Feeling gloomy

I am feeling terribly gloomy right now.

I haven't written anything on here for ages, mainly because I've been unwell and not feeling very articulate, which is funny as I keep getting told by health professionals that I'm very articulate for a depressed person, as if my varied vocabulary is an indicator that I'm not really that ill - although that's a whole other blog post.

I've been getting increasingly more ill for quite a while and it's with a heavy heart that I've had to admit to myself and everyone around me that the job I got a year ago has been a contributory factor in that. It was the job that was supposed to be the start of Great Things for me.  Back on the career ladder, the only way is up etc etc. I always had a niggling suspicion that I might not be able to manage a full time job in central London at a prestigious and pressurised institution after the experiences and breakdown I had the last time I was in something similar but I told myself not to be so negative and to think of all the good things having this job could enable me to do.  I managed to convince pretty much everyone, myself included for a time, that everything was A-OK.

It wasn't and so now I've resigned.  My management have been really great, I don't think they could have been more supportive, but at the end of the day the job that 4 years ago would have been a perfect fit, was just a bit too big for me.  It's unbelievably shit to know you're not up to the job.  My one glimpse of light on the horizon though, is that I do know it was that job, that place and this time in particular - I am capable of working, I have good skills that I can definitely use, I just have to remember that I'm not the same person I was 4 years ago and adapt my thinking accordingly. Ideally I'm looking for 1 or 2 part time jobs still in my industry, preferably without a long commute. I think it's doable.

That's it really. There's a ton of other stuff I could blather on about - we're moving, I've got no money coming in, fear of signing on -  but I'm not sure I'm in the frame of mind where putting pen to paper (yes, yes, not really) about it  is going to do anything other than send me spiralling into the catastrophising-vicious-circle-of-Hell so I'm going to stop now.  Oh but before I do, thank you. Those of you who tweet me and comment on here really do an amazing job of keeping me walking in a forwards direction. I don't know I'd manage it without you.  No pressure or anything ;)

A thank you

I am self-aware enough to know it can be a bit of a bore

When I’m unsure and feeling mentally sore

It’s a chore I know to put up with the downs

And the frowns and the constant go-rounds of me

When I’m not free of the psychological debris

That’s like a dog with a bone and I moan

And I moan

And I moan

But you see - you are here, abating my fear and I’m no longer One but We.

And when I am MAD

Or SAD

Or even BAD – you still care

Do you know that’s incredibly rare?

I’d go so far as to say, in your words; it is RAD.

When I am scared or unprepared or waking up shouting

From a nightmare – oh look! – You are there.

Being is hard

When there’s that sharp pointy shard

Of dark matter running through

Seemingly stuck with superglue, but you!

You soften the edges and make me feel new.

This is a mere gesture but I want you to know

I understand the pressure of caring for one so frequently undone

By a brain, quite insane, almost going down the drain,

So please know I am grateful

And it feels well, fateful that I’m part of your life

Your soon to be wife, in trouble and strife

And I am here, my dear, for you as well

In life’s heaven and hell, or the something in-between.

We are seen at our best and our worst by those who care the most

And we, you and me, will face down the ghosts

From our past and our present;

The ghasts of the night we’ll chase into the light

Come the dawn – reborn,

To try

And try

And try again

With a gentle holding of hands

And a kiss – oh the bliss -

That you understand.

Memories are made of this

Memory is a funny thing.  Being a slave to your memories is anything but. 

It is three years since the things I can't get out of my head started.  I couldn't have imagined that they would still be causing me this much distress.  Long story short? A Person who had a grudge against me started to write anonymously to my work place which culminated in them investigating me for supposedly lying about having depression.  I wasn't lying, I became suicidal, I resigned. 

When I put it like that, it doesn't sound like much. It was.  It is. That I could be hated that much is something I really struggle with but not as much as I struggle with the fact that the people I worked with at The Place, who knew my mental health history lifted not one finger to support me or defend me. The Person and The Place threw me to the wolves and stood by whilst they tore out my sense of self.

Until the last week or so, I've not told anyone how The Person and The Place infiltrate my thoughts. It's constant. One or the other, or both, are there when I go to bed, there in my dreams and there during every waking hour.  I relive each moment, I imagine it happening again, scenarios from the past and the potential future play over and over in my head.  I can see it, I can see them. 

I resigned in January 2012.  It was January 2014 before I could even go to the train station near The Place.  As for The Person,  they are still on the periphery.  Being part of my local community is great but it also means it is almost impossible for me to avoid them, although I do try.  

