doesn’t sound like the best therapy for a clinically depressed person but surprisingly, for me, it has worked. I came back with better priorities, a new view on life, I still got down now and then but I thought about things differently, it didn’t affect me as much.

I guess that’s why I haven’t updated since I’ve been back, I started this blog mainly to come to terms with my depression and since being back I haven’t felt like I’ve needed to do that, but, as they say, all good things must come to an end. Deep down I knew it wouldn’t last, depression just doesn’t go away like that and the last few days I have been gradually feeling worse. Right now I’m still nowhere near the extremes I used to be but I can feel it coming, slowly seeping deeper into me.

My new way of thinking tells me that there must be a reason for this change of mood and I’ve actually thought of a number of candidates:

1) Since being back I have acted more and more like a counsellor for Amanda. Her hysteria about her weight, about food and even life in general is taking new extremes and naturally she turns to me. Getting messages late at night saying that she can’t sleep due to the fact she has just taken a load of diet pills, fat burning drinks, caffeine drinks, and all on an empty stomach so she feels like she’s about to have a heart attack isn’t exactly going to make me feel better. I have told her that when we go back to university (in about a week) I am taking her to see someone, that I can’t act as her counsellor 24/7, that I need to start taking care of myself for once. Whether she goes ahead with it, time will tell, but I’m definitely not going to be as lenient as I was before, for both our sakes.

2) Going back to university. I never thought I’d say it but I think I’d prefer to stay at home. My parents are arguing even more due to the impending divorce, my dad still wanting things to be how they were. My relationship with my dad even tenser because of this, he still can’t accept the fact that I’m independent, that I’m no longer his ‘little girl’. I constantly feel smothered when I’m at home and that never bodes well for my mood, yet I’d prefer to be here than at my house in Durham. I don’t know why exactly I’m feeling so apprehensive. A part of it is my course, I’m not sure it’s the right course for me anymore. A part of it is my housemates. I’ve come to realise during this summer how different I am to them. Apart from maybe two (out of five) of them, they are very naive about life, very innocent and if thrust into the cruel world on their own would never cope. I guess I feel there may be some clashes. Also if I happen to have one of my bad moments, they really would have no idea what to do.

3) Henrik. I hate to think this but I can’t deny there’s a connection. With me thinking my head was now sorted I got back into contact. He had been sorting his own life out and I gave him the chance to vent out about issues, just like he used to do with me. Now, despite knowing he finds it hard to get online as regularly as he used to due to his working hours, I’m finding that I’m waiting, willing, for him to come online. If he does, we talk about everything other than what we should be talking about, we’ll talk till early hours of the morning, decide to go to sleep and I find myself lying in bed wanting to talk to him once again. Exactly how things were before. He hasn’t mentioned the email I sent, hasn’t mentioned anything of substance and I think it’s about time I bring it up. It can’t be a coincidence that when I cut contact from him I started to feel ok again and after I start talking to him again my moods deteriorate. I hate to think that he could be affecting me like that, the thought that I would be better off not ever talking to him again...I’ve decided, the next time I get a chance, I’ll bring up everything we need to talk about, my feelings, his feelings, and get things cleared up once and for all, then, then I’ll decide what to do.

There are so many things I could go into that haven’t been mentioned but I feel this post is already long enough. I can almost guarantee that I will be updating more regularly now, things right now seem like they can only get worse.

Short Musings

I was away for a job interview in London at the start of the week and whilst I was there I decided to stay for a few days with Amanda....well, actually, she practically begged me to stay, not that it took much begging on her behalf. I am getting worried about her. After asking how she was, she basically reeled off every classic symptom of depression, yet she still denies that she has a problem. There are times in the past where I’ve felt like I’ve gotten through to her about this but give it a day and then she’s back where she was before; in complete denial. I can’t really blame her for it, it took me the best part of three years to accept I had a problem, but then I didn’t have a sufferer of depression telling me that I was suffering from depression. We made a deal in the end as she’s just as worried about me as I am her. She wants me to go see a doctor about medication and if I do that she’ll go see one about her depression. According to her, now that I don’t have Henrik to rely on, I’m in need of medication even more than before and the fact I pushed him away is a clear sign I need help. I obviously find it hard to accept. I don’t like the thought that I can’t get through this on my own, that I need medication or some guy...albeit one I’m very fond of...to deal with life.

