“You can’t reprogram your mind like you’d program a computer”

Someone very wise said that to me a few years ago. I still feel like I owe that person big time, as she helped me understand something that has underpinned pretty much all the progress I’ve made since then (and there’s been a lot).

To be fair, there were probably other people (as well as self-help books, etc.) who tried to express the same concept to me in the past, but I never really “got” it back then. The way she expressed it summed it up perfectly in a way that I could immediately understand and relate to… further confirmation of my belief that when you’re trying to help people who are struggling, the way you say something can be just as important as what you say. (I’ll probably write a whole post on that topic at some point).

As soon as she said it, I immediately saw that trying to reprogram my mind as if it was a computer was exactly what I’d been trying (and failing) to do for many years, and I could also see that it was inevitable that that was never going to work, because the human brain isn’t like a computer (though there may be certain similarities).

I work with computers every day… in fact the main part of my job is programming them. So when I ran into problems with depression and anxiety (which hit me very suddenly), my first response was to apply the same sort of logic that I’d apply when fixing a mysterious bug that had appeared in a program I was working on. Computers are by their very nature binary devices: they deal with 1 and 0, on and off, black or white, all or nothing. When they do something they’re not supposed to do, it’s usually because of a programming error. Sometimes it’s obvious straight away where the error is, but often things are more mysterious and it takes a bit of detective work to track down the underlying cause. Finding the cause is normally the most difficult bit; once you find the source of the bug, it’s often very simple to correct it, and (assuming you really did find the source) the error goes away immediately. Done. Straight away, the symptoms of the bug disappear and the program starts working correctly*.

And that’s exactly the process I was trying to apply to my mental health as well. The way I saw it, there was a “bug” somewhere in my mind that was causing my depression and anxiety, and so the solution was to delve into analysing myself in great detail in the hope of finding it. I think I also assumed that when I finally found this bug, whatever form it turned out to take, it would be immediately obvious that I’d found the problem, and there would be a simple solution that would immediately “fix” the bug, removing my depression and anxiety for good.

On a conscious level, I wasn’t really aware that I was following this process. It was just something I turned to naturally without even thinking about it, a framework that appealed to my logical mind. If I’d actually written down what I was trying to do in explicit terms (like I have in the paragraph above) sooner, I might have seen that it wasn’t the right solution.

The thing is, there are a number of problems with applying this sort of process to the human mind. Neither finding the problem nor solving it once it’s been found really work the same way they do with a computer program. First of all, it seems pretty unlikely to me now that a disorder like depression or anxiety can be caused by a single, hidden “bug” of any type. There wasn’t a single rogue line of code, or cluster of neurons, or whatever, sitting deep within my brain causing all this havoc. These things are much more complex and all-encompassing than a standard software bug… as any sufferer knows, they can permeate every aspect of your life, expanding to ruin areas that originally had nothing to do with them, feeding off each other in horrendous vicious circles. Therefore my mission to track them down to some basic fault that could be easily rectified was doomed to failure from the start.

Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, humans don’t learn the way a computer “learns”. You can’t just go in there and delete the unhelpful coding and replace it with something more benign that takes effect straight away, immediately erasing all trace of the problem. I wish you could, but it doesn’t work that way. Humans learn gradually, by reinforcement. Even if you do occasionally find something in your mind that could arguably be classed as a “bug” (like a particular pattern of irrational thinking), even if you can immediately see why it’s illogical and unhelpful, you can’t get rid of it instantaneously… because that irrational mental pathway has usually been there a long time, it’s had a lot of reinforcement over the years, and it’s inevitably going to be stronger at first than anything you attempt to replace it with. The only answer is to keep reinforcing the replacement pathway until it eventually takes over, which can take a lot of time and effort.

