Food and I have never gotten along. As a child, one of the few things I could control was what I put in my mouth and I used that control to refuse all food that was good for me and to eat only the bad. My mother was both poor and addicted to chocolate. I’m sure that has something to do with my relationship with chocolate, especially recalling times that I stole chocolate from my mother.

This past month has been full of breakthroughs for me. I’ve been feeling more “grown up” recently and this has sparked a new realisation: I’ve been living my life as though I was still a child. Every day there has been this little voice inside of me saying, “I can eat anything I want. ALL of the chocolate!” Fighting my parents on every healthy food still impacts me to this day, where I find I am still repulsed by vegetables.

Tomorrow I check into hospital to start my ECT. Tomorrow I begin my detox from all foods unhealthy. I am an adult now and I really need to start acting like one.

A few days to a few weeks ago (not sure when exactly, it was a little bit gradual), I realised that I’ve been living life like it’s a competition. There was always this unconscious list of things that I had to do in life in order to be considered “successful” and beat everyone else. You know, stuff like getting married, having children, buying a house, travelling the world.

Then, as my circle of friends changed, so did my list. I became surrounded by people who either had their PhD or were working on it, so of course I needed to do a PhD as well, so I could “keep up” or beat my “competitors”.

This realisation came after a big mindset change wherein I evaluated my life, where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, and found myself so happy with just the identification of hobbies. For the first time in my life, I was thrilled with the prospect of participating in something rather than the obsessive completion of yet another task.

I can’t begin to describe how free from burden this has left me feeling. By no longer comparing myself to others even my depressive states don’t feel so bad. Perhaps because I now no longer feel guilty and as though I am somehow lacking. Now I can identify and accept that certain life conditions leave me feeling in a different state because I have an illness. I am so excited by this breakthrough.

In somewhat related news, I have now been confirmed to be going into hospital on the Monday coming for ECT. I’ll be staying in the hospital for the first two weeks of treatment and my husband is going to sort out Internet for me to use while I’m there (even my phone has terrible data in that place). I intend to blog a lot during my treatment, mostly because my psychiatrist has warned me that I will forget a lot of things while undergoing treatment and I am really interested in the function of memory and how writing about events may affect it.

So, expect lots of updates from me, and possibly a lot of confusion as I forget that I have updated!

My current state is rather confusing. I’ve been having a really tough time and struggle day to day, but I’ve also made strides in getting better.

The Darkness

I can’t even remember how long I’ve been struggling; it seems like forever. I find it difficult to sleep at night and then just as difficult getting up in the morning. I’m averaging about one to two days per week of actually making it into work and when I do get there, I am not productive. It’s basically at the point that if I don’t get better, I’ll lose my job.

On Monday I quit all junk food and any drinks except for water. I was doing really well until the withdrawal from sugar and caffeine set in on day three. On day four I realised that making such a big dietary change when I am at this level of depression was a very dumb idea. So I’m just going to take some little steps, like eating healthy for my main meals, guzzling lots of water before drinking something else and trying not to eat or drink anything except water after 8pm or so.

The interesting thing is that now I have caffeine and sugar again, I feel like I have way more energy than I did before I tried to detox. I’m sure that will disappear rather quickly once my body is used to it all again.

In any case, some time this month I should be starting ECT. I think I’ve discussed it in previous posts, but essentially I am at a point now where I am on three different drugs which only inhibit me from crying and I’ve been depressed for so long now (a few years) that I don’t know or remember what is “normal” for me. I can’t continue living like this and I am finally really ready to work on my depression.

The Dawn

Despite everything above, I have come across so many indicators lately of just how far I’ve come in the last four years.

Disobeying the Perfectionist Voice

My counsellor helped me through this one.

I was doing Honours with plans to go on to PhD afterwards, but I was finding it very hard and began questioning my reasons for doing this. A part of me figured that it would be useful in case my husband and I move to Norway (I could do my PhD in Norway, which actually pays very well), another part of me just wanted to have the title of “Dr” and a third part of me, the perfectionist, thought that I should do it because I found it hard.

However, once I began discussing it with Josie, I realised that doing Honours and PhD has no relevance to my career (unless I became an academic, which I don’t think I want) and that my main, flawed reason for attempting it was because some of my closest friends were either doing their PhD or had already done it, and I wanted to show that I was just as clever as them.

