Merry Christmas and welcome to 2015.
So another year has passed and overall, for myself, it’s been a pretty good year – not always a joyous year, but life is good, even when I don’t feel it.
I suppose it’s an anniversary for myself: “My first full year of admitting I have depression and attempting to treat it.” I should throw a party – there’d be little cupcakes with ‘Insane but loving it (sometimes)’ written on the icing.
I’ve learnt a fair bit about myself, especially my depression. Not always easily learnt, but I think I get it a bit more now.
I’ve learnt that usually twice a month I’ll go through a brief depressive period, often only 2 or 3 days – sometimes 2 weeks.
I’ve learnt that when I eat crap I really feel crap, and when I have a heavy drinking night out it takes me more time to recover mentally and emotionally than it does physically.
I think I’ve learnt the two downers (thoughts and feelings) that get to me the most: helplessness and loneliness. Loneliness is the one that really eats at me when it hits and makes me feel like I’m a crazy person – because I’m surrounded by people, all the people I love are an hour or less away, and yet it hits me so hard sometimes. The wrong type of logic with emotions can be a weird destructive mix sometimes.
I think what I’ve learnt the most is to accept it, that I have depression, and to acknowledge the fact that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I can’t just live my life ignoring it, not paying attention to the things that affect it and then expect it not to get worse. I think I used to think that way, a childish kind of ‘Well, fuck you depression, I’m gonna stay up late by myself and drink this bottle of wine laced with beer laced with sugar, and live on my couch for a week and there’s nothing you can do about it!’… yeah, that sort of mentality was really winning the war.
Some people think that certain emotions or thoughts are bad, that they make a value judgement on the type of person that you are, that to be affected by these thoughts meant that you were weak – I know I did.
I thought that feeling sad was a bad feeling to have, a feeling I shouldn’t have. I was only allowed to have good feelings – there was nothing really wrong with my life, I had no reason to feel sad, or anxious, or scared, or lonely, and if I was then I was failing, I was weak, I was doing something wrong. I had to be doing something wrong to not be having good feelings.
But thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings. They are neither good or bad in and of themselves. Some might say that is a careless statement, but if you think about it, there are no ‘bad’ feelings. People can feel sad, anxious, lonely, hopeless, confused, angry, distressed, distraught, grieved – but describe to me what ‘bad’ feels like. People don’t like those feelings, they are unpleasant to have, but don’t use the existence of those feelings to judge your self-worth and your absolute value in this world.
Having certain thoughts and feelings doesn’t define who you are. What you do and what you strive do can make all the difference in this world, they’re part of what defines character.
That doesn’t mean ignore those thoughts or feelings, not at all. Understanding my own thoughts and feelings, well understanding them better (I’m no where near understanding my own head completely), helps me see how these things I can’t control are affected by things I can control – actions I take in my everyday life, thoughts I do choose to think!
Trying not to think about purple just makes you think about purple, and trying not to think about your feelings of sadness or loneliness just makes a big, sombre, depressed looking elephant in the room.
Acknowledge them, think about them, but don’t believe them. Sometimes feelings can be based on a reality – Do I feel lonely because I isolate myself from other people? Do I feel unlovable because I close myself off from others and don’t allow myself to be loved out of a fear of getting hurt or rejected?
That is thinking about the feeling. But having those feelings and saying, “I am alone and unloveable” – that’s believing it – and that’s believing a lie.
Remind yourself of your power, your freedom – it exists in the smallest choice, down to the tiniest thought you choose to think. With each seemingly insignificant action that seeks to understand you, respect you and love you, you are winning.
If it feels like you’ve done nothing, write down what you have done – I assure you there will be something there. If you have a goal for getting mentally healthier write it down, break it down into tiny things, say I love you to you, remind yourself that you are worth it. This is how we win the war – by fighting the battles we can fight.
There are many many things about my feelings and my thought processes that I still don’t understand, that I’ve not wanted to address because it’s tiring and it hurts, some of them I’m only realising as I write this.
But I believe this – that I am not hopeless and I am not alone, that there are concrete things I can do in my life that will improve my mental health, one little step at a time. That doesn’t mean that because I eat right, and exercise, and sleep well everyday will be rosy. Sometimes a storm will still come – I can blame myself for the weather and destroy myself on the storm, or I can hunker down and weather it out. A better day will always come and life is always worth holding out for it, even when the night seems very long.
That’s what I’ve learnt in 2014, and that’s what I’ll have to learn more and again in 2015 and 2016 and on and on, but it’s not a wasted effort.
Living life is never a wasted effort.
RAGEAHOL AND THOUGHT 