Shadows, masks and struggles
Just to give you some indication where I'm looking to take you in this blog post, there are life experiences which are routinely offered up for public debate and discussion among everyone, many of who have no awareness or deeper understanding of the lifestyle being discussed. This is the issue that I want to write about here. Who gets to decide who has human rights and who doesn't? Who gets to decide what is authentic and real as a lifestyle and what isn't? Who gets to decide what you can and cannot do? Who gets to direct the drama or story you are living? You or someone else?
So let me give you some examples of individual lifestyles which are routinely offered up for public debate. I'm going to have to resort to a few stereotypes and labels, so some generalization. For example, if someone is a refugee or an asylum seeker. Another example or set of examples come from queer lifestyles, or the LGBTIQ community. To make this more specific let's take the example of say a queer trans woman. Just for contrast we can throw out another far more common example of parents. It seems if you have children, a large chunk of your lifestyle becomes a matter for public debate.
Let's try again without any stereotypes
Okay so let's try again with some more examples but this time no example stereotypes or lifestyles. Let's think about something which cuts across all walks of life, all lifestyles, all identities, and even throughout all perceived social classes. Two words. Mental illness. Don't mental health issues cut through all those gender and lifestyle stereotypes? Let's include examples of mental health issues where you find the great societal leveller. Yes you might find yourself at the top of the perceived social hierarchy as the white, heterosexual middle class male, and yet a mental health issue such as depression or a schizoaffective disorder can quickly cut you down to size. Mental health among men is just as stigmatizing and socially alienating as any other example.
So let's put the various labels and stereotypes to one side, because generally they're unhelpful anyway. Let's stick to the topic of the post, and that is the experience and who the experience actually belongs to - you or someone else?
Let's take the fairly common experience of the journey into one of the variations of depression, arguably one of the most complex of mental health issues. It never happens like a light switch, or obvious like a physical health issue with clearly defined symptoms. Even with depression, or one of its variations, stereotypes abound. All too often you may not even fit one of the common stereotypes, and in the earlier stages you may be adamantly in denial that you indeed are affected by depression. It can often take many sleepless nights, mornings when you struggle to get out of bed but cannot understand why, or experiences where you feel numb while doing things you believe you enjoy doing. You're just not feeling it, and you don't understand why you're not just feeling it.
This is where we get into the rituals of the shadows, the masking and pretending, all the times when you become a mystery to yourself. You know you need to get stuff done, but you just don't have any energy to get anything done. Then there's the dark side of the depression, the thoughts of death and suicide, the lack of any motivation or desire to live. Feelings of happiness, joy, amusement, contentment escape you. Then there's the anxiety, the fear, the doubts, and then the shame and the guilt. The ugly side of depression. The secrets. All the times of struggle when you're really not feeling it, but you pretend, just to put a brave face on it, for other people, for appearances, just to get through the day.
How much experience are you prepared to let go of?
This I feel is a central question shared commonly enough among people who struggle with depression. Many people seem to believe that depression is a kind of mood disorder associated with sadness, melancholy and even laziness.. something which is the polar opposite of happiness. Hence the various 'well meaning' platitudes of advice, such as cheering up, getting outside more, taking exercise, and so on. This isn't it. Not even close. The polar opposite of depression is vitality and vigour. It's an incredibly complex, unpredictable mental health issue because by the time you get through the denial and the various explanations, your brain chemistry has altered, your life has changed, and various cycles and rituals have become ingrained rather deeply into your behaviour.
Let me give you an example of how this plays out. Or maybe a few examples. You arrange to go out somewhere for an evening. So you go through the process of getting ready. You lay out some clothes to wear. You have a bath. You get changed. You charge up your phone. You get ready. You plan your journey. You leave your home. You get to the end of your street and you feel exhausted. Another example is when you go out and decide to cook yourself a proper meal. So you wander round a supermarket, carefully selecting the ingredients. You even throw in a couple of additional items. You get home. You sit down. You end up eating comfort food you already had in the fridge because as you stood in the kitchen you lost the urge to cook. You set aside a day for cleaning and laundry, but then waste half the day browsing the internet and checking your social media feed, over and over again. The cleaning remains undone and you feel guilty, recriminating with yourself for letting yourself go.
