You may know me personally, you may not. But I would like to tell you something whoever you are. I suffer from clinical depression and have done for a number of years. This is a condition which lay unacknowledged, essentially ignored, in myself since I was about 14 years old, maybe a bit older, and is a condition which I was only diagnosed with professionally over two weeks ago.
It seems strange, looking at the words, ‘I suffer from clinical depression’ when you know that it is you who have written them, but like all other diseases, depression should not be kept a secret.
I’m writing here because, essentially, I have so many thoughts going through my head about myself and my condition that I just need to see in front of me, verbalised, rather than having them float murkily through my brain. This post is, selfishly, for nobody’s benefit but my own.
If I could give you a bit of a background about me it would be this: I have always had an extremely low opinion of myself. Self-esteem and confidence are two things that just haven’t come naturally to me. I have always focused on negative aspects of myself, and I have often had absolutely no basis for these thoughts. These feelings have eaten away at me like a cancer for years, leading me to believe that I am unlovable to others. But more importantly, I’ve come to not love myself. And that is an absolutely horrible way to live, walking into a bathroom and seeing yourself in the mirror and being utterly disgusted with the face staring back at you. That may sound as if I’m being overly dramatic, but it’s the truth. You may meet me out and about and think that I am a ‘happy-go-lucky’ kind of person, but that is a facade I sometimes create for myself. I have good days, I have bad days. To be honest with you, I can go from good to bad and back again within the space of fifteen seconds. I’m not saying that I constantly wear a mask of satisfaction and contentment, I’m a human, I get in good moods as much as anyone else. But even when I’m in a good mood there has always been a negative undercurrent running through my thoughts, like a voice. Sometimes that voice can be as soft as a whisper, subtle but present, and sometimes that voice can be deafening, a primal scream drowning out everything else.
I am also susceptible to bouts of extreme loneliness and isolation. It’s that sense again of thinking that I am unlovable that contributes to these feelings. When feeling this way over the past few years I have not tried to engage with people, which would partly take away from those lonesome motions, but rather I withdrew into myself, avoiding people. There is simply nothing worse than feeling completely and utterly alone while in a room with other people, so I just remained by myself. Just me and my thoughts.
But through therapy that I have started (supplied gratis by my college) and through talking to my GP I have learned that his way of thinking has to stop. The cyclical motion of self-loathing that I have been wandering through these past years is completely detrimental to me, and it’s grinding me down to nothing, making me feel as if I’m becoming a black hole, and it’s only me that is being sucked into that abyss. My doctor has placed me on a course of antidepressants called Lexapro too. Initially I’ve been given a 6 month prescription for these tablets, but who knows how long I’ll have to keep taking them. I don’t quite know what to make of being on them if I’m honest, the therapeutic route to becoming better is far more attractive to me than the chemical one.
The main thing that I have learned about suffering from depression over the past few weeks is the paramount importance of talking. Depression is something that I tried to combat myself for so long, and I just became so worn down in the process that I literally had to tell someone how I was feeling or else I feared that I may simply self-destruct. As you may know, speaking about mental health issues is far from a comfortable topic for an Irish male to discuss, but please, if you are reading this and are feeling down about something, however trivial you might think it to be, try and talk to someone. Someone you know, someone you love, someone you trust. No matter how desperate you feel your situation may be, you do have people like that in your life, and they are more than willing to help you.
Nothing Rhymed 