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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