Despite this, I’m starting to regret pushing Henrik away like I did, though deep down I knew it was the most sensible thing to do. It was far too dangerous to rely so heavily on someone who was so far away from me and who I could only contact through email or MSN. But remembering back to times when he was there and helped me through some of my lowest points, I can’t help regretting the decision. I can’t go back on it though, not now, so I guess things are up to him now, he can email back if he disagrees with my decision or he can get on with his life knowing he won’t have the burden of dealing with my hysterical moments. The latter just seems so much more appealing doesn’t it.

Yet Another Thing Stolen from my Life

“What do you do when the only one who can make you stop crying is the one who made you cry?”


I mentioned in my last post that the reason today was such a shit day was because I pushed away the one person in my life who has the ability to make me smile even when I’m at my lowest...Henrik.

He is still the only one I feel that I have told willingly about my depression and definitely the only one I can talk to about it without holding anything back, but today I sent him an email explaining why I think it’ll be best if we stopped all contact. It doesn’t make sense does it; I mean it is pretty obvious that I care for him, quite a lot. I’ll even finally admit that it’s bordering on love, but really, I feel this was the best thing to do.

Before I go into the reasons behind my decision I’ll fill in a little about our history. We have been talking to each other for about a year and a half now and our conversations, mostly on MSN, were always fun, completely random, carefree. We would spend hours talking, day after day just putting the world to right. When I finally accepted that I had depression I felt like I had to tell him and it actually came easy to me. We would talk about it, I’d release the emotion I kept hidden from everybody else, he’d listen and be there for me to vent out. As my depression became worse our conversations quickly moved from relaxed to tense. The things I talked about became more serious, I would talk to him while feeling suicidal and he would try and talk me out of it. This became more and more frequent until I realised I had become completely reliant on him. He told me that he found the situation hard, hated the fact that he couldn’t do anything to take this depression away, he said that the suicidal moments always upset him and I began to feel so bad for burdening him with everything.

Obviously he wasn’t online for me to talk to every hour of the day and I would start to send him emails while he was offline. I became this needy, emotional, insecure person and I hated it. Every conversation lately had been depression based and I had to stop it somehow. I don’t want to be this pathetic and weak person, I want things to go back to how they were when we actually had fun talking to each other but I can’t see it happening, so instead of bringing him down even further I’ve decided to stop completely.

My heart is practically screaming at me but it was something I had been thinking about for some time now. I do care about him and I don’t want to be responsible for bringing him down anymore. He’s better off not talking to me and so I’ve put it into action. I’m still feeling crap about it, it’s going to take a while to get over but hopefully it’ll help me move on with my life.

I had never told him how much he meant to me because I could tell that his feelings back weren’t as strong. I was, and still am, living in a dream world, hoping that he would say the words that I longed him to say. I need to get a grip, go back to reality and this is the only way I can see it happening.

I blame my depression for pushing him away. I hate the fact that it’s controlled so many aspects of my life and now it’s reduced me to a lovesick shell of a woman. But there is some good in all this. I now have an added determination to overcome this condition. If I can overcome it and become the woman I used to be then maybe I could get back in contact with Henrik. How long this determination lasts before the depression also takes that away from me, only time will tell.

Wake Up to the Delicate Sound of Thunder

“Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.”
- Steven Wright


Where to start...today has not been the best day in the world, in fact, I would go as far as saying it was actually a shit day, one of the shittiest of shit days ever to grace the calendar of completely shit days.

I woke up to the sound of my parents screaming at each other, or rather, my dad screaming at my mother while she stood there and took it, a rather frequent occurrence at the moment . I haven’t really spoken much about the divorce, if I’m honest, I’m not sure what I should be writing because my opinions on it are not the opinions I should be having. A year ago when my mother told me that she was going to have a talk with my dad and end things my first thought was what took you so long. Ok, so my feelings towards my dad weren’t exactly great at that time anyway, but still, should I really be supporting it?

