|
First Symptoms:
- Not sleeping
- Decrease in desire for sex
- Avoidance of 2 by staying up late
- Anxiety about 2 made it impossible to sleep anyway
- Running away from crowds of people (a crowd being any more than three
people)
- Occasional bouts of paranoia
- Fear dominates my life
- Fear is the only emotion I feel
- Lack of fear is worse – there is nothing else inside that is 'real'. Adrift.
When I reach No 6
I go to my doctor. Not a success. There were more than three people waiting
and I had to run out. It wasn't until I'd moved house and changed doctors that
I tried again. By now I'd had 1-6 for about a year, but building up so slowly
I hadn't noticed how bad they were. I'd put it all down to the break up of a
long term relationship.
Doctor: You have anxiety and mild depression. Take these.
He doesn't ask much. Never looks up from his pad and I'm out in under the prescribed
seven minutes. Little orange pills. I look them up (I'm paranoid remember?).
They're prescribed in much larger dose for serious psychotic cases. I'm taking
a tiny amount. Does this mean I'm a tiny bit psychotic?
Nothing. My life is starting to blur as the anxiety goes into free fall. Panic
is not a slow thing. I read about depression and anxiety constantly: I have
a lot of extra time due to not sleeping. Anxiety is about the about-to-happen,
the unknown. Labelling and research temporarily ease the fear. I decide the
pills make me over emotional and quit after six weeks. I can't seem to slow
the avalanche of emotions zipping through me – all forms of fear. Eskimos may
well have sixty words for snow – English don't do so bad for fear (obviously
German scores much higher but we use some of those as well).
Timidness - can't face another doctor
Nervousness - can't stop pacing and fidgeting. Smoking is heaven.
Mistrust - obviously I'm not worthy of anyone's trust.
trepidation - I get through everything for months/years by promising myself
an easy pill-induced death (number 10)
Funk - I sit and rock. More often it feels as if everything else that is shaking
and only I am still. or I'm vibrating at a at a different pitch to the rest
of the world. (cranky ideas: number 11)
Second Doctor (allows
14 minutes): I get anti depressants. I'm so panic-filled it's all I can do to
stop myself grabbing the box and running out.
‘Do you have suicidal thoughts?’
Feeling like this, wouldn't you?
There is no end in
sight. The doctor has given no reassurance I will feel better – I might, then
again I might not. Suicide is a common-sense defence. I can't imagine life without
planning it at least twenty times a day.
The pills freak me out. I'm completely spaced. Can't teach. Certainly can't
sleep. If I'd wanted mood-altering drugs I don't need to hang around doctors'
waiting rooms.
I stay on the drugs
for a week. Scary. No sleep at all. For the first time people are commenting
on my behaviour. Sleeplessness is a side effect of the drugs. The doctor says
some people have a strong reaction to the drugs. My tough luck – she hasn't
got anything else to offer.
Now I've really lost it. Fight or flee mechanism is full on. I have constant
diarrhoea and no appetite. The hallucinations begin here. Nothing dramatic,
just walls closing in, and being followed by shadows. I walk a lot at night.
It's over a year since I've had a decent night's sleep. I think of walking into
the sea but something stops me. I'm walking on nothing and always falling. What
I want is for someone to walk around a corner and murder me. Even then I know
it is something else I'm after. A death that is not a death. I read a lot of
R D Laing, and stuff on shamanism but am loathe to ascribe it to my own experiences.
Acupuncture is my next hope. It suits my mood. I see myself stuck with hundreds
of needles like Pinhead in Hellraiser. Actually I only get half a dozen
in me and the acupuncturist takes an all too predictable interest in the 'coldness'
of my mother. For the first time someone in the medical profession acknowledges
I'm in a 'bad state' that has to be addressed.
The focus on what ‘caused’ my illness varied depending on the belief system
of the administrators. GPs would eagerly make notes about the psychedelics I
took a decade ago but had no interest in the vast quantities of a guaranteed
legal depressant (booze) I'd consumed over fifteen years. The end of a nine-year
relationship was considered a 'shock'. The acupuncturist bored on about my mother
twenty five years ago. No one bothered about the motorcycle accident I'd had
six months prior to my first symptoms.
Months of acupuncture follow. Things get a little better. I still treasure my
suicidal thoughts but I function quite well. And that is all I do. Function.
Only later can I see how empty I was. Pared down to that tiny section of rational
brain that got me through each day with the minimum of fuss.
What does it feel like? Like the moment you remember you've left the gas on
and it's too late to go back. That fear from the moment you wake. Your body
awash in adrenaline. It's a drag. It becomes more and more painful until every
day I'm conscious of being in actual pain. Not just the raw emotion drain but
as if someone's pumping acid through my bones.
We all get anxious
– a few nerves before an interview or presentation – but it has an ending. That's
the difference. There is no ending because there is not situation that has an
ending. The anxiety carries on relentless, no end in sight, feeding on itself.
After six months of acupuncture everything gets worse again. I can barely function.
One of the beauties of anxiety as opposed to depression is that you can get
a lot done as you're so worried about not doing all those things. I say that
and then I remember the days where I would sit in a complete funk unable to
do anything. It took desperate energy to make me do things but there was always
plenty of that if I could mobilise it, direct it.
‘Change your life’, the books say. I always felt insulted when I read this.
Snap your fingers and it would all go away. The anxiety was now a part of me,
etched in to my bones. I was scared of letting it go: what was there left beneath
the fear? Nothing. I knew, as everyone who goes through depression/anxiety knows,
that humanity is a facade, a bright mask over a black void. There is nothing
worth believing in. No one is to be trusted. Nothing is real. Fakery and fakes
are everywhere. That is the true nature of the world.
Back on the pills. This time I grit my teeth and hang on until the side-effects
lessen. You may experience some problems with sexual performance, says the doctor.
I say I've been having that for years. Being scared to death most of the time
is not an erotic experience.
At this point all I want is to not feel as bad – to not be in so much pain.
That was the height of my ambition. Yet there was a part of my brain that carried
on in its basic way. It allowed me to work, though I have very little memory
of any lectures I gave over this time. It even allowed me to find a new partner
and a new job. I moved into a new home. Complete change of life.
I'm cured aren't
I? The books say so. The books are wrong – or at least not all right. For a
long time things just carried on as before. I was still on the pills, still
had panic attacks. It was months before I first noticed a change, and another
year after I'd stopped the pills before I could say it was Over.
Why was it over?
Because I'd learned to enjoy people and things again, and learned to love again.
Corny but true. I can see how I was reduced to a very simple existence and that
had no room for happiness. It took a long time, through work which I really
enjoyed, work that challenged me and made me feel that there was meaning to
life again.
There are no easy answers to the being anxious/depressed. The experience has
changed me more than anything else in my whole life. The scars are there but
I avoid studying them. More than anything I focus on what gives me joy.
'Fear cannot be without hope, nor hope without fear.' (Baruch
Spinoza)
|