Last week I did an assessment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  It seems to fit.  What happened to me wasn't typical of the type of events that trigger PTSD and this in itself makes me feel like a fraud - I haven't be assaulted or witnessed an act of violence, been in a war or earthquake zone, I haven't had a life-threatening illness.  I read this earlier though that I think I can justifiably say is the case:

Harmful intentions

Man-made disasters, particularly those involving deliberate acts of violence, terrorism, or exploitation, seem to cause longer-lasting and more painful emotional consequences than natural disasters. The crucial factor may be that such experiences destroys people’s trust in others, particularly if they involve someone you have depended on.

http://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-(ptsd)/causes/#.UvOUMvl_uSo

It was a disaster.  Me and my mental health were exploited by someone with harmful intentions and that experience did destroy my trust in my colleagues and employer who I depended on.  I had depended on them for nearly 9 years. 

I've been signed off work for two weeks due to depression and anxiety. I am so scared that when I go back to work next week, it will be to be told they've received an anonymous letter with allegations that I am faking a mental health condition.   I really wouldn't put it past The Person to do it again, just to fuck with me. I've only been in this job 7 months.  If an employer of 9 years wouldn't back me, can I really expect the current one to? I know the rational answers to all this, but I don't think the fear will ever go away.

Sitting here writing, I can't stop the images of The Person reading this and feeling satisfied at the role they still play in my life. I wish I could cut out the part of my brain that does this and feed it to the wolves. 

I can’t let go

I am angry.  I am angry and I can’t get past it. I am angry and it is not doing me any good. I am writing this in the hope that it will be cathartic and I’ll stop having nightmares about the place I used to work at, that I’ll stop being terrified of not being believed, that I’ll stop thinking about it all the bloody time.

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll know something of what I’m going on about and might not want to read anything else about it, so here’s a Get out of Jail Free card; collect £200 and pass Go without reading any further.  I wouldn’t blame you; I’m sick to the stomach of the whole thing. If you haven’t read it before, here is a brief synopsis: I had depression and was signed off work. A nasty, grubby individual wrote to my employer saying I was faking it and using my tweets as ‘evidence’.  My employer investigated me, found me guilty of misconduct on the basis of my tweets and precious little else and began disciplinary action. I was suicidal.  I resigned.

I’ve tried so hard to get past it.  I cleared my desk on 10^th January this year.  Time has gone on and yet I can’t stop thinking about it.  It affects everything I do.  I am so fucking angry.

They knew I was on a waiting list for therapy.  They had medical certificates from my GP stating I had depression.  They had letters from my GP confirming the severity of my illness.  They had reports from their own Occupational Health doctors who having met and examined me on at least three occasions agreed with my GP’s diagnosis. And yet, on the basis of what I put on Twitter and a telephone conversation with a different doctor from Occupational Health who I hadn’t even met, they told me I was a liar.  They told me my behaviour was not consistent with that of someone with depression.  

This, from a manager who, by her own admission, had no experience or understanding of depressive illness.  This from a manager, who, when I said I felt uncomfortable talking openly to her about my symptoms told me “Stephen Fry talks about his depression…” This, from a manager who whilst carrying out the investigation into the veracity of my mental illness, was also appointed as my line manager, responsible for over-seeing the phased return to work recommended by the organisation’s Occupational Health doctors.  Conflict of interest, much?

Of course, everyone asks why I didn’t take this to an employment tribunal.  I thought about it, I really did.  I sought advice.  In the end, I was still too ill.  Even though I was told that legally, I had a strong case.  The prospect, however remote, of being found guilty a second time of something I hadn’t done was just too terrifying.  I’d pulled myself back from the brink once; I knew I couldn’t do it again.  It’s too late now, you only get so long to lodge a complaint with an employment tribunal, and honestly despite being more mentally healthy now than I have been in a long while, I don’t think I’d ever be strong enough to fight that battle again, even if it were an option.

I’m starting a new job soon. I am terrified of it all happening again.  I’ll never be able to say where I work, or have any public facing role in the new organisation, for fear of the grubby individual who began all this, sending their nasty poison pen letters to my new employer as well. I’m not angry with the grubby individual anymore; they are not worth the effort.  They are nothing. I am angry with my old employer.  They knew me. They knew my past history of depression.  They knew I was good at my job. They knew me. And they called me a liar. And I can’t forgive them.

Being my friend

So I’m guessing y’all know by now that I suffer from time to time from a big ol’ dollop of that there depression? (I don’t know why the mid-Western twang, I’ll stop it – it’s a little unbecoming one feels).  Anyhoo, I’ve been giving some thought to how that impacts upon you – I know, how unselfish am I?

As such, and in the interests of continuing ease of friendship, here are some things you should know and hopefully some things you can do to help me when the going gets tough. (Yes ok, do your best Billy Ocean impression now…that’s right, let it out…)

I need a plan.  Not a life plan (although, yes possibly one of those too).  What I mean is, I’m not good with tentative.  If we arrange to possibly meet up, I need to know if it’s on or not and the where’s and when’s pretty much from the get go.  If I don’t know,   I get very stressed and can’t settle to anything else until I do.  If for whatever reason I don’t hear from you (and that can happen for a number of reasons, rational-me does get that!) I become horribly paranoid and worried.  To the point that I think you’ve a) met with a terrible fate and are dead in a ditch or b) decided I’m a god-awful person you can’t bear to spend time with.   So please, wherever possible, furnish me with a plan!