Both said that they wanted to settle it amicably but my dad increasingly made things difficult and it became obvious that he wasn’t going to cooperate. Today was the day he received the legal letter from my mother’s solicitor saying that the case has been taken to court, an action my mother had actually put off for far too long in my opinion. Even though he knew it was coming, he still flipped. My mother in the end went out to clear her head, my dad became emotional and sentimental towards me for about ten minutes before shutting himself away again in his online world like nothing had happened. It’s then that I realised that actually this divorce does affect me, it does bother me.

Neil, my counsellor, likes touching on the subject in our sessions. He often brings it up and asks how it makes me feel and I always convince him that it doesn’t bother me, well I try to at least. He never believes me, tells me that it must be effecting me somehow and it’s only now that I realise that it does, but not for the usual reasons. It doesn’t bother me that my parents are splitting after 25 years, these things happen, what bothers me is the emotional turmoil that it’s putting them through and the fact that they try to act like nothing is wrong in front of my brother and I, though that is mostly my dad’s doing. I hate this indifference I feel towards the whole thing when it comes to my own feelings. It upset me for the first time today. A year on and it finally hits me, but still, there’s this coldness that I feel towards the whole situation, this unresponsiveness and that's what upsets me. I know that it’s still not affecting me as much as it should. Come tomorrow, I’ll probably go back to how I was before, completely indifferent, and I have to question whether this is normal. I feel that my depression is contributing somehow. Ironic really, the condition that makes me feel so bad about situations that shouldn’t trouble me is making me feel fine about a situation that should be distressing me.

This depression is controlling every aspect of my life right now. It’s crippling. As well as making me indifferent to my parents’ divorce, it has made me push away the one person who could bring a smile to my face, the main reason today was such a shit day and which I’ll put in another post to make things easier to read.

Have you ever been alone in a crowded room?

“Sometimes when I say ‘Oh I’m fine’ I want someone to look at me in the eyes and say ‘Tell the truth’”

Nights are when I feel worst and these last couple of nights have been no exception. Right now I’m writing this purely to distract myself. It’s hard for me to describe exactly what I’m feeling; an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness, the lack of energy to simply go on, extreme loneliness despite knowing my friends are only a phone call away...

Maybe that’s the problem. I know how the conversation would go. They’d ask me what was wrong and the facade would go up. They’d hang up thinking I was fine, I’d hang up wishing they had probed deeper. This is where the hypocritical nature of my problem appears. I want people to know that I suffer from this, I want them to know that actually I’m not fine, I want them to see what I’m going through but at the same time I don’t want them to know, I want them to carry on believing that I’m a happy stable person. I’ve realised that I’m not going to tell them unless one day they decide to probe a little deeper, question me. Out of the four people who know about my illness, only one has been told willingly.

The first person to know was my mother, I told her that winter night after my early morning adventure. I couldn’t exactly deny that there was something up; I was in a complete state. Even though she suffers from depression herself and I’m very close to her, I find it very hard to talk to her about it. I never go into any detail and I have never mentioned how bad it actually is. I could never tell her that I consider suicide for example, and definitely couldn’t tell her how close I have actually got to it. When I feel like this, I can’t bring myself to go to her, I can’t let her see me because I don’t want to upset her.

Shortly after my Christmas episode I told Henrik, the only person I have told willingly. Now you can probably guess from the name, Henrik is Swedish. Being in different countries, we talk through MSN mostly. At the time, I needed someone to talk to. I had only just accepted that I had depression and he seemed the best person to help. Talking through MSN where you don’t see the person’s face and can’t hear their voice makes talking about my feelings so much easier. The main reason I hold back on telling people is because I don’t want them to judge me or suddenly view me differently. I don’t have that problem with Henrik. I put the fact that I’m still here purely down to him. He has saved me on a number of occasions though he probably doesn’t know it. There are many things I wish I could tell him but there are some things, even over MSN, I still can’t bring myself to say. The issue of course with MSN is I can only talk to him if I’m at a computer and he’s online. Lately he hasn’t been online as much due to work and other issues, meaning when I hit a down spell and he isn’t online, like now, I have to cope without him, something that is getting harder to do. Right now I would give anything to just talk to him; instead I’m left here feeling alone.

