Don’t hate me.
I’m going to Paris on Thursday, but I have been struggling.
I’m not exactly sure why… but it has been coming for a
while. I’m at a bit of a crossroads in my life, and this appears to have
freaked me out somewhat. I'm drowning.
Essentially, my purpose in life is lacking. I still can’t work and I am
no longer at uni. (Uni proved to be a little bit more advanced than I was ready
to tackle; my program started in second year.)
I had a bit of a mini-breakdown. I withdrew from uni. I fell
apart. I booked a ticket to Paris. As you do. When I asked my friend D what
he’d think of me if I dropped out of uni to go to Paris, he went silent for a
second and said, “OMG. That is like, so totally Bohemian.”
I suppose it is, by definition. Do I want to be Bohemian?
To be honest, I have NFI what I want right now. I think that
must be the crux of the problem. Paris is all well and good, but what on earth
am I coming back to? And why am I spending money that I should be saving for my
future?
I guess I was feeling rebellious. I *had* planned to go to
Paris in 2013, so I decided to go anyway. Screw it.
Being prone to fairly dramatic mood swings, I’ve since
questioned the wisdom of this decision. I honestly think that it will work out
fine in the long run. I know this instinctively. I’m just freaking out right now.
And when I say, “I’m freaking out,” I guess I don’t mean
“me” so much as my mind and body (if you can separate the three). My body is a
continued source of betrayal. Apart from depression, since I
switched to a different brand of melatonin, I’ve started shaking again.
My mood has been in freefall. It took me a little while to
notice. The starting point that I can pinpoint is when I dropped out of uni. I
was incredibly distraught and felt like the world’s biggest failure. I couldn’t
handle it. I should be able to handle it.
Perfectionist, much?
I’ve really got to learn to chill and give myself an easy
life for a while. Maybe for a few years even. I’m just used to pushing myself
and earning a certain amount of money and having a certain amount of career prestige
and wearing nice black dresses to work. But none of that is as important as my
health.
So what do I do instead of uni? Panicking, I bought a ticket
to Paris. I immediately needed some sort of purpose / self-definition. Je vais être une touriste.
I kinda forgot that being a tourist can also be a fairly demanding
“job”. This brings me back to my initial point: Don’t hate me.
I’m not looking for sympathy; eg: Oh, woe is me, I’m going to Paris. Boo le hoo. I’m not even
expecting understanding. I don’t really understand what’s going on myself, so I
can’t expect anyone else to (except maybe my shrinks). I actually don't really care
what anyone thinks, to be honest. At the end of the day, it’s me who has to
deal with it, as rational or irrational as it may be.
I just know that I have been feeling utterly horrendous for
the past month or so. It’s a bit like the cartoon below...
The beast...
(Source: National Council for Community Behavioural Healthcare)
Depression is easy to miss sometimes. It’s insidious; it
sneaks up, and by the time you realise it’s there, it’s pinning you down and
you can barely move. Or see. Or feel. Or care.
I was feeling a bit lost and I wanted to see where I was at,
objectively. I have been using an online mood tracker since last November and have
found it to be quite effective and accurate in monitoring my mood.
I’ve mostly scored in the “severe” category, with my psychological diagnoses confirming this. However, during May this
year, I dropped right down to “mild / moderate”, which was great news.
I knew that I wasn’t going to be in this category again, but
I wasn’t quite prepared for the result. I got 76. This is the highest score
that I have ever had. If you want to do the test, the link is
here.
I wasn’t quite sure how to cope with this, and I was terribly
upset. I mean, what is wrong with me?
I know that I’m having a bit of an existential crisis, but this is ridiculous.
The problem with severe depression, or a
major depressive episode is that it doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense. It is certainly very
confusing for the person affected. You spend a lot of time wondering what is
wrong, and if you are actually depressed or not (which always seem ridiculous
in hindsight, once you feel better again).
As I mentioned earlier, I likened the feeling to drowning.
No matter how hard you kick and gasp for air, something dark and menacing is
pulling you down. And all the kicking and gasping is exhausting. Plus, your
brain just doesn’t work properly.
I mean this in a literal way. Following my psychologist,
Ms G’s advice, I dragged myself out of bed one weekend and walked down to
Cremorne Point. It was a stunningly beautiful day, the sun was out, the breeze
was warm, the views were amazing. And I felt… nothing.
A glorious day!
Right, I thought, I just need to work up some endorphins.
They should boost me up to “normal” again at least. I walked the kilometre or
so uphill back to my house. I worked up a sweat. I was out of breath. And I
felt… nothing.
This is the point where I really started to get frightened.
It’s pretty rare where a half decent workout on a beautiful day will not evoke any positive chemical change in the
brain. I felt like rapping on my head to try to elicit a response. I felt like
I was in a glass box screaming at the top of my lungs and nobody could hear me.
It took me a while to get the message through to Ms G and Dr
J. I’m not very good at letting them see how much I’m sinking at times.
Apparently other clients go in with dirty hair and slouch and speak in a monotone. I guess
that’s just not how I roll. I put on a mask. Or something.