I may not always answer my phone.  There are times when basic conversation, or even texting, is just too hard.  It really is a case of “it’s not you, it’s me” so don’t think I’m deliberately ignoring you.  Well I am, but not because I can’t be bothered with you, it’s because I can’t think of anything to say or because what I could say is too painful to begin to know how to express.

I may cancel our plans.  Most of the time this will be for an actual reason like I forgot, I double-booked, something urgent came up – you know, the kind of reasons the rest of you give for cancelling plans.  Occasionally it may be because I’ve hit a wall of depression and can’t move from my bed let alone leave the house,  that being the case I’ll probably say I’m not feeling well – which is, funnily enough, the truth!  It’s just that for me, not feeling well doesn’t mean a headache or a cold, it means I’m depressed.  The thing I'd ask you to do here is just give me time, I'll come back when I can.

One thing I won’t do is lie to you.  I may not want to burden you with the full truth of how I am feeling but I won’t lie.  I was accused recently by a friend of 18 years of continually lying and making excuses to get out of seeing her.  One of my ‘lies’ was something along the lines of “I had a bit of a breakdown this week and ended up having to go to a mental hospital so I’m not going to be able to meet up on Friday.”   I don’t know what hurt and angered me more, the fact that she was so unfeeling about what had happened to me, or the fact that she thought I would make up such a monstrous untruth!  Needless to say, that friendship is well and truly over.  

I am blessed by having many good friends.  And sometimes this blessing is a curse.  I want to be there for you, to help you through your bad times, I pride myself on being there for those I love.  But the depressed me has a tendency to think that I won’t be of any value to you if I can’t be the strong one, the advice-giver, the cheerer-upper, that I’m not really worthy of your friendship so I hide away from you until I feel able to be the friend you might need.  I know it’s awful, that there’s a part of me that apparently thinks you are that shallow that you’d only see our friendship on the basis of what you can get out of it; I’m working on it.  When I’m well I do know that it’s really not like that, it’s just that sometimes, and it’s certainly been the case over the past year or two,  I’m not that well at all. 

Debt is depressing.

Being poor sucks. Really sucks.  And I don’t mean poor as in you can’t afford to go out as often as you’d like, you’re not having a holiday this year, you’re not earning enough to justify a haircut.  I mean poor as in you’re getting red letters from all your creditors, you weigh up every bus fare against buying bread and milk, you really don’t know how you’re going to pay your household bill this month, next month, every month. And knowing that part of the reason you’re so poor is because you have an illness that takes away your ability to manage any kind of personal care or circumstances really sticks the knife in.

Like work and depression, alcohol and depression, relationships and depression, finance and depression can feel like a chicken and egg never-ending circle.  Did I get in debt because I am depressed or is my depression causing me to get further into debt as I don’t have the emotional strength to get a handle on it?

I’ve never been that good with money (Savings? Huh?)  but I’ve always managed to keep on top of any debt I had until now.   I’m unemployed after being forced in December to resign from my job due to an investigation into claims I was faking depression. It’s a long, sorry tale which I’ve blogged about before so I won’t go into the detail here. Suffices to say, I’m out of work and no one seems in any way keen to interview me.

I’ve just had my Job Seekers Allowance cut because I missed an appointment.  I missed an appointment because I got four days’ work for which I will get paid about £600 at some point in the future. I did try and inform the Jobcentre by email of the circumstances (I couldn’t phone as it was a Bank Holiday weekend and I was working 15 hour days) but nevertheless my allowance has been taken away.  This means that my monthly income is £320 Housing Benefit which is for my rent (it obviously doesn’t cover it) and £8.71 per week Council Tax Benefit.  I’m not going to disclose how much I owe to the red letter senders – frankly it’s none of your business! – But clearly, they ain’t getting paid any time soon.

Because I’ve been so ill with depression, my natural tendency to keep a grip - albeit a tenuous one - on my finances has gone to pot.  It’s not been so much burying my head in the sand as being so out of focus with things that they have just not even registered. My memory is terribly affected by depression. I just don’t remember to do stuff.   And now I’m surrounded by letters and getting the dreaded 0845 phone calls and I don’t quite know where to start.  Having my JSA cut has knocked me right back; I’ll be honest, I could have sorted it out a couple of weeks ago but I was already slipping, I’m having more and more frequent depressive symptoms.  I am terrified of going back to where I was at the end of last year but the curse of depression is that I just don’t feel able to do anything about it. And so we’re back to the chicken and egg.