It was/is hard to come to terms with and a big part of me still feels like I am “chickening out”, but at least I know that I am making the right decision.

Accepting Lost Time

My psychiatrist, Dr Orr, loaned me a book recently compiled by the Black Dog Institute and incorporating stories of those suffering from depression and even a couple from those caring for someone with depression. One of the authors made mention that no one had told him that depression caused you to make bad decisions. I don’t think I realised this until I read it, but this in combination with Peter telling me that the only time he saw me happy in a job was when I was in libraries caused me to re-evaluate the decisions I’ve made since this bout of depression hit me in 2007.

As soon as the depression started, I felt dissatisfied and lonely (it coincided with me becoming single for the first time in three years). I thought I could fix the loneliness with company, not realising that it was something far deeper than that, and stupidly moved out of a nice house and into an apartment with two people that I quickly disliked. That was the obvious bad decision for me.

The dissatisfied feeling I attributed to my job as a Library Officer, perhaps because I spent most of my day there and I had gone from loving my job and being productive and happy to struggling to complete my usual tasks. Added to that was some “encouragement” from someone I began dating at that time who said I was “wasting” myself in a library, that I was much smarter than that. So I decided that I was fed up with my job and I wanted to see what else was out there. After a couple of job changes, I decided that I didn’t even like libraries anymore and changed out of my library degree and into Computer Science.

Fast forward to the present and I have now begun to understand that I still love libraries (academic ones anyway) and that this is where my career should be headed. In that spirit, I am enrolling in a Graduate Diploma to qualify me as a Librarian (rather than a Library Technician) and will hopefully be back in an academic library as soon as the right job shows up.

Again, this is something that I find difficult to come to terms with given that I tend to become obsessed with “wasted time” and berate myself for any lack of perfect achievement. On the upside though, I can think of one fantastic decision I made in my depression: marrying my husband. I grow more and more in love with him every year and I really value his support through this ordeal.

Talking Back

Last week, on my way to a job interview, I missed a turn I was supposed to have made. I went down a side street, around the round-a-bout and came back to go back the way I came. I had obviously left my thinking cap at home, because instead, I continued on the way I had been going. As I continued on in the wrong direction, I said out loud to myself, “I am such a fucking retard”.

Very shortly after that, I made a nice U-turn and then thought to myself, “Hey, that was mean. I shouldn’t be so mean to myself. Good job on making that U-turn!”

Thinking things like that and feeling them are very different, but it’s moments like that which help me to identify the progress I have made from the person who would have cried and cut herself for “being such a moron”.

Enjoying the Process

Perhaps coinciding with my disobedience to my perfectionist voice, I have identified a significant mindset change in myself. The perfectionist in me is always saying that I should be so much further along in my career, that I am not doing things quickly enough, that I haven’t achieved enough. Every course or project I have undertaken has always been a mad rush to the finish line while I’ve already thought about the next three things I’m going to do.

Not anymore!

I have hobbies now, real hobbies that I can do or not do any time that I want. I can actually enjoy the process of learning and growing without that big pusher coming up behind me. Liberating!

Identification and Verbalisation

One of the biggest barriers in “fixing” my depression has been the fact that I am often unaware of what I am thinking or feeling. And obviously, if I can’t identify a feeling, then I can’t verbalise it. I’ve been making regular break-throughs in that regard. The one I can most identify was just a couple of nights ago. My husband and I were cuddled up in bed and for some reason I was mimicking one of our cats, who makes funny sounds. My husband said, “Stop it! Or at least quieten down.” So I tried to make the sound quieter, because I was finding the whole thing hilarious. Very quickly after that though, my husband told me that I was beginning to annoy him.

In the past, I would have been upset and not really been sure why. When he would ask me what was wrong, I wouldn’t have an answer. This time though, I thought about it and did my best to identify exactly how his words had affected me and was able to finally reply to him with, “It’s like being told that me having fun is a hindrance to others and that I shouldn’t get to enjoy anything”. (Those aren’t the exact words, I’m sure I put it more eloquently than that)

So there’s the dawn on my horizon! I can see and feel that I am so much better than I used to be, regardless of my day to day struggles. I am so excited and optimistic about my future. I really am going to beat this thing.