The third person to know was Amanda. I knew that when I went back to university after the Christmas break I would need someone up there to know, just so if I did try to do something stupid, someone would be there to look out for me and stop me. I told her because I felt I had to, not because I necessarily wanted to. I chose her out of all my university friends because I thought she would have the best chance of understanding. She suffers from anorexia and had confided in me a number of times. A lot of what she was feeling, I could relate to and so the decision to choose her came pretty easy. Actually telling her was another matter. In the end, she found out through a rather longwinded email (as you can see, I do tend to go on a bit sometimes). I don’t talk to her much about it, I still find it hard to talk to someone face-to-face when I’m in a state, but after Henrik being online less, I’ve had no choice but to rely on her a little more. I’m getting a little better at it, but now, me being back home in Wales and her living in London and currently jetting off to Zanzibar, knowing that she knows offers little comfort.

And then the fourth person is my counsellor. Not really sure he counts, but there we go. I’ve been seeing him for about six months now but as I see him through the university, I’m currently not having any sessions and I won’t start up again until October. Even though I find it hard to talk to him, still not over my face-to-face issues, he is easier to talk to than others. I don’t mind crying in front of him or showing how much everything is affecting me, and not having those weekly let-out sessions are definitely effecting me.

So I’m stuck with feeling alone, in need of a hug and in need of a shoulder to cry on. I often go through all the people I know and I wonder whether I could actually tell any of them. Some definitely wouldn’t understand, most would change how they treated me. Truth is I’m scared of letting people know, despite how badly I need it to happen. I guess all I can wish for is someday someone will see through my facade and that that day comes soon because I’m not sure how long I can take this loneliness.

The Slow Ringing of my Demise

These last couple of weeks since being back home I’ve decided that my new hate is the sound of a ringing telephone. My dad, having wrung up god knows how much debt, doesn’t exactly get his payments off in time. To be honest, I don’t think he can afford to, I mean he doesn’t work, he doesn’t earn anything apart from his pension and that isn’t much, all he does is waste his time on some online game and spend the little money he has on cigarettes. My mother has had to bail him out a few times, giving him some cash here and there, I’ve had to do the same. In fact, within two days of being back he had already asked me for money.

Well, after getting fed up of the credit card companies phoning him and demanding payments he has taken the very mature and adult decision to deal with it by ignoring the phone. No one in the house is allowed to answer it. The phone rings, we sit there, ignore it, and wait for the damn ringing to stop. It must ring at least 20 times a day now and I’m starting to lose my patience and sanity. The problem is, at first it just made me irritated, now, I’m getting irritated as well as terribly down. Every ring seems to get loader and sharper, each ring pierces right though me and now provides a nice countdown to a shit mood. And the phone rings every day, meaning it doesn’t matter if I wake up feeling relatively good, the sound of that telephone puts me right back down.

I didn’t get worried about it until earlier today. I was having coffee with my mother when someone’s mobile went off, the ringtone happened to be the sound of a ringing telephone. Even though the person answered the phone, and I knew perfectly fine that it wasn’t my house phone, it had the same effect on me. I felt incredibly down all of the sudden, everything seemed hopeless. I’m not sure what to do; my brain now associates the sound of a ringing telephone with a depressed mood, a depressed mood that hits so suddenly that if I was already in a vulnerable state, well, I dread to think what could happen.

To me it looks like I only have two choices. I either try and reverse my mental attitude by trying to associate the sound with something good, or, I throw the phone out of the nearest window after setting it alight into the path of an oncoming bus the next time it rings. No choice really, just need to find that lighter...