I can imagine that to some people this just reads like a list of excuses for being crap with money; it’s really not. Depression plays Russian roulette with your mind. It takes a wrecking ball to your sense of priority and gives your memory a right old kicking.  When leaving your room to go to the toilet is Mount Everest, than having to interact with people you feel over-burdened with guilt about owing money to becomes an impossible mountain to scale.

This morning I have been looking on the website www.nationaldebtline.co.uk and I think it might just be the thing that will help me get a handle on things, so that is a step in the right direction.  I am going to look into getting an advocate to help me contact the companies I owe money to.  I can’t do this alone. And for once I am going to ask for help, which as any depressive knows, is often the hardest thing of all. 

Being Happy

Today is a good day.  I’ve had a fair number of good days recently, but this morning I woke up knowing that I am getting better. I’ve been scared of getting better in case I relapse into another severe depression, one that I don’t know I’ll have the strength to recover from.  I am still a bit scared about this, but I am pretty certain that the three months of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), the right medication, and some truly positive influences in my life have given me the tools to manage any relapses.

Depression is a part of me, it’s not ever going to not be there so I am learning to embrace it, and see that it can be channelled positively.  If I wasn’t depressed, I’d never have started this blog - imagine how much the poorer your lives would be without it, eh?! I think depression makes me funny. I can take the mickey and get away with it because I’m a depressive.  It gives me an edge.  Depression can give you insights into your own self, not always accurate and quite often self-loathing, but when you can step away from it a bit, you do learn a lot about how and why you think the way you do – after all, all those hours spent away with the fairies inside your own head have to be good for something, right?

I’ve started noticing beauty again.  A hydrangea in bloom, my boyfriend’s sleeping face, a giggling child, the smell of oranges.  It’s like the world is in technicolour; sights, sounds and smells are in focus.  And get this, I don’t hate myself. I think I’m alright, really. It’s been so long since I’ve thought that, and I feel giddy.

I was so proud of myself, walking home from my penultimate therapy session this afternoon.  I could have skipped but that would look somewhat out of place on Tottenham High Road, so I contented myself with smiling; beaming actually.

Being happy is hard work sometimes, but it’s worth the effort. Although, what the hell I'm going to blog about now, I have no bloody idea. 

An open letter to The Person

Hi!

How are you? 

Congratulations. You told me once that if I ever betrayed you, you would destroy me.  To be honest, I thought it was one of your many bombastic, melodramatic statements that could be taken with a healthy pinch of salt. Turns out I was wrong, you actually meant it. Of course, we differ quite substantially on what constitutes ‘betrayal’;  for me, I followed my principles and along with others took a course of action that was right, necessary and long overdue, for you I failed to be the lapdog you had assumed I’d be.

No doubt you wholeheartedly believe that attempting to ruin my health and career was entirely justified and needless to say I completely disagree. Your actions over the past year made me severely depressed and suicidal and forced me to leave a job I’d been successful at for nearly a decade, so well done, you almost did succeed in destroying me.   I say almost because I am still here, a bit battered and bruised – I am happy to admit you have done a spectacularly good job of trying to ruin me – but here nonetheless. 

I’d like to thank you actually. Without the events of the last year, I would probably never have sought the psychological help I have needed for many years (I’m not particularly grateful for the suicidal thoughts but hey, you have to take the rough with the smooth), I wouldn’t have discovered that I have talents and passions I can build a career from and I definitely wouldn’t have made so many friends, willing to fight my corner.

I’d like to think, for both our sakes, that your - can I call it an obsession? Yes why not – obsession will have abated by now. But just in case you’re still monitoring my online output, I’m letting you know  I’ve unlocked my Twitter account, so please feel free to peruse to your heart’s content. 

Regards,

Bear_Faced_Lady 

Soup

I like cooking.  I like the creativity of it, the sense of achievement, the feeling of producing something bigger and better than the sum of its parts.  I’ve found that one of the main symptoms of my depression is not being able to eat much at all and six months ago, cooking  meant boiling the kettle for instant noodles or trudging to the shop in my pyjamas for a bag of salted popcorn, that is to say, not cooking at all.  I slept rather than eat properly; my stomach felt hungry but my head couldn’t get itself into gear enough to make the connection between that and getting out of bed and going to the kitchen.   It’s a vicious circle, too little food means not enough energy, not enough energy means too much sleep, too much sleep means enhanced feelings of wasting your life, being worthless.  Eating just felt…effortful.  