On Monday I was sitting in Melbourne airport, looking up book reviews on my Kindle in the general area of nutrition and exercise. As always, I was sorely tempted by several books until the logical part of my brain kicked in and told me that it would be a waste of time and money right now; I’m not well enough to implement any serious changes like these books would tempt me to do. If I was so inclined to start fixing myself and areas of my life, I needed to start with my illness. So, after a quick search I downloaded and started reading The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Depression: A Step-by-Step Program by William J. Knaus.

The first seven percent of the book was a very hard to read introduction on why you should read the book. Before boarding my plane, I did manage to get a bit into Chapter One of the book and this quote really spoke to me:

Here is depression’s point of view: “I am depression. Cold like an arctic mist, I dampen your spirit and your soul. I fill your thoughts with gloom. When I am with you, you are but a withered leaf beneath wet snow with nowhere to go. Still, I can do much more. I can fill your mind with graveyard thoughts and make you teary. I can cause you to complain and bicker. I can make you feel uncertain. I can drain all pleasure from your life. I can drive laughter into the shadows. I can dig you into a hole so deep that you can’t see the top. I can then overwhelm you with thoughts of helplessness and hopelessness, so you won’t try to get out. For I am the mood of depression. I alone can control what you feel and do.”

The author went on to say, then, that this was perhaps a bit overly dramatic, but for me it is so relevant.

Today I also found a couple of poems I wrote when I was much younger, so I thought I’d share them. These were written around 2002, when I was fifteen or so.

Poem One: Haiku

A broken heart beats
Like an echo of the dead
A memory gone

Poem Two

Poison, clouds, dust and dirt.
Abrupt, cold, insolent and curt.
Ice, snow, metal and steel.
Hunger, passion, the next helpless meal.

You’re wrong, you’re cruel,
you leave me so cold.
You’re predictable, self-centered,
your mood swings grow old.

You leave me, you come back,
you leave me again.
You blind me, you mute me,
you are the race of men.

Poem Three

I’m so alone, I am left behind,
The people keep leaving me, wish they’d stop leaving.
Ashes, scattered in the wind.

I’m so afraid, I am small and weak,
Everything I had has been lost and long gone.
Dust that covers up my screen.

I’m so angry, I am screaming murder,
All my beliefs have been thrown out the window.
Hate that burns up from inside.

I’m so hollow, I am emptying,
Children are crying and I’m slowly dying.
Wish, wish that I could care.

I’m so open, I am being trampled,
Let them in, they take me, I cannot break free.
Lest I should break.

I’m so gone, I am not lingering,
Slowly I fade, like the sun sets I fade.
Please let me rest in peace.

Before the freeway incident recently, I was feeling kind of okay. I still had a lot of problems but I felt more optimistic about my future and had forgotten how bad depression felt. Don’t have that problem anymore.

I’ve been trying my best to pay attention to how I feel at various times and have realised that my social anxiety is extremely high at the moment. I used to be the kind of person who would smile and say hi to strangers. Now I avoid eye contact with strangers who talk to me, feel relieved if people don’t show up to social engagements and sometimes am too afraid to even play Draw Something (a mobile phone game that is like Pictionary), because it’s still a kind of social interaction. I started playing games on OMGPOP again recently and find that sometimes I just play game after game of Solitaire because I’m too scared of playing games with other people.

It’s such a shame. I like meeting new people and having nights out, but right now it’s too terrifying and has an 80% chance of turning into an unpleasant situation for me. I’m in Melbourne right now, alone in a hotel room while my husband is out socialising at a convention where we should both be. Tomorrow I will be doing my best to attend the convention and the gala dinner, but I honestly would not even be trying if the tickets hadn’t cost so much. I just want to curl up in bed.

So, my mood is fairly low. I’ve been crying a bit and thinking to myself that I can’t keep living like this. I really, really hope that ECT will help.

Tonight is a total disaster. Another bad driving incident. The pain is too fresh for details.

I am so sick of this. I’m sick of feeling like I deserve to be beaten. Sick of hating myself, and feeling like I should hate myself. The hole inside me is bigger than me. A chasm of sadness that could obliterate the world if I dare unleash it. Not that I could.

All of the pain and suffering that I have suppressed in my miserable little life fills such a large space but is trying to escape through a tiny crack (me). At times I feel this pressure, like I am going to burst. Like the pain is never ending and I will be dead long before it ceases.