How the Darkness Hit

Looking back, I don’t think I have ever been completely happy. Of course, things have happened which have made me happy for a little while, but on the whole, I don’t remember a period of carefree happiness. I noticed a turning point at the time of my GCSE exams, I was 15 going on 16 and suddenly it wasn’t just sadness anymore, it was a prolonged feeling of hopelessness, it felt like something was eating away at me, taking away all energy and enthusiasm until all that was left was an empty shell. At that time, I had no reason to feel as bad as I did, my exams were going well, my life back home was stable and it wasn’t like I didn’t have any friends. The only thing I could think of that was causing it all was the pressures of growing up and so I hid it away. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t handle such a simple thing as growing older and I learnt to hide these feelings, I managed to put a smile on in public and people believed it.

As time went on, the facade I had created was becoming harder to keep up. I found myself unable to hold back tears and would often have to come up with excuses to explain to friends and teachers. This came easy to me due to the fact that things at home were starting to get a little tense. It offered the perfect get out. My parents were arguing because my dad had been spending money we didn’t have on god knows what. He didn’t work and had slowly become addicted to some online game. He knew more about peoples’ lives on that than he did about me or my brother. Money was tight and I was drifting further away from my dad, but still it seemed like there was something else contributing to my miserable outlook on life.

It’s hard for me to pinpoint when the suicidal thoughts started but I guess it was around this time. Still I would hide away, now even more ashamed for thinking such things just because I couldn’t deal with a little stress in my life. By the time I was in my last year of school, things at home had gotten pretty bad and I was just waiting for my mother to tell me that she was going to ask for a divorce. My chemistry teacher kept me back one lesson and I knew what he was going to say;

“I know something is up. Last year you were smiling away, I haven’t seen you smile once recently, what’s changed?”

It took me a while to answer, in the end I told him all about what was going on at home, my feelings about my dad, everything apart from the thing that deep down I knew was the real issue. I think he knew I was hiding something, to be fair; he had been the only one to notice the slight cracks in my facade. He suggested that I see the school counsellor and after some thought I agreed. My counsellor was a rather plump woman with strong religious beliefs and would often say that all I needed to do was think positively about things. This began to make me feel worse. I still hadn’t accepted that depression was the issue, I still hid away behind the convenient excuses, and she seemed to willingly believe that my stress at home was all that was behind my negative emotions. One session I outwardly said that I just wanted to give up, to which her reply was “I want you to start looking at the positive side of things, thinking positively will help you control your emotions” How could I think positively when all I could see was this bitter darkness that was draining away my energy? I started to skip sessions. I felt like she wasn’t taking me seriously, I felt weak, belittled, and I had this sudden urge to prove her wrong, to show her that she had misunderstood me. I wanted to kill myself so she could see that her get a grip attitude didn’t work. It lasted months. I became obsessed with death, researching into different methods. By this time, my mother had asked for a divorce, and I had started my summer job. I think this new distraction in my life helped me snap out of my recent obsession. I was going to start university in a few months; I would be 300 miles away from home, away from everything. I still felt down, I still knew something was wrong but I had some hope, I thought as soon as I got away from home, I’d get away from this curse, but it didn’t work out that way.

It wasn’t until Christmas time that I finally accepted that I had depression. I was back home and one night I locked myself in my room and began to cry hysterically. I didn’t want to be there any more; I had such a strong urge to kill myself that I had already taken more than the recommended dose of painkillers. But something snapped, I didn’t want to do it, I knew that I needed to get out and so at 2AM I walked out into the cold winter street with no coat, walked for miles not caring where I ended up. Of all the places to go, I ended up at TESCO. The security guard gave me a funny look when I walked in. I didn’t buy anything, I didn’t have any money on me, so I just walked around before deciding to go back home, receiving another funny look as I walked out. I was greeted at home by my very worried mother and all I could do was cry. It was at that point I accepted I had a problem and agreed to see a doctor.

Luckily for me, my university offers a free counselling service. I have weekly sessions with my counsellor during term time who is just a little more competent than my previous one. Medication has been recommended to me a number of times recently and I have only just gotten over my stubborn attitude towards it. My doctor, knowing how much I don’t want to go on anti-depressants, has put me on anti-anxiety medication for now but I know it’s only a matter of time before that’ll change. I guess we’ll see how things go.