Today marks the second day of Depression Awareness Week (or - as I prefer to call it out of a sick sense of fun - World Depression Week) and I wanted to write something about my experience. However, as Tim Lott has already taken on the task of describing the sensation of being depressed here much more eloquently than I could hope to, I decided to have a go at looking at it from a different angle. Here I talk about the change in self-definition and identity that occurs in conjunction with mental illness. Or at least, how it occurred for me.
For most of my life, depression (and mental illness more broadly) was one of those really sad things that lot of people who weren't me unfortunately had to deal with. Kind of like having unreasonable parents, or living somewhere really cold, or having acne. Then, around the same time as I took the picture above, I started waking up sad. Every day. The emotional rash had broken out on the oily skin of my psyche, and I had no Clearasil Ultra 5-in-1 Acne Exfoliating Lotion to hand. I'm almost sorry for that metaphor, but hey - it's my blog and I'mma do what I want. Anyway, the transition from a perfectly mentally healthy person to an already imperfect and now somewhat mental person was a rough one. In some ways, that transition was harder for me to deal with than the depression and undefined eating disorders that followed. Having to reinvent your own identity is never an easy thing to do, but undeniably there is an added layer of darkness when the new definition involves words like "victim" and "sufferer". Even the amorphous "survivor", a word many of us who have experienced sexual assault use to describe ourselves, seems harsh. In fact, anything that reminded me how much of a struggle each day had become seemed only to aggravate the pain that these daily exercises like making breakfast had become. Years ago, I went to a few of my sister's first-year psychology classes at Auckland University. Among the memories of unnecessarily cruel experiments on monkeys, I recall one class in which the lecturer spoke about the diagnosis of mental illness. She spoke about the apparently random ways in which definitions of different disorders were tweaked year-to-year in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, and how patients responded to being diagnosed. Some patients experienced relief in finding that all their terrifying symptoms were, in fact, diagnosable illnesses, while others filled their diagnoses out, collecting new symptoms to fit more neatly into the parameters of their specific illness. Nowadays I am grateful for this definition, but that wasn't the case at the time. I am thankful now to have the language to talk about my experience, and relate to other, yes, sufferers. However, I do still wonder whether there was not something in the act of becoming conscious of my depression that solidified it in my mind, as a part of it. A sort of cogito ergo sum, but for "I feel depressed, therefore I am depressed". Because up until the day I said out loud that I wasn't ok, it was just me being sad and not really feeling like life was worth it. Not pleasant, obviously, but actually not as scary as being Someone With Depression. Likewise, when I felt myself dipping back into that pool of emotional tar almost a year later, it was not the waking-up-crying that made me want to run away, it was the thought that I was returning to the Big-D. (Click on that link, I dare you. It's Dumbledore. You'll enjoy it, I promise.) On that note, I'll wish you a happy World Depression Week! I'll also add that there are a million resources out there for people who are going through something and don't think that talking-therapy or drugs are what they want. CBT is one of many options, and anyone can get in touch with me through the contact page if they have any thoughts or questions.
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Now, I am not someone who thinks of herself as a runner. I have not stormed out of the room during a fight, or hung up on someone out of frustration. I will sit on my end of the line, maybe angry, maybe silent, but there, until I know I have something useful to say. However, I will be the first to admit that there have been times in my life when I could do nothing but run away. Two, to be exact. Both times I was running away from places I loved. The first time I ended up running into the man I ran away from the second time. Both times I was too far away from home to go back, but knew that anywhere else would be better than staying. And both times I stayed longer than I should have before I finally left. These are my stories of running away. 1. I had been in Kadikalesi, a small village in Bodrum, Turkey, for about three weeks by the time I knew I had to leave. Originally I’d had a job working at Kekik, a local bar/table tennis hotspot in exchange for room and board in the house behind the cafe, but I decided to stay a few days up on the hill with Ahmed after my work finished. Ahmed (of course he’s called Ahmed) ran the windsurfing club two doors down the beach from Kekik, and we had become friends in the way you do with forty-year-old Turkish men when you’re traveling and meet a local who speaks intelligible English and is generous with his weed. At first I was able to pass off his absurd sexism (asking me whether I liked bondage in the middle of a casual group conversation about packing styles) as a cultural peculiarity that I couldn’t blame him for. However, after days in his house turned into nights getting high on the terrace and him playing terrible porn for all to see, it was obvious that this was not the place for me. Ed, the lovely Brit who had been sharing his room with me, knew that I was off and graciously accepted a parting kiss from me the next morning. Having said the only goodbye I was prepared to say, I waited for a dolmus to take me to the otogar in Turgutreis, and from there a long-haul bus to Istanbul. A few days later he sent me a message to make sure I was ok, and I let him know that I was. This was the first time I ran away, and it was easier than I had ever imagined. So much angst had gone into the plan - should I leave a note, was it ok for me just to leave, should I go and say goodbye - but once I was gone, not a single look back was necessary. It was in Istanbul that I met Dustin, an American I would find myself running from fifteen months later. 2.
Perhaps it is not quite right to say that it was Dustin that I was running from, in the same way that it’s not like I was really running away from Ahmed; it is not usually a person, but a situation in which you no longer feel you can exist that causes you to run. And today, in Flagstaff, Arizona, I knew I could no longer exist without movement. The old immobility of depression had returned, and it became obvious that if I could not put myself into action and remove myself from a city in which I had no place, the paralysis and its master would defeat me. Sobbing over the phone to my roommate back in New York, I found a bus ticket to Seattle leaving from Flag that day. Why I might want to spend 47 hours on a bus getting even further from my home may seem like a mystery, but at this point a bus was something I knew I could handle better than hitchhiking to Las Vegas for a flight to Mexico, my other option, and it was under $250, which no flight was a couple of days before New Years. Yet the question remains, why did I have to leave Flagstaff, and why was I there in the first place? I suppose the second question is slightly easier to answer; there was a time when Dustin wanted me there, and I wanted to be wherever he was, and at that time he bought me plan tickets to spend my winter break there. And as for having to leave - I suppose it was a mental health decision more than anything. I had cried more often in the ten days I’d been in Arizona than in the three months since I left my family and home in New Zealand to study in the Big Apple. That’s the first time I’ve ever called the city that, and I swear I won't do it again. Anyway, after about a week I became terrified of going back to the black, as the song goes, and I knew all too well how inactivity and depression can quickly turn into rather unpleasant cycle in my life. So I left. And though Dustin knew I might not be home when he got back from work, it still felt a bit like I was making a dash for it while his back was turned. Which is kind of a shame, since I love this man more than I know how to express, but when you realise that there is no place for you where you are, that’s when it’s time to go, with or without the goodbyes. This time I left a note, almost as an insurance policy against having to answer questions before I was ready - he never replied to the past three letters I wrote him, so I figured if he had a piece of paper with my hand on it, he would be prevented from knowing me once more. |
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