What makes it worse is that depression is generally fucking senseless, illogical, unpredictable, and can easily make you out to be a liar and unpredictable. Trying to deal with depression isn't always a case of going to see a doctor and getting a prescription. Often getting treatment for depression is time-consuming, hard work, takes a lot of research, and even when you go through all the steps and jump through all the hoops isn't guaranteed to work. Anti-depressants help some people and take the edge off things, making it easier to deal with. But then again for some people anti-depressants don't work, or come with side effects. I tried three courses of anti-depressants, two transformed me into a zombie. One course of anti-depressants worked better for my depression, but exacerbated my social anxiety. Likewise therapy works for some people but not for others. It's all a bit hit and miss.
But if trying to find effective treatment for depression is costly, inadequate with varying outcomes, even more challenging is trying to find effective and sustainable support. Even today mental health and mental illness carries a lot of social stigma. Of course it's a great deal better than it was say 50 years ago when there was little or no effective treatment available but mental health is still nowhere near any kind of parity with physical health issues. Mental illness is still a taboo subject for many and often your direct individual experience of an issue such as depression, an anxiety disorder, bipolar or PTSD is still overshadowed or diminished by widespread social and cultural beliefs about these issues. This can often make conversations difficult and revealing that you struggle with a mental health issue problematic.
All too often, and I feel this needs to be pointed out, depression isn't just a mental health issue, but is rather a multi-dimensional health issue which takes in aspects of physical health, has an existential component, and often in the way it cheats you out of your own life experience, also comes with the potential to distort your perspective and perception of your environment. There are also environmental factors which can often act as triggers. While some of these can relate as far back as childhood and unresolved past trauma. I'm sure some of you are aware of those inner voices which tell you that you are worthless, that you're not good enough, that you are lazy, weak, inadequate. But there are also circumstantial triggers which come from your current circumstances of life. Not always is depression some fancy middle class mental health issue which affects the affluent. It's also quite common among people who experience poverty, inequality, and social issues. Indeed all too often those who struggle with depression and are poorer are less likely to be referred for treatment or therapy. Even today getting a job is still pitched as a cure for depression. Okay, so what about all those high functioning types who have jobs and still struggle with depression?
Finding your own way through mental illness
Often what robs you of your life experience is not so much the mental health issue itself, but the stigma and the taboo associated with the mental health issue. All too often someone having a mental health issue is the unspoken reality of the family and even a relationship. But then again we can flip this round - concerning the stigma - and often when we speak about someone else we can often define them by their mental health issue, thus making it our second hand experience. But see if you have a mental health issue such as depression then it is part of your experience of life and the only thing you can do is accept it as such.
I can only here write from my own experience of dealing with dysthmic or unipolar depression. I wasted at least 20 years, maybe even longer, pretending that I didn't have it, listening to other people telling me that I couldn't possibly be depressed. But after more than a decade of broken sleep and various addictions I had to face the fact that unipolar depression was a significant part of my mental health. It's part of the reason I threw myself so heavily into mysticism, initially as a means of escape, but after years of Buddhism, meditation practice, exploring and developing my individual creativity, I managed to somehow equip myself with a skillset where I can identify the cycles and learn to let go, drift off, and pick up my life again somewhere further along the cycle.
Not that I'm always successful. Sometimes I get it wrong. Sometimes I misjudge where I am on the cycle and sometimes I over-extend myself or expose myself too much to something which turns out to be a trigger. The worst part of this is when the effects of my depression spill over in a way which I cannot mask or shadow or I let myself go. I'm not on anti-depressants because of the side effects of social anxiety, which for me was an even bigger ordeal than the depression. I found social anxiety exhausting, because you are consumed by your fear and by constant worry and left unchecked can cause you to become paranoid. So what would happen would be that I took anti-depressants to deal with the depression, then the social anxiety would kick in, and trying to compensate I see all kind of things that weren't there, over-think things, become afraid of people, and become so exhausted and worn down would sink back into depression.
So I quit the anti-depressants and went through a period of telling myself that while I have the depression, the world around me does not and carries on the same with or without me. It's taken me some time but I've developed a strategy of non-attachment, regulate my sleep, my diet, and kind of try my best to live my life in alignment with my cycles, trying to maintain a kind of average or equilibrium. Average is okay, I can still function relatively well. There are good days which I treat as some kind of recovery but it's reduced the bad days and the crashes. But most important is that I have accepted it for what it is, part of my life experience, and part of my journey through life.
But one thing I have learned from my own experiences of dealing with depression is that it doesn't make me any kind of authority on the subject outside of my own individual experience of depression. I don't have any advice to offer you or anyone else on the subject of mental health. If you tell me you have a mental health issue I will accept it at face value and accept it as part of your life experience. I can listen. I can support. But I won't judge, because I know how it feels to be judged by others solely on the basis of your mental health issues.