We Are Not Alone - July 2002

Yes I'm still here!

My life goes on although I am in a kind of limbo. Although things are not as black as they once were I still get periods of despair at my situation and fear for the future.
The drugs I am on seem to have stabilized my mood swings and that helps a lot. Although I am now on a level that is just above the gutter at least I don't have the mood swings that sweep over me like a roller-coaster. One minute up in the air and the next rushing down to the ground. The frightening thing about those swings were the terrifying plunges into the blackness of hopelessness.

As far as I am concerned there is no future and the past is hidden away in my subconscious. Even when I do get flashbacks they are so wreathed in haziness that they might have been someone else's memories. I am almost totally detached from them. Okay, this masks the acute pain of bad memories but it also serves to make me realize that I have lost the good ones as well.

Through this web site I have met some wonderful people who offer me advice or just want to make contact to share the fact that I am not alone in my illness. To those of you I offer my heartfelt thanks.
However when the blackness sets in there is such a feeling of isolation that all of the advice in the world couldn't drag me back into the light. I am sure fellow depression sufferers feel the same way.
Depression is all consuming, like a black hole in space. Once there it fills the whole of ones world and will not allow any light to penetrate. All one can do is wait it out and hope that it will end as soon as it started.

Sometimes the emotions that depression brings are almost tangible. I have often cried out loud in sheer misery at the hopelessness of life, my life. I have tried to look forwards to what the future may hold, all of the things that would be left undone if my life ended prematurely. But the balance of good versus bad weighs heavily on the side of bad.
As things stand there are no strong thoughts of self harm. Sometimes there are flickers of suicide or disfigurement but they are way out at the edge of my periphery and are soon banished by sleep or other thoughts.

I guess the best way of describing my mental state, and I have said this before, is that I am treading water and waiting impatiently for my life to end naturally. Is that a crime, a sin? I cannot answer that question but if it were posed to me I would respond with the question 'is it a sin to let me carry on with this unhappy existence?'

I came across an article in the Sunday Telegraph the other day. It was written by a professor of English, Jonathan Dollimore, who suffers from depression too. As I read his words I began to notice a startling similarity between his life and mine.

Statements such as;
"Depression is like that — it attaches to the negative in anything. Still, I had wanted to help her. Something resembling sympathy was alive in me."
rang true with me. Whilst I suffer from depression and at times it is all-consuming there is a part of me that wants, needs to help others who are less 'fortunate' than me.

Dollimore goes on to say;
"If there is a selfishness in “mental health”, it has less to do with conscious callousness than with defending oneself against reality. To be without the defences of sanity is not necessarily a gain — although some would claim that it is, and those who have written most eloquently about depression impute an almost spiritual dimension to it."
This, once again, rang a bell in my mind.

Reading on I came across;
"I’m the only one who still doesn’t know [what causes depression]. I do know that there’s something deeply mysterious about it. For reasons one never fully understands, it begins with an inability to get pleasure from anything, followed by an inability to carry through even — or especially — the most mundane of tasks. From there, experience differs widely, but many people end up having thoughts of suicide, attempting it and sometimes succeeding. That final phase is the most terrifyingly mysterious of all: it’s not so much that the life force has been extinguished; rather, that it seems to have been turned against itself."
And began to think that Professor Dollimore was writing about me!

The more I read the more I identified with this story;
"The mystery is there, too, in the loneliness of the experience — in its being beyond the reach of communication or even expression. Those who have had it struggle for the right analogy without ever feeling they’ve found it."
and I wished that I had the eloquence of Professor Dollimore.

The final paragraph that made me realize that I was truly identifying with the article was;
" I’ve wanted to believe depression to be biological, chemical or hereditary because that way I could searching for the cause, trying different cures, hand myself over for treatment in good faith, as might with any other illness One of my symptoms is chronic fatigue and doctors have often tested my blood for illnesses associated with condition. I’ve been disappointed when they’ve found nothing, being willing to exchange depression for even a serious “physical” illness that was explicable and treatable."
I have stated many times in the past that I could cope a lot better if I had tangible signs that I could come to terms with. Unfortunately depression is invisible to those that don't suffer from it and the non-sufferers think that it can be got over by 'pulling your socks up' or 'pulling yourself together'.
Oh how I wish!

I got the message Professor Dollimore and you have my sympathy AND empathy. Let's hope we both survive this and find a future!