Recently I was so optimistic about getting better. I was looking forward to giving ECT a try and changing my lifestyle into one in which I care for myself. I felt like being happy was possible.

Tonight I find it so hard to see beyond the present. I feel like this night will follow me and drag me down. I find the love of my husband hard to accept, his kindness hard to believe, when I feel as though I am full of poison. A despicable, disgusting organism that could not be called human. I want to rip out my brain, tear it into pieces and squash it into the ground under my heel. There are cords of black throughout the grey matter, disease that robs me of any potential I had at being a real person.

I’ve been reading a book that has helped me so much recently. I’ve begun to understand that just because I can’t see my depression, doesn’t mean that it isn’t a real, physical disease. Science has shown that the brain of a depressed person is different from others. It is a true illness, so misunderstood. Knowing this helps me to finally accept that I am not okay. I can’t do the things that non-depressed people can do. As much as I would love to get up at 6am every morning and exercise my butt off, I just can’t. I have to accept my current limitations and work within them. I need to stop reaching for “perfection” and aim for “okay” for the time being.

As I sat in my car, crying in the dark, I tried to remember what that optimism felt like. I knew I would not be able to feel it, but I could acknowledge its existence and help myself to remember that I would feel that way again. I understood it logically, even if I couldn’t grasp the feeling.

It’s three weeks until I next see my psychiatrist, who is attending a wedding in Ireland. Three weeks to hold onto this experience as evidence to be held under the microscope. Yes, I am ill. Yes, I need help.

Save me.

So in May or June I may be undergoing electroconvulsive therapy (a.k.a ECT or electric shock treatment). My psychiatrist (Dr Orr) says that there is a 90% chance that it will lift me up and give me back my motivation, but a 50% chance of relapse in a year.

At present I am on three drugs (one I just started this morning) and struggle every day to get out of bed. I am fighting a severe lack of confidence in myself. In fact, I found that the second paragraph of this article describes my morning quite well (my “4F” is the freeze/dissociative). I feel that every day I am fighting myself over every little thing and I am just sick of it. As ever, I am guilty of putting all my hope into one thing that I want to save me from myself, the current being ECT.

I don’t really have anything else to say. Every day is so damn hard and I am so sick of being this way.

I’ve had some downtime. For the last few months things had been steadily declining, culminating in me shutting myself into my own little world. And it wasn’t as comforting as the worlds I had when I was a child either.

My drugs have been changed again. I’m now on Zoloft (a stronger version of the anti-depressant that had worked for me for two years) in the mornings and Zyprexa (wafers meant to relieve my agitation) in the evenings. In the last two days the Zoloft has been upped and Zyprexa lowered. I certainly cry much less now although I’ve been struggling with getting out of bed. Can’t blame the iron anymore since that’s normal now.

My counsellor, Josie, set me a “mental health” plan to follow, which I have failed to do. It was essentially a routine that demanded little of me. Treadmill in the morning, work, walk around outside when I get home, healthy dinner, half an hour to do a task selected the previous day and write down one thing that I did well that day. Plus go to bed and wake up at the same times each day.

I feel I’m incapable of going at any speed other than full or none. The treadmill is the perfect example of this. I’m supposed to go on the treadmill for ten minutes a day. Doesn’t matter what speed, just ten minutes. But I don’t want to do it because it’s an expense of energy with little benefit. Working out for an hour in the morning? Sure, I’ll happily do that. In fact, my workouts have a whole ten minutes of treadmill time incorporated as a five minute warm up and a five minute “final blast”. Doing the ten minutes on its own though… I just don’t want to do it. I’d rather watch TV and eat way too much chocolate.

Chocolate is another great example because the same is true of my eating habits. I either follow my meal plan, or I fall off the wagon and eat ALL of the wrong things. And I usually buy too much, so I end up with this mindset of, “I have to finish all this bad food before I can start eating well again”.

This was going to be a post all about how I am planning on starting up my training plan again, but I guess it’s good that I’ve derailed into this issue. Identification of the issue is good. Just wish I knew what to do about it.

