The Catholic faith has this thing called Purgatory. Not quite Heaven, not quite Hell, it is a whole lot of nothing where souls sit for all eternity until judged worthy enough to enter Heaven.
For me, there’s no better analogy for what depression is like.
It is the Endless Void.
The Bottomless Pit.
The Big Empty.
For much of my life, I’ve struggled with depression. When things get tough, when I’m down on my luck, when I feel I have no one in my life and I’m all alone, there it is. Waiting for me. Ready to drown me with its dark, black tendrils and I, defenceless, let it envelop me.
At its worst, it tortures you while offering a knife to your throat, goading you to lean forward and set yourself free.
My worst bout came after finishing my final year of university. It started – as these things typically do – when I lost a girl I loved. She’d gone home to visit her parents in Sweden. By the time she was due to come back, the place we both worked had shut down – a place I adored working at and other kick to the mental scrotum.
There weren’t any other jobs – this was 2009. I graduated during a recession in full swing. As the months dragged on, the chances of getting her back or even finding any work at all seemed increasingly more remote. My heart sank, and I sank with it.
Depression can a suck a person dry. Even the strongest of us can be drained by its embrace.
Sending out a single CV in a day became a major achievement. Hell, even getting out of bed and playing Call of Duty was an arduous task.
What I had all the energy in the world for was self-loathing. I spent every day beating myself up. Every hour reminding myself that I’m a failure. Every minute wishing it was my last.
Eventually, I decided I needed help. I booked an appointment with a doctor, inventing a fungal infection as an excuse. So there I was, one fungi-free sockless foot stinking up the surgery, balling my eyes out.
She stuck me on citalopram. Aside from playing havoc with my sex drive, flipping me from ravenous beast to impotent failure at random, the drug created a wall between me and the depression. It was the strangest thing. I knew it was still there, but I couldn’t access it. Yet, it gave me the space to realise much of what I felt was due to my situation.
The solution was obvious: change the situation.
After ditching the drugs, I managed to get a job looking after autistic children and met a lovely lady. Things began to look up. It didn’t last. The job was a dead end, working for fascists more concerned in profit than a child’s health. They soon twigged that I gave a shit, and I was promptly shown the door. Freshly unemployed, the girl quickly ditched me for some flash wealthy prick laughably called Rich Forbes.
Hurt though I was, the inevitable spiral downward got put on a brief hiatus. I’d soon end up back in my hometown looking after my mental mother, then in the full swing of a bi-polar breakdown.
The novelty of the change kept me occupied, but soon wore off as tedium replaced it. Jobs were still scarce. Life at home was an unending horror. I couldn’t seem to get a break, and life moving forward looked ever more bleak. The only joy I had in my life was the odd occasion I could scrape together enough pennies to get drunk out of my skull.
The whole process robbed me of two years of my life before I started to get back on my feet. Even then, depression would haunt me.
I never looked up suicide techniques online, didn’t ever put myself in harm’s way with the hope of ending it. But I thought about it. I thought about it all the time. I understand why people do kill themselves. It seems easier than another day of the relentless dirge. When you are in that state, it is without end. The only light at the end of the tunnel is death.
It was therefore with a healthy sense of irony that I began reminiscing over those good old days when anxiety really began to take hold. Here I was, a few short years later, panicking over tumours, cancer, and any other ailment that looked vaguely pointy and dangerous. Somewhere along the line, I realised, I’d actually come to care about being alive. I wanted to be alive.
Let me tell you, when it heard about this travesty, depression was not impressed.
Despite splitting on the issue of pro-life/pro-choice, I’ve come to realise that depression and anxiety are very much two sides of the same coin.
Granted, there’s a few more differences. The lethargy of depression is not reflected by the bouts of energetic neurosis of anxiety, and depression doesn’t seem to exhibit anywhere near the number of side effects several gallons of cortisol pouring through your veins has.
Yet, there are strong links. Where anxiety seems to be a fixation on the future – what could happen – depression dwells on the past – what has happened. If anxiety is panicking over what seems like inescapable doom, depression is being trapped in your past.
It uses the exact same mental circles. The rivers of shit I spoke about before run just as strongly in depression as they do anxiety. You are trapped in the exact same loops. You will still continually fuel your own circle of despair.
I mentioned before that I’ve been doing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – which I should add has been going extremely well – and had somewhat of a revelation in a session this week.
At the heart of both my anxiety and depression is worthlessness. They are intrinsically tied. Both feed and draw strength from the same core feeling that I’m nothing.
In depression, I scour my past for evidence to back this idea up. Once I’ve found it, I linger on it. In anxiety, I actively hunt it in the present. If I can’t find it, I just invent it.
In figuring this out, I confirmed a long held belief that they were tied together – that the anxiety had been there all along, lurking behind the bouts of depression. I’d searched for the connection, and now I’ve found it.
In discovering it, many things suddenly make sense. When I went through those suicidal months, I’d figured that much of my condition was situationally-based. I was broken hearted. I was destitute. I felt there was no hope.
It made sense to me that the condition was superficial. At the time, when I looked back at other depressive periods, I could normally find a cause – a trigger. But now, I can see how all of those events and see how they exacerbated the feeling of worthlessness.
My broken heart; evidence no one loves me. The lack of jobs; proof that I’m not of value. Returning to my hometown empty handed; confirmation of my failure.
It’s all linked. It’s one and the same. It is not the ebbs and flows of life that cause it. It is my response to it. It’s not the dark things my inner child is pointing at. It is me at the age of 31 still thinking like the sad, isolated, bullied child that lingers in my memories.
More recently, I became depressed in the run up to my redundancy last December. After it was formally announced, I sat at home in stasis for a whole two months, incapable of grasping hold of the situation. I was immobilised by my failure, and the reinforcement of my worthlessness narrative.
It was different this time, though. The finer details of how I broke depression’s spell the first time around will be the subject of a future post, but the experience imbued me with a deep sense of hope. Hope that I’m stronger than it. Hope that I can beat it. Hope that no matter how I feel right now, there will always be a happier day.
Everything is temporary.
Back when I started writing this blog, I said I had to grab the root of anxiety in order to uproot it. From where I sit now, this feels like it. This is the deepest part of it – the origin of it all. The past three months, I’ve been diligently analysing the root, understanding what it is, and what it’s made from.
Now, the real uprooting process can begin.
Over the next few posts, I’m going to discuss some of the techniques I’ve been using to combat anxiety, as well as some of the epiphanies I’ve had along the way. I’ll be talking about meditation, coping techniques, medication, exercise, CBT, challenging my biases and ideas about myself. There’s even a love letter to cycling coming up.
Oh, and I’ll finally get onto addressing a substantial elephant in the room: psychedelics.
Likes, shares, and comments not only let me know my work’s appreciated, but help it reach others who may draw some strength from it. I’ll also endeavour to reply to anyone going through the same issues I’ve faced, so please reach out. You are not alone.
Uprooting Anxiety 