One day at school, as part of a carnival themed day, my class was given a samba dancing lesson.  As this went on, one child started to get a bit tearful about not being able to do all the steps.  After various attempts from all of the adults present to encourage the child to keep going, the dance instructor suggested that the child sit out and watch our next run through the dance, to see if that helped.  Afterwards, I went over and asked the child:  “When you were watching us dance just now, what did you see?”  After pausing for a response that didn’t come, I then asked:  “Did you see everyone getting all the steps correct and dancing in perfect unison?”  The child thought for a moment and then looked me straight in the eyes and said:  “Yes.”  Now, if you can imagine a group of 9-year-old children (and, if you know me, me) being taught a samba routine in half an hour, you might guess that what the child thought that they’d seen wasn’t actually true.  I certainly made lots of mistakes.  Lots of children stopped dancing at times because they’d lost their place and waited to come back in again when we got to a familiar bit.  We were all just muddling through as best as we could.  This is one of the things that characterised depression for me.  I often looked at other people leading their lives and thought that they were getting it all right and I was doing everything wrong.  People would tell me that what I thought I was seeing wasn’t true and that everyone was just muddling along as best they could.  What they were telling me kind of made sense, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.  It wasn’t that I thought they were wrong or just saying it to try and be kind, but what was in my head was just too powerful.

Another illustration of my depression is something that I wrote in response to my Jam for Tea post, so it may help to have a quick look at that.  A quick summary would be that I couldn’t find the jam in the fridge where it was supposed to be, but after looking patiently in several different places found that it was exactly where it was supposed to be, where I had first looked.  In discussion that followed on Facebook I wrote the following, “Alternatively, I could have looked in the fridge, not seen the jam, decided that it was my fault that it hadn’t been put back, thought about all the other things I hadn’t done, reached the conclusion that I’m a terrible human being and gone on to have not a single positive thought for at least a fortnight. When there wasn’t anything wrong in the first place.”  Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?  Except that I wrote it because it is true, or I might venture to say now:  “it was true”.  Well, maybe “fortnight” was something of an understatement!  Little things going wrong, coupled with an instinct to blame myself, led to a seemingly endless progression of things that had gone wrong being brought to mind, the blame for each of which my mind delighted in laying on my shoulders.  People would tell me that this was silly, that it wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t find the jam.  What they were telling me kind of made sense, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.  It wasn’t that I thought they were wrong or just saying it to try and be kind, but what was in my head was just too powerful.

What do I mean by “what was in my head was just too powerful”?  Well, my mind was very good at turning against me those things that would actually have helped me.  It would often persuade me that whatever was being suggested was probably a good idea in general and would probably help most people but that either it wouldn’t work for me or that there was no point trying it because I’d never manage to do it properly or keep it up.  The final weapon in my mind’s armoury though was to turn the remedy into a stick with which to beat myself.  If I did manage to try something and it did seem to help then before long my mind was asking me, “Why haven’t you done that before?”  The answer, of course, was that I was a terrible person for not having done it before and so the cycle of negative thinking started again.

For me, depression was a slow, creeping, insidious shadow.  It wasn’t triggered suddenly by some trauma or other, but gradually the ways of thinking I’ve tried to describe gained in power and frequency.  When change happens slowly like this you can end up thinking things that you would not have entertained at the start.  This can, of course, be a good thing.  In this case it wasn’t.  With my mind frequently telling me that I was useless and doing everything wrong, it seemed to be a logical conclusion that I was making life harder for the people around me (family, friends, colleagues).  When I had spent a long time thinking that I was making life harder for the people around me it seemed to be a logical conclusion that they would be better off without me.  When I had spent a long time thinking that the people around me would be better off without me it seemed logical to think that if I was killed in an accident then that would be for the best, even though people would be upset in the short term.

I’m going to stop here in my progression of thought because I want to reflect on being in this state.  It was a state I was in for a long time – for several years.  It felt normal to walk along a street, even on an otherwise good day, see a bus or lorry coming towards me and think that if it accidentally mounted the pavement and killed me then that would be for the best.  Because of the insidious progression of the depression I didn’t particularly stop to think that this wasn’t a normal state of mind.  And if anyone had asked me whether I was suicidal I would have said “No.”  Because I wasn’t.  I didn’t once think at this stage of actively doing anything to kill myself.

