My Experience: Part II - The Suffering That Depression Has Caused Me To Endure

It’s really hard to put into words how I feel when I’m depressed. There’s no words strong enough to do my feelings justice and if you’ve never experienced depression yourself, you can only try to imagine how terrible it really feels. No one can understand the true horror of depression unless they’ve felt it first-hand. If you’ve never been clinically depressed your body just isn’t programmed to feel such strong negative emotions, to hit a low that reaches deeper than any low you have ever experienced. Lucky you.

I have panic attacks, anxiety attacks, full on mental breakdowns that all occur just out of the blue. I can literally be perfectly happy and not have a worry in the world one minute and then all of a sudden this rush washes over me and I feel scared, although I don’t know of what, my mind is blank yet racing with thoughts at the same time, I forget everything I was doing, everything I should be doing, everything I am and I just become overwhelmed with negativity – it’s like I’m under water, drowning, being tossed around by a giant wave with no way of knowing when it’ll stop, if it’ll stop, if I’ll ever get the chance to come up for air. My chest feels tight, it’s hard to breath. I start shaking and crying, gasping and hyperventilating. I need to get somewhere safe immediately – my bed, the arms of my boyfriend, my mom or my sister. It goes on for hours like this. Every time I start to feel a little calmer and the tears have managed to stop flowing then another rush comes over me. There’s no trying to stop it, to get a hold of myself, my brain can’t even fathom how to go about doing that. All I have to do is wait; endure the pain of it all until it comes to its natural end. Needless to say, I feel off for the rest of the day. I can’t shake the feeling of what happened. I feel sad, down, lonely, tired. I just want to fall asleep and hope I sleep right through until the next day.

I cry a lot. I’ve heard that crying may mean you’re not dealing with depression but simply grief because as I explained in a previous post (Depression vs. Sadness), your mood produces emotional symptoms, whereas the symptoms of depression are more physical. But I’ve always been a very emotional person, I’ve always turned to crying as a way to release the feelings built up inside me and so I think my excessive crying now is due not to the temporary mood of grief, but to grieving for the loss of myself that depression has caused. I don’t recognize myself any more, and sometimes no matter how hard I try, I can’t get back to the way I used to be and this scares me. So whenever people ask me how I’m doing, whenever I’m forced to talk about my depression, I get a lump in my throat and the tears start swelling up behind my eyes and no matter how hard I try, it eventually becomes too much and I break down crying.

Sometimes I’ll be sitting by myself and I just start crying out of nowhere. All of a sudden this feeling of frustration over takes me and I can’t escape it. I bring my knees to my chest, put my forehead on my knees, and grab at my hair with both hands, pulling on my hair because I feel so overwhelmed, so frustrated, so broken.

I get irritated a lot and lose my temper. When people do things that I used to find funny and playful, I now have no patience for them and they cause me to be annoyed. The littlest things set me off and I argue a lot more than I used to. I also can’t concentrate – my mind either feels overwhelmed and jumps from one idea to the next, making it impossible for me to make up my mind or I stare blankly ahead while my mind is off in la-la land, thinking of absolutely nothing, just wasting time away.

Most of the time I have zero motivation to do anything. There’s lots of things I’d like to do, and often I’ll sit there staring at things, willing myself to just pick them up and start doing something, but I just can’t. There’s no explanation for it. There’s just this force within me that is holding me back. It’s terrible, because I’m so bored, but no matter how strong the boredom, I can’t bring myself to do anything. Sometimes I can’t even read or watch TV or do mindless tasks. I just sit there, staring off in the distance. Sometimes I go days without showering because it just seems like such a huge chore. I love to cook but I barely eat decent meals anymore because I just don’t feel like making them. I live for nature and the outdoors but most of the time I can’t bring myself to get dressed let alone leave the house, even to just go sit in my back yard for a bit. It takes me hours to fall asleep at night, usually I’m not asleep until 4am and then I never want to wake up and get out of bed in the morning. By the time I’m up it’s almost lunch time and I’ve wasted half my day just lying in bed. I used to be extremely active (sports, gym, yoga, zumba) but now I do none of that; it’s just too much effort. I’ve become lazy, but not a kind of laziness I can control. It’s not like I don’t want to do these things and rather sit around doing nothing, definitely not! I would love to be my active self again, but I just can’t. Again, there’s that imaginary force holding me back.

Most days I get out of bed and go sit in my recliner, I drink a tea and spend the whole day reading. I only get up to go to the bathroom, snack on something that doesn’t require time to make or to refill my tea. I feel like each day just blends right into the next one, it’s all a blur. My life is passing me by. Days have turned into weeks, into months and now into years of me doing absolutely nothing with my life. It saddens me that I’m missing out on so much, that I’m missing out on being a regular 24 year old girl, that I can’t hold on to a job and don’t even have enough money to live off of let alone go out and have a good time with my friends doing all the activities I dream of one day doing again. I try to get things done each day to change my situation, even if just a little, but it’s terribly hard to notice any progress. I’m determined to turn all this around and be my happy self again but sometimes I just feel stuck. 

My Experience: Part I - My Story

I haven’t posted in over a month. I didn’t forget about my blog or give up on it but I was going through a down period and I needed to focus on me for a little while. I also knew the next couple of posts I wanted to write were to describe my personal experience of getting diagnosed and dealing with the effects of depression and it was hard to work up the courage to tell this story.