At the end of November I decided to do an online food shop so at least if I did feel like eating, I wouldn’t have to leave the house to get supplies.  I bought, on a whim, a big bag of potatoes.  It stayed a big bag of potatoes for some time.  A big bag of green-tinged, pock-marked potatoes by the time January rolled around. My appetite had been improving but I wasn’t enjoying the cooking or the eating; it felt like a necessary evil to be honest.   My flatmate said something about making a load of chips just to get rid of the gnarly taters but I felt bad, they’d been sat there for nearly two months and I thought they deserved a better fate than boring old chips. Yes, I felt guilty for the potatoes, what of it?  Also, I still wasn’t up to much on the eating front and that’s when it hit me.  I could make soup.  Leek and potato soup.  All by my own self.  I’d never made a soup before and I found I was feeling quite excited at the prospect.  Could it be I was regaining my joy for food?  I pushed that thought to the ‘perhaps I might get better’ box in my head, I didn’t want to hold on to it too hard in case I didn’t make the soup, in case I just left the potatoes to rot whilst I rotted away in bed, hungry. The idea of getting better is frightening. Like a siren, calling you to a land of pleasure; what happens if you get dashed upon the rocks?

I made the soup.  I found the actual process to be soothing.  There was a logic and routine to it, things which had been largely missing from my life for so long but also it was creative, taking these knobbly old tatties and tuning them into a warming, comforting, not too much effort to eat food blanket.  I felt ridiculously proud of myself.

I started to tentatively re-engage with food. The next week I made stilton and broccoli soup.  A couple of weeks later, smoked bacon and lentil (this one was not such a success, too greasy) and then yesterday I made a Thai-style prawn and noodle soup.  In between soups I’ve cooked a roast dinner, a stew, a couple of pasta dishes more complicated than just opening a jar of pesto.  And I’m starting to not only enjoy the process of cooking food again, but the eating of it too. I have started to see the point of it again.  Thanks to soup.

‘Cos I’m guilty, guilty as a girl can be.

So sang Bananarama in their 1987 hit Love in the First Degree.  Do you know it only got to number 3 in the charts; it was beaten to number 1 by Pump Up the Volume.  A classic no doubt, but my pocket money went on the ‘Rama. How can you not love the ‘Rama?  Anyways, I digress.  I was 10 in 1987, my clothes came from Tammy Girl and C&A, I fervently believed my toys came alive when I left the room and I had an almighty crush on Phillip Schofield who had broken my heart by leaving the Broom Cupboard.   I was also well on the way to developing the guilt complex I carry around with me every day. Poor 10 year old Bearface.

I feel guilty about everything.  Really, everything. I feel guilty about the books on my shelf that are shoved to the back, never seeing the light of day because I have to double them up because I have more books than shelf space, I feel guilty about the sweet cat that’s taken to frequenting my balcony in the mornings, even though she is clearly well fed and looked after, I feel guilty about the old people who now have to walk a bit further down the road to the temporary bus stop that’s outside my house.  I recognise these are ridiculous things to feel guilty about, and yet feel guilty I do.

Never mind how I feel about the people I know and the things I do, or don’t do.  This is where my guilt complex really takes over.  I feel terrible that I have let down a number of friends whilst I’ve been in my depressive slump.  Not that anyone has said “You’ve let me down, Bearface” – well one has but that’s a whole other story – but I feel like I have.  I feel like I’ve been a bad friend, selfish and self-obsessed.  I have a huge amount of guilt about my mum, that I didn’t do enough to support her through the last months and weeks of her life, that I didn’t love her enough to put her first.  I feel guilty that I don’t do enough to help my siblings cope with our rather difficult father.   For fuck’s sake I feel guilty when I see people arguing in the street and don’t intervene, when clearly it’s got bugger all to do with me! See?  Guilty about everything.

Now it hasn’t escaped my notice that in a certain light this could be viewed as entirely narcissistic – it’s all about me. But guess what? Yes!  I feel guilty about that too.  My therapist and I are going to be exploring all this guilt, where it comes from and how I can stop it from controlling my thoughts and behaviour.  It’s pretty easy for me to trace where it comes from but it’s a vicious circle which I need to break free of.

Right this second I am feeling guilty about the face that in the opening paragraph of this post I expressed a preference for Love in the First Degree over Pump Up the Volume.  Yeah, this really has to stop!

I guess I’m not in Singledom anymore.

I have a boyfriend. 

This is weird. Good weird, but weird nonetheless.

I haven’t had a boyfriend for three years; I liked being single and being in control of my own destiny, with only myself to please, and it was definitely by choice. Oh, alright, and also partly because my man radar was way off kilter and anyone I’ve got involved with has turned out to be highly unsuitable for one reason or another (or, just not that into me. We’ll ignore that).