I wasn’t going to return to describing the destructive progression of thought on the pretexts of not needing to spell it out and of not wanting to upset anyone who loves me who is reading this.  However, I’m going to make myself carry on.  I’ll discuss my reasons for writing this whole post later on, but it is important that I be as honest as I can be with myself.  So, when I had spent a long time thinking that if I was killed in an accident then that would be for the best then, on a particularly bad day, it seemed logical to think that I should kill myself.  I was well aware that many people would be hurt, but was convinced that in the long run they would be better off without me.  I made a hurried plan, the details of which I don’t think are important here, beyond the facts that I was alone at home and the plan involved driving somewhere else.  However, when I went to get in the car I was stopped by a simple thought that I couldn’t not be at home when my wife and children got back.  The thought wasn’t that I couldn’t possibly kill myself but, as I said, I couldn’t not be at home.  Rather unsurprisingly, my mind was in quite a state at this point and in order to calm it down I drank most of a bottle of whisky.  Not a pleasant thing for my wife to come home to, but at least I was still alive.

That was my lowest point.  I would probably have had to stay in this state for quite a while before actually going through with trying to take my own life.  Fortunately, I have not had to discover that for myself.  You may have noticed that I have spoken of my depression in the past tense.  What has brought me to the point of being able to do this?  In the same way that it is difficult to describe my depression and difficult to give reasons for it, it is difficult to describe my recovery.  I am very fortunate to have been surrounded by people who wanted to me to get better and were prepared to do what they could to help.  In particular, I have a wife who has lived out her vow to have me in sickness as well as in health with amazing patience, love and fortitude.  Quite apart from anything she did or said directly, it is all down to her that I have had the time, space and help I needed to recover.  I feel like this is the point at which I should say that she is my rock, but I don’t like that phrase much.  If she’s a rock and I’m not then that sounds rather one sided and I certainly hope that I’m also there for her when she needs me.  If we are both rocks then that sounds like a rather inflexible relationship.  The only way that our marriage has lasted so far and through my depression has been by both of us being flexible and prepared to change.

Having people around me prepared to take the time to talk to me when, perhaps, they didn’t know what to say was very important.  This must have been a thankless task because it must have seemed like it was making no difference.  As I said above, what they were telling me kind of made sense, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.  It wasn’t that I thought they were wrong or just saying it to try and be kind, but what was in my head was just too powerful.  With the benefit of hindsight, however, I can see that it did make a difference in the following two ways.  Firstly, although I doubt it was perceptible, being told in my low moments that other people saw me differently and more positively than I saw yourself did take the sting out of those lows and help me keep going a bit longer.  Don’t underestimate the importance of being reminded that, as someone once sang, “Happiness is an option,” even if it is not an option you can actually take at the time.  Secondly, all the advice that, as I have said, kind of made sense did go in and get stored away.  Now, all those things that I kind of understood but couldn’t quite believe have joined together and now I can say “I get it.”  It isn’t that one person, or one book, or one technique provided all the answers, but the solutions that I now find work for me are an amalgam of things that all sorts of people suggested at all sorts of different times.

People giving me the space to talk was also very important.  This was where speaking to a professional was very useful.  As you might expect, we spent time looking back at how I got into this state.  Doing this gave me a much better understanding of myself, which is of course very useful, however in the end I realised that it wasn’t a process that would offer a definitive cause and therefore provide an obvious solution.  Another useful aspect of therapy was that voicing what is going on in my head gave me a chance to process it and understand it better.  In addition, sometimes, when I managed to be really honest about it, when I heard myself say it out loud then at some level I realised that it didn’t make all that much sense.  That actually, I wasn’t really as bad a person as my mind was telling me I was.

Many things were suggested to me that might help.  I was on medication for a while and, whilst I’m not convinced that it helped all that much, it may have made things a little better than they would otherwise have been.  If I was to pick one technique than I would have to say that I have found mindfulness meditation really helpful.  Like many things, I had several false starts where I tried it for a bit, didn’t manage to keep it up and consequently felt bad about it.  Then, one day whilst trying it out I really felt the maelstrom of thoughts in my head slow down and I felt able to notice negative thoughts come and, most importantly, then go away again.  Whilst not always easy to do, from then on at least I knew that it was something that could help and could leave me feeling much calmer.