One of the “Tools of Adulthood” that I lack is the ability to self-soothe. This is something that children with caring parents naturally inherit and are able to implement themselves as they get older. Not only do I not have this rather vital skill, but it was replaced, in me, with a very negative voice. Children internalise what their parents tell them (non-verbally as much as the words themselves) and I’ve internalised someone who truly hates me.

A common tip that people like me are told is to start arguing with yourself. If you can identify that negative voice, you can then start to argue against it. Last night was a tremendous win for me, because not only did I find myself arguing against that voice when I would normally just let it reduce me to tears, but I listened. I felt the truth in what I was arguing and it actually helped. Where I would normally enter into a self destructive cycle that would keep me awake for hours, I instead acknowledged my argument and found the issue of last night too boring to focus on.

It is a small step, and one that I’m sure I will struggle to repeat, but this was a big win for me. I’ve now proved to myself that it is possible to learn these things later in life and maybe I will one day be just fine after all.

The biggest issue I’ve had these last few months has been related to my new anti-depressant: Pristiq. Prior to this I had been taking Lexapro, chosen because it was my psychiatrist’s favourite for depression and it came in an oral solution, super handy for someone who can’t take pills, like myself.

For two years (or so, I don’t remember) it worked great. Of course I was still miserable a lot because I had a horrible job and, well, I’m fucking depressed, but it was better than I had been in the months before finally giving in to the decision to take medications. It was a really helpful medication with no side effects for me.

Unfortunately, around the middle of 2011, it stopped helping. After my surgery, I went down and didn’t bounce back.

Now here’s the hard part for me. I see a psychologist every two weeks and my psychiatrist every couple of months. My psychiatrist has relied purely on the information I give him in terms of how I’m feeling and what needs to happen. And I suck at discussing any emotions that I’m feeling or have felt. When I was in high school, I would make appointments to see the school counsellor whilst miserable, and then I’d been fine by the time I saw them. The same happens when I see my psychiatrist as well. It’s like I’m so relieved to finally be seeing them that I instantly cheer up and find it hard to talk about previously feeling sad. I feel more confident about my ability to handle things in that moment.

Because of this, I stayed on Lexapro longer than I should have. And now I’ve probably stayed on Pristiq for too long.

Shortly after Christmas I checked into a psychiatric hospital. The reason, on paper, was so I could be monitored while they changed over my drugs. My drugs didn’t change and I didn’t find the hospital to be any more help than being at home. I guess I’m supposed to go and talk to a nurse or someone when I’m feeling bad, but all I could do was sit in my room and cry.

Each time my psychiatrist spoke to me, I must have been happy. I think that when I did have my bad night in there, I had decided that I wanted out and didn’t talk to him about my bad time because I was scared that when I asked to leave I’d be told, “No”. I am consistently letting myself down by not talking about the bad times when I’m feeling good. Not even good… just not bad.

In any case, I was eventually changed over to Pristiq which has posed two problems for me. Firstly, it doesn’t come in a liquid solution. To begin with, I was crushing it myself in the morning which results in poor absorption of the drug. Recently I have been getting them compounded into a liquid solution by a specialist pharmacy, but it tastes so damn foul that I dread every morning. Secondly, the side effects suck. On the 200mg dose I was extremely angry a good deal of the time. Now that I’ve dropped back down to 100mg I just get sad more often. There’s also the added worry about missing a dose, because unlike the Lexapro, when I miss a dose I can feel it.

The big problem, however, is the positive effect that Pristiq had on me. After I had been on Pristiq for a couple of weeks, I suddenly had so much drive and energy to tackle my issues, both mental and physical. I was even so confident about the whole thing that I started a circle on Google+ so people could watch me kick my own mental and physical butt and hopefully find their own strength in that. I mean, wow, I was so empowered that I thought I could help other people with their problems!

Now I am terrified of losing that. I worry that if I tell my psychiatrist to change my medication that, sure, I’ll be more able to cope, but I’ll lose all that energy and strength that I never even knew was inside of me. When I feel bad, it’s really bad. Like, “Oh my God I wish I could kill myself” kind of bad. But when I don’t feel bad I feel like everything is bearable and I can beat this if I can just stop being so damn tired.

I’m so scared of making the wrong choice. And more importantly, I’m so pissed at myself for not communicating any of this to my psychiatrist. I need to just write this down on a piece of paper and bloody read from it if I have to, just to get everything across and stop letting myself down. Stupid Gwyn.