Tag: mental health

short stories

~ New Year, New Me ~

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~ New year, New me ~

Another night of laying there unable to sleep. Another night of watching the hours go by as dawn approached, knowing I’d face the world even more sleep-deprived than the day before. Such a situation was nothing new to me. Insomnia had been ravaging my life for years by the time I was in my thirties. It came and went, but at its worst I’d get just a couple of hours of disturbed sleep a night. Sometimes I’d get none. Slowly it would snowball out of control until my mental state was dark, depressed, and delirious. At my very worst, I would even slip into psychosis and begin to have auditory and visual hallucinations. I would be totally exhausted and broken – a pitiful wretch – and all I needed was to simply sleep to fix myself, but I would lay there each night undergoing psychological torture, totally unable to switch off and get the thing my soul was screaming for. One time I got so frustrated I started banging my head against a wall in a desperate attempt to knock myself out. That’s when I realised the severity of the disorder that was violently destroying my life.

It’s now the start of 2024 as I begin this year in this all-too-familiar way. I partly have myself to blame for it, having gone on a weekend bender in Dublin three weeks before. Whenever my routine is disturbed by drinking and late nights, I usually end up spiralling into a state of sleep-deprivation. I guess I should have accepted by now that my partying days are behind me with this paralysing condition, but it’s been hard to let go of all the fun things that filled my youth. So, here I am three weeks on, battling a disease of the mind that no one else can see and only a few can understand. Still, the start of a new year presents the opportunity to start fresh and mark out some targets. Maybe I’ll quit drinking, I say to myself. Maybe I’ll finally get this condition under control. Strict sleeping times and healthy practices. No more partying until dawn. It’s a nice idea that I commit myself to with a sense of vigour and hope. A man can always use the concept of a new year to try and start afresh; even if it’s just a temporary delusion, sometimes that’s what one needs in order to keep marching into another year of existence.

For now though I lay in my room, hiding from the outside world which seemed far too unbearable when one hadn’t slept properly in weeks. I guess it was a good place to be considering that storms had been battering the country for weeks. I couldn’t help but listen to that heavy wind and rain like I was listening to a representation of my turbulent mental state. The nearby river continued to rise as I felt a growing gloom about my life, as if a sprawling swamp surrounded me with sinister creatures lurking somewhere in the shadows. Each year life got considerably harder and I was left wondering how I’ve even made it this far without drowning altogether. I took refuge in the fact that there was obviously some sort of strength inside of me that had kept me fighting off my demons throughout the years – whether that be depression, anxiety, alienation, insomnia, or general madness. However, I didn’t feel as strong and brave as I once did, and things were only getting harder as that river continued to rise and the current got stronger. I could feel my insides shaking; my nervous system vibrating with anxiety. I wondered how the hell I was ever going to get by in this world with my mental health problems and unemployability and the rising cost of living and everything that just seemed to make being a human-being a stupidly difficult and unrealistic task.

I couldn’t let myself get bogged down in a million worries at once, so I set a step by step guide to get out of the darkness first. The first thing I needed was sleep so I focused on fixing that by staying away from booze, meditating, and having set bedtimes. It took a few days but I eventually felt able to head out and face the world. I ran alongside the flooded river; I breathed in the air; I went shopping in the supermarket for healthy foods. Slowly I started to feel somewhat like a human-being again. The next step involved the ever-present necessity of money. I needed a job after my last one decided to let me go a few weeks before Christmas. I started searching and sending out applications. As always, I looked for the most straightforward jobs possible – menial factory or warehouse roles that required you to do just a couple of repetitive tasks. That’s about all I could manage at this point. Perhaps that was my ceiling. I was an autistic daydreamer after all, and my limited capacity for work was hard to ignore when reflecting on my job history.

Although jobless, I was at least getting some income being on government unemployment benefits. It required me to attend meetings with a work coach to tell them the steps I was taking in seeking employment. My last one was at the height of my insomnia when my anxiety was through the roof, and I was unfortunate to be met with a guy who grilled me and got me to apply for terrible call centre roles in which I wouldn’t last more than a few days. This time I was better prepared and lucky enough to be met with a woman who clearly didn’t care as much about her job as the previous guy. Perhaps she too knew what a joke it all was. I sat there describing some jobs I’d applied for, as well as some vague future employment goals. She typed some things into a computer and nodded her head as I accepted my place as a misfit and liability in this society. The tedious process plodded on and eventually came to a merciful end.