In 2010/2011 I went on an exchange to England for a year. It was the best year of my life! I experienced a new culture, I met so many amazing people and made some of my best friends, I travelled all the time. It was perfect. Then I returned home to Canada and things got hard. I was thrown back into a more strict society with higher expectations; it was like culture shock in my own country. Friendships had dwindled over the year as people’s lives continued on without me while I was gone. It was my last year of university and for the first time ever I found school work to be a chore. It wasn’t hard, I had just changed. I used to be the person who identified myself by my grades and focused only on school work, to the detriment of all other aspects of my life. But now I had experienced a different way of life, a more relaxed way of life; I felt alive. I wanted to travel and explore and meet new people and socialize; school just wasn’t as important as it used to be. But I had gotten straight A’s throughout my past 3 years of university and I knew I’d be very disappointed in myself if I didn’t get straight A’s in my final year, so as hard as it was to concentrate, I pushed myself to give it my all. In the end it paid off and on graduation day I was happy when I received a medal for graduating at the top of my class. It was worth it. But I was burnt out.

Throughout the year I also diagnosed myself with Seasonal Affective Disorder. After being in England for a year I was certainly sun deprived. Then came the cold Canadian winter (which I usually love because I ski/snowboard/skate/snowshoe) but for the first time, I hated it. I started sleeping a lot, stopped trekking to the gym, went outside as few times as possible and eventually started skipping most of my classes (which I NEVER did before!) I think the lack of sunlight, the endlessly long, cold winter, and my pure exhaustion from school just did me in. My body gave up, it didn’t want to try and fight anymore.

After my year abroad I had also gone through a break up. The break up itself didn’t contribute to my depression, but there were consequences to that relationship that were now fairly evident. For 3 and a half years my life had revolved around one person and now that he was gone, I was alone. I had given up most of my hobbies and we had spent all of our time together so I now realized that I really didn’t have any friends. This certainly affected my mood – I had no support network, no one to share stories with, no social life. It was just me. I love having alone time, but when all my time was spent by myself and I had no one to do anything with it got incredibly lonely.

In May 2012, right after I finished my last year of university, I was officially diagnosed with depression. I went on a dopamine medication and immediately had a bad reaction so my doctor switched me to a serotonin medication that seemed to have more promise.  But despite having just gotten diagnosed with depression, I still decided to move back to England for law school. In hindsight, that was probably a bad idea. I loved England, I made more awesome friends, but being in another country, so far away from my family, at a time when I was really struggling made things worse. I was fine for the first semester, the change and the excitement was enough to boost my spirits. But then second semester came along and I was 100% burnt out. I couldn’t focus on school; I had no interest in it anymore. The grey, rainy weather in England put a damper on my already low mood. I had no motivation to do any of the fun activities I had planned to do, and I barely saw my friends any more. I stopped going to class, even though I was on a VISA and could get kicked out of the country for not showing up. I stopped going out with my friends. I didn’t travel anymore. I didn’t even get dressed or leave the house. It also didn’t helping that I was dating (and living with) a guy who turned out to have zero aspirations in life – his negative outlook on life really brought me down. I decided to break up with my boyfriend, take a leave of absence from law school and return to Canada. Packing up and getting myself to the airport was an enormous task for me, I’d say it was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. It was so hard for me to gather the motivation to actually do something and to leave the house and catch a train to the airport seemed impossible. I almost didn’t get up the morning I had to leave because I couldn’t coax myself to get out of bed and face the day. The only thing that got me moving was knowing that I was going home and that I could then get into my own bed and not have to move again for as long as I wanted.

Being home actually made a huge difference. It was nice to see my family and my dog. It was summer time and I live on the lake so I could just relax and soak up the sun. I was happy. And I thought I was cured. I had stopped taking my medication while in England, a few months before I came home. I found it really wasn’t helping me and I actually thought it was making me worse. Now that I was home, I was glad I wasn’t on any meds, I don't like the idea of putting all these unnatural chemicals into my body, I much rather find my own personal, natural ways of healing, so I was happy that all I needed to cure me was to come home and be with my family in the sun.

So I had dealt with depression (officially) for just over a year – May 2012 until June 2013. And then I was fine. I was still struggling to get back into a routine of working and moving out of my parents’ house, but I was happy. I eventually moved to Toronto in January 2014 and started working in February. I then got a second job in March and I loved how busy I was. After so long of doing nothing and being bored of doing nothing but not having the motivation to do anything else, a full schedule felt like heaven! Until the end of March, when it all came crashing down again.

March 2014 – I had been free from depression for almost 10 months and all of a sudden I felt my world spinning out of control again. Maybe I was never really completely free from it the first time. Maybe it was just a false sense of happiness from switching up my routine. I’m not sure. But I was certain that I was dealing with a relapse.

I missed work one night because I suffered an awful panic attack and couldn’t stop shaking and crying for hours. The next day I quit that job. I started struggling to wake up to get to my 9-5 job downtown and I either missed days or came in late. Eventually we worked out a revised schedule where I worked 11:30-5 instead. That helped for a while, but as time went on that also became too hard. I wasn’t falling asleep until around 4 or 5am, so waking up in the morning was actually impossible. Even when I managed to get to work, I couldn’t concentrate and it took forever to get anything done. I eventually just stopped going to work altogether. I reluctantly went back on medication (a different kind then the previous 2 I had tried). It’s working better I think. I also started seeing an acupuncturist (more on that later) and he really helped me deal with some of my issues. I’m still struggling with the relapse. But I can definitely say I’m on the rise again. And this time I’m not going to assume my recovery. I’m going to work hard and make some serious life changes so I can hopefully eliminate depression from my life altogether.

I know this post is incredibly long!! But whether anyone reads this to the end or not, I thought it was important to tell my background story of how I got to where I am today, if not for anyone else’s benefit, then at least for my own, as a record of my past and what I’ve been through. In my next post I will discuss all the feelings and emotions I have experienced when in my states of depression to give people an understanding of what I go through, and to help those of you dealing with depression see that you’re not alone in experiencing these troubling feelings.