I saw them both recently and they’d wished me bon voyage and sent me on my way. It was
probably a bit early; I was still getting my head around how I was feeling and
hadn’t given all the behavioural tasks I’d been assigned a proper go, so I
didn’t push the issue.
But the behavioural tasks have had limited success. I am
still just going through the motions. I get up, I walk, I cook, I socialise. Sometimes
I perk up, but mostly I feel dead inside. I feel hollow and pointless and
empty. I realise that everyone I know envies me right now, because of my trip
and my fabulously whimsical, easy life. This makes me feel even worse. Guilt is a
huge part of depression.
To make matters worse, for some reason, I have been almost
constantly hyperventilating for a few weeks now. Not crazy hyperventilation,
that you’d notice, just chronic breathing that is too fast.
The problem with this is that it upsets the chemical balance
in your bloodstream between oxygen and carbon dioxide. Not enough carbon
dioxide puts your body into fight or flight mode. If you can’t stop
hyperventilating, you’re always on edge. I’ve had a lot of panic attacks over
the last few weeks, and general feelings of unbearable, stabbing, inexplicable
anxiety and self-hatred.
So what I have been feeling is physiological, as well as
psychological (but can we ever really separate the two?). What to do? I phoned
and spoke to Dr J a week ago. He was about to leave the country for an American
medical conference, but he still make the time to talk to me. He was concerned,
though not surprised.
We decided to increase my antidepressants. Not what either
of us would have wished, but he said that two weeks to wait (until Paris) was
too long. Had I not been going to Paris, he would have potentially swapped me
to another drug as I may have hit “the wall” with mianserin. But I am going
away, and so we work with what we have.
Increasing antidepressants is not for the faint-hearted. I
felt hungover for about a week. They are über dehydrating. I’m also on the
maximum dosage, and part of me will always feel that so many drugs in my system
is just wrong. But I’m also not prepared
to drift through life feeling like a cicada shell at the end of summer.
*crunch*
As for the chronic over-breathing, Dr J had already left the
country by the time that one came up. It may be a result of the increased meds
(they tend to make you feel worse before you feel better). I spoke with Ms G yesterday, and she has squeezed me in on Wednesday.
Everyone keeps telling me, “It will be fine,” and it’s doing
my head in. “It” being my health, my shaking, the trip. I’m not a moron, I know
it more than likely will be. But I’m still scared and concerned at the moment. I'm still shaking at the moment. I actually
do realise, in the rational part of my brain, that the trip will be just what
I need. But when it’s just me, alone, every night, shaking and swallowing those
damn pills, there is nothing about it
that feels alright.
Dr J said that people expect that when things appear to be “fine” that
we are also expected to be “fine”. But unfortunately the brain does not work
like this. It takes a while for things to sink in. He said time, increased medication, Paris and a bit of luck
and I’d hopefully start to feel a bit better. Paris is by no means a panacea,
but it will definitely help.
Ms G made a very good point in that anxiety and excitement
are two very similar emotions. In my overly-sensitive state, it is easy to
understand how my brain could be confusing the two. Think about when you’re
excited – your heart rate goes up, your thoughts start to race a little, you
breath is shallow and quick. These feelings are akin to panic, physiologically,
so she said that it makes sense that I am feeling the way that I am.
I HATE all of this. I hate being problematic. I just want to
be excited and happy like a normal person. Some nights I look at the bowl of
pills and want to chuck the lot in the bin. But I can’t.
Yesterday I spent $214 at the chemist buying six weeks’
worth of drugs for my trip. Luckily I’m not going to South East Asia; I’d make
the Bali Nine look like a naturopath society. Seriously.
But I am off, and even though it took me a about 25 minutes just to choose two bags in which to store my copious medication, I did choose them
in the end (see below, aren’t they pretty?). If I can just fling myself to the
other side of the world, via China, hopefully things will start to fall into
place in my head.
Mexican oilcloth sandwich bags!
I certainly am plunging into the unknown. The part of me
that doesn’t feel (a) literally petrified – in that I can’t move or get out of
bed half the time and (b) numb is completely intrigued by what lies ahead.
On my last trip I stayed alone, and only met up with friends
twice. This time, I am set to meet up with four lots of friends, and I will be
staying in what appears to be a guest house slash headquarters of Gallic hedonism. There
will be far more mingling I feel, and that’s going to be good for getting me
out of my current context.
Dans la maison de JSeb!
I sometimes feel that when you travel, you get to be your
“perfect self”. You pack all your favourite clothes, your nicest make-up, your
best shoes. You update your playlists on your iPod so that you have a perfect
soundtrack to your adventures.
You have no responsibilities and you tend to be more daring
in unfamiliar surroundings. You tell taxi drivers whatever the hell you want
when they ask you what you “do”. I’m tempted to say “rien” when someone asks me this trip, just to see their reaction.
When you’re on the plane, you’re all packaged up with
exactly what you need, and nothing you don’t. Suddenly you’re off on your own,
context-less, footloose and fancy free. A blank slate, you could say.
Somebody hand me the goddamn chalk already.