My recovery was a gradual process for a long time.  At the right time, after a good deal of persuasion, getting back to work helped, especially doing something that, whilst not without its stresses, required me to be very much in the moment whilst at work and that I could leave behind when I left work.  Then, rather unexpectedly, the EU referendum resulted in a dramatic jump in this recovery process.  Suddenly I felt that I could look back at all things my loved ones and been saying to me for years and say, “Back then it kind of made sense, but now I really get it.”  As a Christian, I see God’s healing power in this sudden change.  For the first time in years, possibly even since adolescence, I was completely at peace with myself and with the world around me.  As someone once sang:

“I’m completely at peace with the world,
And the dark clouds around me,
That often surround me,
Just fall away into the night.
I’m not scared anymore.”

As I’ve touched on faith, I’ll have a look at something that we discussed in therapy:  Did the guilt associated with some Christian teaching on sin from childhood or adolescence play a part in my depression?  Possibly it did a bit.  And yet the answers that now seem obvious to me were there in my faith all along as well.  I remember on my confirmation course, at the age of 14 or 15, when being taught Jesus’ summary of the law (“You must love the Lord your God with all your life, and with all your mind.  You must love your neighbour as yourself.”) one boy asking, possibly somewhat facetiously, “What if you don’t love yourself?”  I think the discussion that followed was along the lines of that not being an excuse for not acting kindly to others.  The question, however, has always stayed with me, perhaps because Christian teaching sometimes seems at odds with Jesus’ implication here that we should love ourselves.  It isn’t, of course, just Christianity that has a problem with this.  The phrase “he loves himself” is rarely said as a positive comment on a person’s virtues.  What does love here mean?  Well, in a famous passage, which has been familiar to me from a similar age, Paul helpfully tells us:

“Love’s great-hearted; love is kind,
knows no jealousy, makes no fuss,
is not puffed up, knows no shameless ways,
doesn’t force its rightful claim;
doesn’t rage or bear a grudge,
doesn’t cheer at others’ harm,
rejoices, rather, in the truth.
Love bears all things, believes all things,
Love hopes all things, endures all things.”

This is often read at weddings, my own included, but I understood from when I was a teenager that it wasn’t just about married love.  I got that it was about the way Christians should behave towards other people.  I didn’t get that it was also how I should behave towards myself.  In my depression I was not kind to myself.  I raged against myself, bore a grudge against myself (or, to use a different translation, I kept a catalogue of wrongs against myself).  I cheered at harming myself and in expecting perfection from myself I was puffed up.  It seems obvious to me now, but, like my jar of jam, although the answers were where I expected to find them and although I had looked right at them, I hadn’t really seen them.

I titled this post “My Depression”.  I can’t write about other people’s depressions, or depression in general, because I have only experienced my own.  It is something that is really hard to describe.  Hard because it is difficult thinking about it, but also hard to find the words that will help someone else understand what it is really like.  In the past, depression is something I found really difficult to understand in other people.  Although I tried to understand, the commonly held opinion that life is hard for everyone and you just need to get on with it kept nagging away.  Now I know that you can “just get on with it” for quite a long time, but there can come a point when what is in your head is too powerful and then you can no longer “just get on with it”.  So, I’m writing this in the hope that it helps some people to understand more about depression.  I hope also that it might give hope to anyone reading who is depressed, or living with someone who is depressed.  But also, I’m doing this for me.  At the moment I can look at myself and see the difference between the depressed me and the not-depressed me.  I hope that, by writing it down, if those dark clouds roll back in and surround me again then those around me can point me to this to remind myself of the difference.  And because this is something that I have written of my own free will then I hope that it will be much harder for my mind to argue against it.

For now, though, I’m enjoying the freedom of living without my mind trying to take me down all the time.  I’m enjoying feeling really present in the world.  I’m enjoying the things, such as reading scripture, which will rebuild and nurture me, without my mind turning them against me.  It is a truly liberating experience for me.  As someone else once sang:

“I can see clearly, now the pain has gone.”