I think for a while I refused to accept this. Maybe it was just arrogance… no matter how often I read about it in books or was gently told about it by therapists, I refused to accept that I could be so irrational that I would continue to act in outdated, unhelpful ways even after I’d seen them for what they were. I was convinced that as soon as I finally got to the bottom of why I felt this way, it would be trivial to stop it. In truth I’d already uncovered a lot of the problems in my mind by that time, but I hadn’t put much effort into changing them because I didn’t expect to need to. I couldn’t believe that it was possible to simultaneously recognise that a particular thinking pattern was unrealistic and destructive, yet also continue to be negatively affected by it.

The most damaging thing about this attitude was that it caused me to dismiss what was probably good, helpful advice as irrelevant. For example, if a book suggested that cutting down on alcohol intake could be beneficial for depressed people, I would dismiss it without even trying it. After all, I knew that alcohol wasn’t The Sole Cause of my depression, therefore cutting down on it clearly wasn’t going to cure me, therefore it was a waste of time. I’d be better off spending that effort continuing to search for the “bug” that needed to be fixed and not getting distracted by this kind of side issue, because at the time I saw that as my only chance of really getting better. Or maybe if I was going through a particularly low spell, I would try to put the advice into practise out of desperation, but would give up on it a few days or weeks later when it (inevitably) failed to give me the total, immediate cure I was looking for.

On the other side of the coin, I also persisted in doing things that were clearly destructive and bringing me down, because once again they seemed irrelevant – I knew they weren’t the main cause of my depression, so why bother to stop doing them?

It simply didn’t occur to me that maybe making some small changes might bring small improvements, and that over time those small improvements would build up into a big improvement, and that I could build on that big improvement to eventually get what I wanted. There was no room for that concept in my world view; I was far too wedded to the idea that my problems had one simple cause buried somewhere within my mind, and that the only way to get better was to unearth it and expose it for what it was.

 

And so, having all of this pointed out to me in such a simple and concise way was the start of big changes for me. Suddenly I realised that building up lots of small, gradual improvements wasn’t merely an option for getting better, it was actually the only option, realistically. In light of this I re-examined all the advice I’d rejected over the years, seeing now that just because it wasn’t an instant cure didn’t mean it was worthless… it could still be part of the solution. I started to look after myself better, making sure I had enough time for relaxation and sleep, and I experimented with the effects that my eating and drinking habits were having on me to see if I could make a difference there. I began to take pleasure in the small and simple things again rather than looking for lofty, all-encompassing solutions. I was kinder to myself and no longer forced myself into situations I really hated unless there was a very good reason to. It took a while after spending so long in such a different mindset, but I persevered with it.

A few years later, my life had changed out of all recognition. I wouldn’t say I’m “cured” yet, but I’m hopeful now that I might one day reach that point. And if I do, it won’t be down to finding a “bug” in my head and fixing it, but to a gradual accumulation of hundreds and thousands of little changes over a period of years, the changes I never used to think were worth bothering with.

Returning again to the title, I’d just like to say a huge THANK YOU to the friend who said this to me. You have no idea how much my life has been transformed by that one simple sentence.

 

* Anyone who knows about programming will recognise that this paragraph is something of an over-simplification, but I didn’t want to spend too long going into the minute details of debugging, as it’s not really relevant here.

My Story, part 8: The impulse to dance

Getting my feelings back and giving myself time to feel safe and alive again had laid the foundations for recovery… but a return to what I’d call normality was still a long time coming.

It was a turbulent time. My relationship with the girl who’d helped me so much eventually ended very badly, leaving me emotionally and physically exhausted. While still grieving the loss of her, I set out to try and build a functioning and enjoyable life for myself, independent of my family. I moved out of my parents’ house again, this time knowing I would never go back. In fact living in such an unhealthy and messed up environment had become so intolerable to me that I ended up spending the last few nights before getting the keys to my flat in a hotel. It was expensive, but I’d reached the point where I would do anything just to get out of there.