Anyway, Mr Bearface as he is now known – I am nothing if not original – has odd interests. Odd to me as they are entirely outside my experience, that is. He does skateboarding and snowboarding and is as passionate about them as I am about singing and cheese, which is to say, very.   Given my complete lack of co-ordination and ingrained fear of anything approaching extreme sports it is unlikely I will ever be tempted to join him in either of these things.  I love that he has passions in life and feels like he’s come home when he does them, however, I must confess that on going to a skate park with him recently I did feel rather like his mum. Do I clap? Do I kiss it better if he grazes his knee? Do I sew up the patches in the jeans he only bought recently (fancy skating in them, young Bearface Esq) that have ripped from doing some kind of ‘move’?  I am really interested in the world surrounding his interests and the philosophies that accompany it, but I do feel slightly at a loss as I can’t contribute. I remember a girl I knew getting hold of a book like Rugby for Dummies or something and genning up on the rules, manoeuvres and positions of the game – it served her well, she made it with most of the rugby team as I recall. I, however, can’t quite bring myself to ferret out a similar book because I’d sound like a prick, suddenly spouting stuff about how to ‘ollie’ (I’m cringing right now)  so it’s a good thing I like listening to Mr Bearface enthusing; perhaps I’ll pick stuff up along the way.  It’ll be RAD.

Another weird thing is he’s a vegetarian.  And eats fake meat.  I’ll say it again. FAKE MEAT. I’ll be honest, I don’t see the point. Some of it does actually taste alright but I reckon that even as a carnivorous meat hound, I eat more vegetables than he does. I like meat.  I love meat. MEAT. That is all.

So from meat to flesh. Say hello to personal hygiene and grooming, everyone. Given that in the last year my ability to shower on a daily basis has been severely compromised by that fucker called Depression – seriously, getting out of bed to go to the toilet can be a seven hour process sometimes never mind actually washing – it is nothing less than extraordinary to find myself showering AND moisturising every single day. No one likes a smelly bear, after all.  Also (men, look away now lest you have all your illusions shattered) remembering to pluck those random granny hairs from your chin so that he doesn’t get stubble rash from kissing you; that’s a right old pain and yet I do it because I want to look good for him and for me and it’s been a while since I wanted to look good for anyone, least of all myself.

And oh how we laugh!  At nothing.  At each other. Laughing without even having to explain what I’m laughing at because he just knows.  I haven’t done this much laughing in such a long time and whilst I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s the best medicine (I am all about the SSRI’s and therapy) it is certainly making my smile, a lot, which after the bastard that was 2011 is no mean feat.   Anyone who says when they see me in my shitty old-man style striped and faded pyjamas “I don’t know if they have a brand* but if they did it would be ‘Convalescence’…” is getting the funnies right in my book.

Probably the weirdest thing about it all is the fact that I’m used to being the strong one in a relationship. The one who picks up the pieces, gives the advice and encouragement, grits teeth when said advice is duly ignored.  I do the looking after and admitting I might need some looking after in return is difficult and frankly, makes me nervous.  I wasn’t sure I’d manage being the one who needed propping up but do you know what, I sort of don’t mind and I know I need it.  I like not having to be the only one navigating the good ship ’Us’ through the tumultuous waters of life; I like knowing that there’s another hand on the tiller, helping to guide us to calmer shores. 

2012 is going to be a difficult year for me, lots of challenges with health, work and finances are threatening to send me toppling over the edge, but knowing that I’ve started the year laughing so much with someone who isn’t freaked out by my mentalism and situation is definitely a properly good beginning.  Weird, but good.

*Primark, seeing as you asked.

Last night a bookshop and a choir saved my life

Actually, they’ve been saving my life for the majority of this year, but last night saw my favourite choir singing carols in my favourite bookshop and having them both together gave me tingles and a warm love-filled glow.

I won’t dwell on it too much, but what with Stalker from Hell (AKA The Person) a work investigation into my mental health, the worst and most elongated episode of depression I’ve ever had and the heart-breaking, mind-fucking  consequences of it all, 2011 has been one heck of a bastard year.

Tottenham Community Choir has been a mainstay in my life for over two years but this year I have needed it more than ever.  Knowing that no matter how dreadful I am feeling, there are 70-plus friends who don’t judge or poke their noses in, who just care and want to enjoy singing with you has been a huge motivator in helping me come to terms with being afflicted with depression and has also been a massive reason to get out of bed.  I can’t even begin to express how much I owe the choir, even though the circumstances that led to The Person blighting my life are so intimately connected with them.  I feel I truly belong.

As for The Big Green Bookshop, I don’t think Tim and Simon have any idea just what they’ve done for me.  My weekly trip to have a natter, a cuppa and a mooch around the bookshelves were not just the random visits of a supposedly poorly girl who couldn’t be arsed going to work (as The Person suggested to my work), they were goals.  I set myself tasks to try and re-integrate myself with the real world. “Come on Bearface, put some clean clothes on and see if you can get as far as the bookshop” has been my mantra for months now.  I’ve also made some fantastic friends through the shop.  It’s such a community hub that you just can’t fail to meet people you connect with and I’ve been lucky enough to become part of that community, which is full of understanding, funny and supportive people.

