DEPRESSION WAVE

It’s difficult to describe to anyone who doesn’t get them how a depression wave feels when it hits you. It’s like suddenly everything you do is either far too much to deal with and you feel constantly like you are teetering on the brink of some sort of abyss where you’re blinking away the tears, gulping down the screams, and living in constant fear of a sudden and frightfully embarrassing meltdown that nobody around you is likely to either understand or know quite how to deal with.

Unlike a tsunami, which is usually born out of a short, sharp geological shock, the rather more personal storm that is a bout of depression can start very peacefully, like a slightly more potent wave lapping up onto the shoreline. You can be quite contentedly listening to the calm lapping of the waves of events that make up your days as they come one after another and then another, different, darker wave seems to pass over you as if somebody just walked over your grave and you feel a change in the air, like the sudden onset of a dark season that comes out of nowhere.

And yet instantly, you feel it pass over you and things, which may have been going along swimmingly for quite some considerable amount of time, can immediately feel different, as if your outlook, your whole perspective has quite suddenly altered somehow and everything seems different, darker and far, far worse than it did even seconds ago.

Things that you usually quite enjoy, like, for example, writing a bit of nonsense each morning, can immediately feel utterly pointless somehow, and everything you do, driving your car, eating your breakfast or just listening to a song on the radio can fill you with a feeling of utter hopelessness, misery and sense of the melancholic that makes it almost impossible for you to function, with a sense of deadness all around you and the taste of ashes in your mouth every time to try to speak or eat or interact with anything in the world about you.

For those of us that can, somehow we drag ourselves onwards, despite running the risk of alienating those who have to work closest with us by our “strange” or “introspective” or simply “odd” behavior. For those who get it far worse that that, even the most simple-sounding of tasks can immediately become a struggle or a burden and be far too difficult to cope with.

From a personal point of view, I sometimes am very aware of the change in my mood and I try to compensate in a quite pathetic manner, which can lead to some rather embarrassing attempts at bonhomie to try and hide the bleakness I feel, and which usually ends up with me feeling far, far worse about things and wishing that I could just shut the hell up.

But shutting up can be just as difficult for those around you to have to deal with too. Those icy silences or the frosty retorts to all of the tales of their “normal” sounding lives can be just as alarming or upsetting as some ridiculous artificial notion of joviality. As with most things, there is no “right” way of dealing with these things, you just have to blunder along as best you can and hope against all hope that you don’t upset too many people along the way as you poke around trying to find your own lost pathway back towards the light.

Shortly after that, especially if you are left feeling “bad” about any of your behaviour, you can really start to believe that there has never been anything likeable about you at all, and you start to look at the evidence that you see all around you as only you can perceive it and from your own, admittedly slightly skewed point of view, and you will have all of your worst fears about this utterly confirmed, and that nothing you can say or do can ever have any value at all to anyone, ever. It’s strange during those periods how many of the things you can most value about yourself and which seem the most important things in the world to you can seem to be so utterly irrelevant to the world at large...

Or maybe that really is just me...

I do sometimes wonder whether a lot of this is due to the lack of sunshine in my life. The link between the sun and the chemicals in the brain that keep us all feeling “ship-shape” and “tickety-boo” has been long established and, apart from during the weekends, for large chunks of the year I can find myself getting up in the dark, driving in the dark, arriving at work in the dark, not emerging all day and then leaving and going home in the dark, and the only glimpses of daylight that I see are through the blinds of the office as the world goes about its business beyond them.

But I guess that I’m not the only one who lives like that. Perhaps that’s why the image that comes to me when I start to ponder upon things like depression is a wave. Deep down inside, I’m obviously just a frustrated “surf-dude” who’d much rather spend his life on the beach, even though the idea of having a “beach holiday” has always been an anathema to me, and anyway, how would I earn enough from doing that to pay all of these bills...?

It’s a constant worry and probably explains why I’m such a “complex” kind of a guy.

Or at least why I have one... J