I then headed back out into the streets of Nottingham city centre. I walked around and saw them all surrounding me again: the normal, civilised faces of humanity. Presentable people with careers and cars and credit scores and shoe collections. People ready to continue on along the treadmill of a normal, sane life – mortgages and marriages; security and stability. The separation from everyone else all was as strong as ever. It was a new year, but it seemed it was the same old me – wandering the world like some sort of alien that had been cast away on planet earth. Still, I reminded myself that I had a beautiful girlfriend; that I was consistently looking for work; that I was twenty hours into learning to drive. Perhaps this year would be different. Perhaps this year I’d finally smoothen and straighten out. I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that the ‘new year, new me’ optimistic delusion was taking effect once again.

I continued walking towards home until I reached the river. I stopped and sat down on a bench beside it. The water levels had dropped back down to normal and the winter sunshine twinkled upon the surface. I let myself breathe and observed the pleasant scene before me, watching a flock of birds fly along the river and happy dogs stroll along the pathway. It was a place I had experienced great peace before and, after a few minutes, I noticed that peace there in my soul once again. I felt my inner anxiety being alleviated – all the thunder inside being replaced by a loving, radiant light that had filled me before. Despite my current troubles, I knew that it was a beautiful world, and that I really did belong to it – even if I felt out of place in society. Slowly I began to accept myself and where I was in life. Slowly I began to accept that yes – it was a new year, and in reality would never really be a new me, but the best thing I could do was to nurture the part of myself that had guided me to peace and happiness before. At that moment, I made a decision to look after myself a bit better, starting by resisting an offer to go out for drinks that evening. Something inside of me said the way forward this year was as simple as that. My plan wasn’t to conquer the world, or run a marathon, or some specific goal or resolution like that – but to just treat myself with some basic kindness and gentleness. Starting from there, who knew what it would lead to. For when the storm has passed and the destruction has been cast, it seemed the best and only real thing you could do was dust yourself off, pick up the pieces, and let yourself move forward in the direction of the calming and healing light.

poetry

Round Twelve

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~ Round Twelve ~

Beaten
Punched out
On the canvas
Life hitting harder than ever
And you fight to get up again
But this time, the thousandth time,
You finally begin to feel the futility
As you think back to all the struggle
The seeming eternity of this constant battle
As the crowd stands watching
And you contemplate finally succumbing
Letting yourself fade away under the lights
Feeling the heaviness of your heart
Battered and bruised
But, somehow, still beating its blood
That life force still flowing through you
As you take a deep breath
And feel a new surge of energy
That makes you stand once again to your feet
Delirious and even crazier than before
Not the same person anymore
Worn down, reshaped
And doing whatever it takes
To stay in the fight
And find some strength from somewhere
As you move forward back into it
To face the punches
Once again.

short stories · thoughts

~ Back in the Fog ~

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fog
~ Back In The Fog ~

Sometimes it just comes out of nowhere. One day you’ll be strolling down the streets of life, completely content with how things are, then suddenly the light starts to dwindle and you find yourself back in the fog. It is a state of being which is mostly referred to as depression. For me, depression for me was never about feeling down or sad. Rather it was a sort of void where just to feel something would have been welcome; even feelings of sadness, nostalgia, and melancholy were desirable when you were depressed, because that was at least feeling, and I felt that true depression is an overwhelming emptiness inside – a complete sense of nothingness – and this was the most soul-destroying thing a human could experience. A life without light, or feeling, or hope, or desire. Just a senseless, barren wilderness where you lingered like a ghost in the fog without any light to lead you home. And even if you were to speak to someone about it, you couldn’t even put your finger on what exactly the problem was. Your life may have appeared to be fine based on external appearances; but, of course, as we knew from the rich and famous were commiting suicide, depression did not discriminate based on aesthetic factors, and appearances could be dangerously deceiving. 