People need people.  It’s easy to feel alone, isolated and unworthy of other people’s attention when you’re depressed.  Knowing that you are surrounded by those who just accept you as you are, listen when you need them to and make you laugh when nothing else can is a wonderful thing and I feel privileged to count choir and bookshop folk as my friends. I hope I can be there for them if they need me.

I don’t make new year’s resolutions as the pessimist in me thinks it’s just setting yourself up to fail, but I will make this one as it will be a piece of cake to keep; in 2012 I will sing songs with Tottenham Community Choir, read books from The Big Green Bookshop and nurture and cherish the friendships I have made in both.

Stigma

This weekend Stan Collymore took the brave step of tweeting about his experience of depression which struck a cord with many people, not least with me.  He writes eloquently and honestly and I found it a painful thing to read, chiming as it does with my own ongoing health.

Speaking up about mental health is frightening for anyone, especially as you anticipate there might be a negative reaction from some people, but I can’t imagine how it must feel if you've got well-documented incidence of adultery and domestic violence attached to your name.  

Not being a football fan, I have to admit these incidences passed me by, or at least I don’t remember the press coverage from 1998 and 2004, so when I tweeted earlier today “I might love Stan Collymore” I was taken aback to discover these things in his past and the subsequent implication that because of these things I ought to think differently about what Stan is doing. It made me pause. Can I really respect a man who cheated on his wife and beat up his girlfriend? Well yes, I can.  I’m not condoning what he did, of course I’m not, but do I have faith in the idea that people can change, regret and repent for their actions? Of course I do. What kind of a world would we be in if our entire personality and moral code was based on the very worst examples of them?  I doubt any of us would come up smelling of roses.  Just because you’ve done bad things in your past doesn’t mean you should not be valued and supported for the good things you do in the future.

To publically discuss your depression on  TalkSport radio and write about it when right in the middle of a bout is hugely commendable and an important step forward in the public comprehension of such a prolific and misunderstood illness.  

The overwhelming majority of people I see tweeting about what Stan wrote are people who either have suffered depression themselves or know someone who has, and this gives me real hope that with time, and the bravery of fellow sufferers famous or otherwise, we will someday reach a point where mental health is no longer stigmatised and we who suffer are given the compassion  we warrant and deserve. 

Sing, even when you're not winning

My earliest memories are of my mum singing. She sang doing the washing up, she sang doing the hoovering, she sang all the time and it’s something that’s rubbed off on me. Unfortunately I don’t have anything like the voice she had – she had the chance of a recording contract in her late teens but never followed it up; marriage, kids, life got in the way – but the love of it has always been with me.

I stopped singing when I auditioned for my sixth form production of Sweet Charity. I’d never sung on my own in front of anyone except my family and I was beyond nervous. Consequently the noise that came out of my voice was more akin to an elephant passing wind through a badly tuned bagpipe than Shirley Maclaine and I ran from the room, mortified and crippled with embarrassment, vowing never to sing in front of anyone ever again.

Fast forward a decade and the confidence that comes from a few too many teamed with a karaoke night in the local led to me occasionally getting up and belting out a bit of Patsy Cline to the late night stragglers propping up the bar. One of said stragglers was my then partner who, for whatever reason, found my getting up and singing in front of a bunch of drunks incredibly shameful and he’d often storm out in a mood.

Then in 2009 that relationship ended and my love affair with singing was re-kindled. I ventured along to a rehearsal of a new local choir. You didn’t have to audition, or be able to read music, or even think you could sing, perfect for an unconfident, shy and emotionally bruised woman such as I. The joy I felt on hearing and actually being part of a group of people singing together in harmony is one I’d never experienced before – falling in love, sex, getting my degree, becoming an aunty, nothing came close to the all-encompassing feeling of pure uplifting happiness I felt. I left that rehearsal feeling like I’d come home.

As someone with a long-term history of depression I can honestly say singing is good for your soul. No matter how bad I am feeling (and if you’ve read any of my other posts you’ll know that how I’ve been feeling over the past eight months or so is pretty fucking dreadful) two hours in the comforting, motherly arms of my choir on a Tuesday night is a balm to my aching, frayed mind.

When I sing now I still get the same sense of joy I felt at that first rehearsal even when I am feeling isolated, melancholy and crippled with fear. I’d love to syphon off that feeling, decant it into those old-fashioned blue-glass bottles and give one to everyone I know.

Why having a locked account doesn’t make you dick

I hate having a locked Twitter account. It is intensely irritating that I can’t reply to people in my timeline who don’t follow me back, if I reply to a mention which includes non-followers they don’t see it and probably think I’m ignoring them, people often assume having a locked account means I’m up my own arse and full of my own self-importance. I am passionate about sharing information and I’m a right bloody chatterbox so being behind a locked door doesn’t sit well with me at all.

