A black weekend

Another chapter in the ongoing saga of how difficult I find it to live my largely unchallenging life…

I’ve written before about the fact that I have issues with depression and anxiety. It’s something I make no secret of, and I’m not ashamed of it (other than of course self-esteem issues also mean I’m deeply ashamed of it – such is the delightful enigma of mental health).

It started with what might be seen as a minor victory. I don’t necessarily feel that my cycles of depression are seasonal, but this winter has been hard. Christmas wasn’t a glowing success, and January and February have, so far, been characterised by a marked desire for isolation. Going out has been hard, even motivating myself to leave the house for work has been difficult some days. My ongoing shoulder complaint has also been bringing me down. But I’ve been soldiering on. Saturday, however, by the time I got home from the gym, I was feeling particularly low. My wife had already had to chase me up out of a chair when she came into the lounge to just find me staring at the floor, unable to verbalise what was bothering me but just feeling overwhelmed. I then went to the supermarket, and on the way home, a tire on my car made an alarming noise and then instantly deflated.

Now, I’m not a handy man. My skills with any kind of DIY or car maintenance rarely extend further than phoning my dad. But I pulled over, found the spare and the jack, jacked the car up and changed the tire. Even had the wherewithal to get the rubber-headed mallet and WD40 I keep in the car, to deal with a reluctant wheelnut. Slung the deflated wheel in the boot and drove home, feeling like a proper man for once.

Phoned the garage, then run the car down there to get a new wheel and have them check it over. Explanation was forthcoming for the incident, blah, blah, more needed than just new wheel due to what caused the deflation, big bill, these details become more mundane and uninteresting, but long story short, walked home from the garage in an increasing state of disarray, which when home rendered me incapable of a) immediate sensible resolution of our problem and b) rational discussion of our problem with my wife.

Now, my wife is a saint. I would say 49 times out of 50 she is an absolute rock when I’m experiencing anxiety issues. But there’s undoubtedly some perfectly understandable frustration on her part that her husband can’t always face these things like a normal grown up man, exacerbated by his inability to talk to her appropriately when he’s in crisis. I snapped, she snapped, and she asked me to go sit in another room until I’d calmed down. Only I didn’t stop at the front room, I went on out the front door and left. Turned up at my parents’ house an hour and a half later, soaked in sweat and just broke down crying.

Put flippantly, I’m forty years old and I ran away from home. But actually, this was something new for me. Something inside just flipped, and I strode off out through Thorpe, over the dual carriageway and along the back road from Postwick to Brundall. All the while, aware from a secluded vantage point deep inside my head that what I was doing was stupid (you don’t walk out on your spouse mid-argument), but entirely unable to stop myself. All the while, increasingly confused by my own behaviour, and scared of my wife’s reaction, but entirely unable  to stop myself. Just a mess of confusion, panic and fear. I knew all the time I should stop and go back, but I didn’t have the first idea how to make myself. The flight mechanism was overwhelming.

Often the first thing to happen after an anxiety episode is that I’ll need to sleep. Even without the physical exertion of actually going out and taking a six mile hike (not that six miles is a huge distance, but I’m in no great shape and unused to it), the stress and tension that builds up in me just causes me to collapse as I start to come down from it. So on this occasion, I went out pretty quickly, for an hour or so. Got up for a couple of hours and sat with my parents, wrapped in a blanket and a t-shirt of my dads while my mum washed my saturated clothes. Then went back to bed for twelve hours.

Dad ran me home in the morning after I went to church with them, barely unable to stand up I was still so exhausted, and no doubt visibly unwell. My wife, of course, was graciousness itself, though not to an indulgent degree. I spent a relaxing Sunday recuperating (okay, and crying a fair bit), in the evening we watched The Red Shoes, and I sank into my own bed Sunday night next to my wife drained but returning somewhat to a even keel.

Alas, this good work was somewhat undone by an incident this morning whereby I made myself late for work by half an hour for no reason other than my head was convinced my morning routine was proceeding as normal only to realise as I left the house that, being 9:30, this wasn’t the time I was supposed to be leaving, it was the time I was supposed to be arriving at work. On any other day, a ridiculous and amusing error, but after this weekend, another sign that my brain was not doing what it was supposed to be doing, but rather feeding me false information. I arrived at work out of sorts, and again in a state of high confusion and creeping panic.

This is the predominate feeling at the moment – confusion. Which then feeds rising panic. The world should feel normal, but my brain is seemingly having difficulty interpreting it as it should. I’m, in all probability, nothing other than run down, and in need of a break (we are holidaying soon). But there’s always the concern that something fundamental isn’t working properly.

So why am I sharing this? Firstly, for my own sanity, I find that writing these things down helps exorcise them. I have few creative skills, but I like to think I know my way round a sentence, so this is one weapon I have in confronting this thing that grips me from time to time (okay granted, didn’t really know my way round THAT sentence). Once HERE, it feels at least in part like there is less of it THERE, in my head.

But I also hope that by not shying away from it, not hiding it, it might help someone going through a similar thing feel less alone. Or help someone who knows someone going through something similar understand a bit more of how it can work in some heads. No two people experience these things the same way, of course, but it can’t hurt to see an example laid out.

One other thing I want to share. I made brief mention on Twitter Saturday night, in the gap between my post-hike kip and my twelve hour sleep, of the day’s events (again, I firmly believe in the value of being open about this). And some of my friends tweeted me with supportive messages. Among them, from someone whose entire relationship with me extends no further than following each other on Twitter and occasionally retweeting a thing, tweeted me saying “keep well and you know where we are on here mate”. The tiniest of things in one sense, and yet as a humane gesture from a relative stranger, in a moment of personal crisis, I can’t tell you what it meant to me. I sat in my parents’ guest bedroom and wept when I read it.

Never underestimate the power of simple kindness.