For me, my first period of depression began for me sometime around thirteen. Out of nowhere life became empty, and the only thing I looked forward to was sleeping. And even when I was smiling and laughing, I was broken inside, a drifter of life, not really there at all – not really anywhere. Just existing in some hollow and automatic way. And of course you can’t tell anyone how you feel, because you feel ashamed to feel that way, and all teenagers are depressed they say, but I wasn’t sure how true that was when the energy to go on living just wasn’t there anymore. And I looked back at old photos and lamented on my childhood, thinking that I had died in some way; that this brain inside me was beyond repair and I would never return to the days when the smiles were genuine and the skies truly blue. 

The depression returned when I was twenty. What I assumed was just a comedown after the best summer of my life, turned out to be another lengthy two-year spell in the void. After a few months of adventure and music festivals, the autumn came and I was thrown back into the emptiness I had experienced a few years previously. Even though I had moved out of it before, I still couldn’t imagine what it would be like to feel normal again. The fog surrounded and suffocated me, and again what was left to do but to just try to keep on living, even when there was no connection to anything I was doing. Even when my brain would not allow any joy to register. Even when I didn’t want to wake up and get out of bed in the morning.

Other spells of depression came and went through the years, and that fog was an environment that I became familiar with. Returning home from an eighteen month adventure one year was probably the time when the fog got the thickest and I truly thought about ending it all. But even though I walked blindly, I carried on with whatever fire was left in my heart, seeking to slowly light up my way to some sort of clearing. What I was thankful for when the times were hard was this deep kind of stubbornness in my soul. I had felt it since I was a small child; the unshakeable urge to march against the storm and ‘rage against the dying of the light’, as a great poet had once said. It kept me marching through the greyness. It kept moving towards some sort of distant salvation. And as the periods went on, my brain began to shift through a series of awakenings where I felt I was able to light up the world around me whenever that fog came back out of nowhere. I brought my own light to the darkness and kept a quiet courage in my heart as the light dwindled and the demons surrounded me.

I can imagine people I know close to me reading this now in a state of surprise. I guess I never spoke about it, and in a way I didn’t even really want to. People had their own problems to deal with, and when you are in a state of depression, you kind of just keep it to yourself and let it have its way with you. Naturally this made my problems invisible to the outside eye. This is something that is all-too common for sufferers of the condition. So often we hear the eulogies of shocked and surprised people who ‘had no idea’ that the person they thought they knew so well was contemplating how they were going to end their life. It’s a form of suffering that is mostly silent, and consequently it’s usually very difficult to tell who is wandering in that fog. It could be the person serving you coffee. It could be the lover in your bed. It could be your mother, your postman, your doctor, your therapist.    

Depression does not discriminate and everyone you walk past on the street is potentially a sufferer. I recalled one night out over the Christmas holidays where me and two of my closest friends got speaking to two sisters in a bar. What followed was a fun evening of drinking and dancing. One of the sisters was an energetic red-haired girl who was in full spirits. She was full of smiles, making out with one of my friends, excitedly telling us how she was going to attend a fox hunting protest the next day. You would have never have thought that she was someone lost in the fog, but just a couple of months later she committed suicide. Her sister spoke about it on social media and shared the last photo of them two together. Again, the wide smiles could be seen and everything seemed fine on the surface, but that point she had already written her suicide letter and made her decision to leave this world behind.

Sometimes people lost in the fog of depression do actually make it known. I travelled once with a Brazilian girl who regularly told me about how her ex was suicidal and threatening to kill himself. After a couple of failed attempts and a few more warnings, he went ahead and finally did it. By this point the girl didn’t even seem too upset about the thing, like she had already grieved his loss in the preceding years. To her, he was a man who had already died – just a shell of a person existing in flesh and bone without any spiritual attachment to his life. Truly this was the greatest tragedy of depression, creating people who were essentially dead already inside, and although I don’t compare what I felt to the scale of any of these people, I can understand why there are people out there who choose to check out rather than stay lost in that lifeless fog where life is just an desolate existence of nothingness. 

These days I still have my troubles and periods in the darkness.  However, through some strange series of events, I believed I have rewired my brain in a way that will not allow me to succumb to that state of total emptiness. But this is only a theory for now, and it would not surprise me to one day be walking down the streets of life and find my world suddenly shrouded in that sinister fog once more, having to dive into myself to find some more light to lead me into the clearing again. For many, depression is “a battle that lasts a lifetime; a fight that never ends.” So remember that when you stare into the eyes of those strangers passing you on the street. You never know who is searching for a reason to keep breathing the air of this troubled world.