I have to protect my tweets because I am being harassed by someone who appears to only understand Twitter as a means with which to make me life hell. This began back in January, I wrote my first blog post about it. All went quiet for some time and I began to put my life back together. At the beginning of the summer I hit a major depressive episode and had time off work with it. I began to recover and went back to work to be told that The Person had written again, this time using any tweets that referred to me leaving the house, drinking and socialising as evidence that I was in fact faking depression and asking my employers to investigate the claim. I still don’t know how The Person knew I was signed off with depression as I never explicitly said it on Twitter. Creepy, eh? I know depression is an often misunderstood condition, so I blogged about it in a bid to explain that being sociable and being depressed aren’t mutually exclusive.

Knowing your every move is being tracked by someone with a grudge against you is unnerving in the extreme. I share a lot, that’s the way I am so what could I do? Delete another account, not tweet anything relating to my personal life or say fuck The Person and continue to tweet openly and publically? Much as I wanted to do the latter I just couldn’t - this is my mental health and career we’re talking about here, not a crusade for open comms - so I locked my account and went through my 570 or so followers, forensically checking them to see if I could identify The Person. I couldn’t so I blocked 226 of them and felt like the biggest bitch going.

Obviously the police are involved although given that their main response has been essentially “dur, leave Twitter stoopid” I don’t hold out much hope of them being particularly useful. My employer is indeed investigating the claim that I have been faking depression – you can imagine how helpful that is in terms of making a full recovery from a major mental health episode – and I still have a locked Twitter account and will probably have to continue to have one for the foreseeable future; until either The Person gets bored, I stop being such an open person or, as currently seems most likely, I have a complete mental breakdown and get carted away to the nearest psychiatric unit.

So if you’re one of those people who feels the need to take the piss out of people with locked accounts, or smugly refuses to follow people back because their account is protected, remember there is a real person behind the avatar, with real reasons for locking themselves behind the door of Twitter and perhaps give them a chance.

Flippancy is a defence mechanism

I've had depression my whole adult life. Most of the time it doesn’t affect me and people are quite surprised to discover it is something I suffer from; I am outgoing, loud and fairly opinionated, I am sociable, communicative and the first one to get up and shake my thing on an empty dancefloor. I take medication that keeps me on an even keel and I am lucky that I have a wonderful group of friends I can talk to when I am feeling particularly down - they take me out, let me talk and do their level best to show me that I can be happy. But sometimes that isn’t enough and recently I have been signed off work by my doctor with a particularly significant depressive episode.

It isn’t easy to explain. During this bout there have been days where I have literally been unable to get out of bed, to get a drink, go to the loo, to eat. There is emptiness, followed by despair, followed by panic and fear. Fear that I’ll never be free of this seemingly endless cycle of my own introverted thoughts. Some of the symptoms of depression are an inability to concentrate, a heightened level of emotional sensitivity, lack of motivation and difficulty making decisions and interrupted sleep; these things make going to work during a significant episode very difficult. But it is unpredictable and there are better days, where I’ve been able to take the focus away from myself and go out and do some food shopping, meet a friend for coffee and dare I say it, have evenings out, having a drink and feeling free of the black dog for a few hours. A lot of that is putting a brave face on it and afterwards the depressive thoughts come back tenfold, but yes, there are times in the midst of a bout when I feel alive again. There are people for whom this indicates that I can’t really be that ill, and certainly shouldn’t be off work – in essence that I am the very worst kind of malingerer. You might agree with them. If you do, that’s your choice, I am not going to justify myself to anyone. It is what it is, I am who I am.

Depression is not about strength versus weakness, coping versus falling apart. It’s as real a condition as any other – other people just can’t see the symptoms like they can a rash, a stammer or a fracture. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone but the main reason for that is still because of the stigma surrounding mental health. Diagnosed depression can be managed with medication, talking therapies and the like but the attitude of other people to it is for me, a definite obstacle to being free of it. For every friend who gets what it’s about, there are countless others who don’t, for every friend with depression, there are countless others in denial and refusing to seek help because when all is said and done, we still have a culture of shame and fear around depression.

“What have you got to be depressed about? You’ve got a great job/lovely home/wonderful partner!” doesn’t even come into it, it’s got absolutely fuck all to do with financial security or whether you’re seeing someone as so many people seem to think. Sure these things can make anyone feel a bit depressive - who hasn’t been unhappy in a job, home or relationship at some point? But there is a vast difference between the unhappiness we all must feel at times in our lives and the condition Depression, diagnosed according to standardised, recognised medical guidelines.

I don’t go around advertising that I am a depressive, I wouldn’t be shouting my mouth off about any other illness I had either, but on the other hand I will not be shamed into not talking about, because it is not a fake illness. It is unpredictable, frightening and exhausting, but it won’t beat me and nor will the attitudes of other people.