2406: Getting it Across

The worst thing — well, one of the worst things, anyway — about being depressed and anxiety-wracked is the perpetual feeling that you are not getting your feelings across properly, and the companion fear that people around you are just thinking that you’re “a bit down” or, at worst, being irrational and unreasonable rather than suffering from crippling bleakness and an impossible desire to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.

I, at least, have this blog as a means of expression as well as words I say face-to-face to people, words I write in email messages or words I say down a phone. (The latter is particularly rare, since, as those of you who know me well will already know, I do not like speaking on the phone at all.)

So, feeling particularly bleak and hopeless as I am at nearly 4am on this stuffy, sweaty August evening, it behooves me to try and be as frank as possible within the confines of the medium.

I am not doing so great.

I’ve not been doing so great for quite a while now, partly as a result of my own meandering, directionless life and partly due to external factors I have no direct control of. But at the moment, I feel like I’m doing especially not great.

It’s true, I wrote a while back that the new meds I’ve been taking have had a positive effect, and I stand by that, but I’m having one of those times where I feel like everything is getting on top of me, and that’s causing a domino effect of everything else in my mind to collapse, leaving me a mostly useless mess for a considerable proportion of the time.

I quit a job I had a while back that had the possibility to be if not particularly well-paid, then certainly reasonably secure and possibly even enjoyable. I did so because I was extremely worried about my wife, who was suffering especially ill health at the time. I was a little hesitant to do so, because I was afraid that I would end up in the exact situation I am now — seemingly unable to get another job — but ultimately I knew that it was the right thing to do, and I stand by my decision.

However, my wife, while not fully recovered as yet — still waiting on the NHS to do various bits and pieces, which will hopefully get into motion in earnest next month — is now back at work, seemingly getting on just fine with her new job, while I am reliant on erratic freelance income and sending out swathes of job applications every week that are probably never even looked at by cynical HR departments. While I know I’m not being completely useless, as I am getting work and getting it done to a good standard, there’s always this feeling at the back of my mind: why?

The question that comes after “why” varies from moment to moment. Sometimes it’s asking why I didn’t stick with teaching. (Because the stress of teaching in two particularly “challenging” schools was a strong contributory factor to the depression and anxiety I’ve been suffering since 2010.) Sometimes it’s asking why I didn’t fight for my USgamer job when I was unceremoniously told one morning that I didn’t have it any more, sorry. Sometimes it’s asking why that job had to end at all — and this one is usually accompanied by furious anger and resentment towards several people involved in the situation, whom I believe were responsible for me being shown the door. Sometimes it’s asking why I couldn’t just have knuckled down at SSE and been a good little corporate drone, nodding and smiling at their primary school-level Health and Safety “exercises” that they foisted on even the office staff at every opportunity. And sometimes it’s asking why I made choices back at the beginning of the Millennium that now feel like massive mistakes altogether: studying English and Music, pursuing the PGCE, going into teaching.

There aren’t answers to many of those questions, and they tend to lead on to bleaker thoughts. The question about my time at SSE in particular is almost always accompanied by an exaggerated combination of flashback and imagination where I recall my traumatic last day at the company, dragged over the hot coals by an unsupportive management who just wanted to get me out of the door and wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say. In reality, I yelled “fuck you” at them, stormed out and slammed the door, wishing to God I had the courage to say or do something more coherent to make my frustration known. In my imagination, I do everything from throw the phone on the table of the meeting room at my “opponents” to flipping the table, ripping the door off its hinges or smashing every computer I walk past on the way to collect my things. Each time I have this flashback-dream, it gets more intense and unpleasant, and it leaves me short of breath, panicking, begging for sleep to claim me, because it’s always when I’m trying to get to sleep that my mind sees fit to dredge it up once again.

And the bleakness these endless questions leave me with make me more vulnerable to all sorts of other things. A simple request to play some online games with friends becomes an unimaginably frustrating and infuriating slight when I can’t pin anyone down due to their (rationally speaking, perfectly reasonable) commitments to family or suchlike. I have difficulty focusing on anything, feeling like I “should” be doing something, anything other than what it is I am doing at the time, and this often leads me into a cycle of just doing nothing at all.

One of the most frustrating things is that I’ve fallen back into old habits with food. We stopped going to Slimming World when my wife was particularly unwell, as I was finding the weekly weigh-ins and Syn-counting an unnecessary stress on top of all the other things I was thinking about. Consequently, with little to no control over what I eat each day — plus a predisposition towards eating as a means of “self-medicating” anything from boredom to depression — I’ve put a bunch of weight back on again, so much so that I’m terrified of stepping on a set of scales, going back to the same Slimming World group I once attended or even trying on certain pairs of trousers.

All kinds of adjectives float around inside my head when I reflect on myself and how I might be able to get out of the situation I’m in. Hopeless. Worthless. Useless. Failure. I know none of them are true, but when you get this far into the darkness it’s hard to see the light of hope. I vacillate between burning hatred for the people who have directly or indirectly contributed to the position in which I find myself, despair that makes me want to curl up and cry for the rest of time, and guilt at all the people I feel like I’ve let down with my inability to have made anything worthwhile of my life by this age.

I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’ve exhausted all my options, tried all the things I’m supposed to try, and I don’t know what’s left. I’m sure in life it’s pretty difficult to back yourself into a completely unwinnable situation, but I was designed in the ’80s, after all; to continue the analogy, I feel like I’m in an early Sierra game and I’m finding each and every single place it’s possible for King Graham to fall off something, trip over something, get crushed by something or get eaten by something. Eventually I might find the right path without tripping over Manaan’s cat (yes, I know that was Gwydion, not Graham) or falling off a cliff, but right now I can’t see it. And, sadly, life has no GameFAQs.

I should probably go to bed. Reflecting on this further isn’t particularly helping me, but looking back over these 1,400 words I am a little glad I put pen to paper to express these things ticking over in my mind. Perhaps someone will read them and understand me just a little better. Perhaps I’ll look back on them one day and wonder what I was worrying about. Or perhaps I really am a useless waste of space with no future whatsoever? Who knows.

Either way, bed beckons. If you read all this, thanks.