Coming Out of Depression
I might need to come up with a new title that's less bleak than "Crying into the Void"
“Are you ok?”, a friend recently half whispered/half shouted as we sat inside a loud, warm Irish pub in North London as our other friends drunkenly stumbled through ‘Happy Birthday’. He asked with the type of inflection that suggested a more severe undertone than the usual “Are you ok?” driven by good manners and a desire to avoid awkward silences. I understood what he was asking. “Have you psychologically recovered from whatever it was you were going through the last time I saw you?”
I answered truthfully. “Yeah, fine I think? I am ok. I am definitely better than I was.” Better than I was has been a central theme to the conversations I’ve had with loved ones while I’ve been home. It’s the same response I’ve given anytime someone has tried to gage the ever changing status of my mental health. It makes a nice change to not have to be quick in finding a funny way of saying “Oh I am in unbearable pain, but you know, this is just life and we are here and time is passing so onwards I go.” I suspect the shift has been evident to those around me, who have mostly responded with an affirming “you seem better”, or “you look better”, or perhaps my favourite so far, “your writing is less sad.”
The tricky thing about being an extrovert with similar oratory abilities to [insert your favourite dictator here], is that I’ve mastered the art of convincing those around me that the information I share with them around my general state of being is the whole story from inception to end. Or at least I think I’ve mastered it. I find it easier to present a blunted synopsis of my struggles in order to avoid scaring the shit out of everyone around me, than finding the words to articulate something I myself do not understand.
I thought for a while that I had been successful at protecting my friends from knowing that at any given moment, I was/am five minutes away from a total nervous breakdown. When needed, I would turn on the charm and the jokes and throw distractions at them in the form of funny anecdotes and superficial dilemmas in order to prevent them from edging near the boundaries. For the most part, my friends are just as fucked in the head as I am, and I felt a responsibility to uphold my position as the strong and reliable one, for their sake as well as mine.
I maintained the bravado in an attempt to minimise how unwell and unhappy I was for a few months, until I made a string of very specific (read: terrible) life choices last year, that inevitably caused some concern among those closest to me. I wholeheartedly believe in the philosophical teachings of “fake it til you make it” (think it was Plato?), and thought “why can’t I just apply the same principle and just confidently bullshit my way out of being depressed?” Depression isn’t like a job interview or first date. Try as you may, there are ceilings to which you can outmanoeuvre the composition of your brain chemistry. I hit that ceiling in November/December 2022.
I am better than I was, but still not really better (and perhaps never will be). The gradual ascent into recovery - if we can call it that - has been more passive, though just as fragile, as I had thought it would be. I somehow avoided a need for the type of medication one can only access via an uncomfortable GP appointment.
Even more surprisingly, and somewhat hilariously, I ghosted my therapist. My initial fear was that without regular therapy I would surely deteriorate, but somehow the inverse occurred. Of course, there are too many variables to suggest a causal link between ghosting my therapist and finding my way out of depression, the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc etc and whatnot. However, perhaps the hour or so on Zoom every couple of weeks was barely making a dent.
In a difficult conversation with my Father a few months ago that took place in his car as we drove to dinner one evening, he suggested I find alternative therapy options, as what I had at the time “did not seem to be working.”
As difficult as it was to hear, it was mostly just very funny to hear my Middle Eastern Dad, not hugely accustomed to having open discussions about mental health, concisely articulating a problem that I had spent the past few months intent on ignoring.