For the next few years it felt as if there was a battle going on in my head, between the part of me that was able to experience genuine happiness and wanted that for me, and the part that was trying to drag me back into depression again. For a while it felt as if the depressed part was gaining the upper hand – almost every day I felt out of place, like I was living the wrong life but had no idea how to get into the right one. Being around so many “normal” people at work was very difficult – they were nice and it probably would have been good for me if I could have talked to them a bit more, maybe even made some friends, but that seemed out of the question. I saw myself as very different from them. Maybe I hadn’t been born that way, but the last decade of depression, anxiety and turmoil had made me different and I felt I had no hope of ever changing that.

Gradually, though, things changed. Not in the way I expected. The real breakthrough came as I learned to listen to my feelings enough to know what I really wanted. It was a tentative process at first, but every step I took down that path brought a little more relief from the hell of the depression, and made my day-to-day life a little more bearable.

The first concrete instance of this, and one that I’ll always remember vividly, came a few months after I moved out to start my new life. It was the start of a new year, and I’d decided I needed to find some new social groups, give myself a chance to get out there and meet people. Nothing new there, I’d tried this plenty of times in the past, with results that usually varied between disastrous and disappointing. But what was very new was the group I chose.

I joined a dance society at the local university.

That may not sound like a particularly profound or unusual decision, but anyone who knew me at the time would have been shocked and confused by this, and indeed many of them were! It was about the last thing anyone would have expected from me, the last thing I would have expected from me. For a start, I wasn’t a student and was nearly 30 by this time, so a university society might not seem like the most natural group to go to if I was hoping to fit in. Even more to the point, I couldn’t dance to save my life and had always hated it when they’d forced us to do dancing at school, to the point of not turning up for class on those days.

So why did I do it? It wasn’t actually completely out of the blue. A few years earlier, I’d had a brief involvement with a dance band, and we’d played for this society a couple of times. Although being in the band had been nothing to write home about, I’d always remembered how much fun the dancers seemed to be having, and what a nice group of people they seemed. At the time I was way too out of touch with my feelings to recognise this as a desire to join in, and way too shy to do anything about it anyway. But the memory had stayed there, lodged at the back of my mind somewhere, waiting for the right moment to be acted upon.

I couldn’t explain why the decision to join the society thrilled me so much. It was totally out of character for all the reasons already mentioned, yet there was no doubt about it: I loved the idea. I really wanted to do this, more than I’d wanted anything in a long time. I looked at the group’s website and discovered that they held several weekly classes during term time, including beginners’ classes. That sounded promising. I emailed their co-ordinator to check that (a) I would still be welcome there as a non-student, and (b) the class really was suitable for total beginners. The answers came back swiftly in a friendly email: yes and yes. Now I had no excuse not to go along!

I had several days to get terrified before the first class of term. My social anxiety wasn’t as bad as it had once been, but it was still acute enough to make walking into a group like this very challenging indeed. I ran through all the possible problems in my head… maybe I wouldn’t be accepted into the group because of my age and not being a student… maybe I’d be hopeless and would make a fool of myself in front of everyone… maybe no-one would be willing to dance with me. After feeling so excited about this I wasn’t sure if I could cope with the disappointment of it going wrong. At the same time, I was determined that no matter how bad the fear got, I wasn’t going to bottle out of this. I was going to go along and give it my best shot.

On my way to the first class, I went for a drink to calm my nerves in a pub just round the corner from the venue. Then, when I realised I was still far too anxious, it became two drinks. Finally I took a deep breath and, reasoning that I was probably now at the optimum balance between being too anxious and being too drunk, I left the pub and walked into the hall.

The music was loud. The lights were bright. The building was swarming with people, shouting and laughing and having fun. I think there’s a very good chance I would have just turned around and walked straight back out again at that point, never to return… but thankfully it didn’t come to that. Before I had time to leave, a girl noticed me, smiled at me and asked if I wanted to dance. I smiled back and said yes, stammering something about not knowing what I was doing, but she was leading me out onto the floor, taking no notice.

It was one of the most amazing nights of my life. I don’t have clear memories of the actual dance class; it was just a blur of music and movement. Everyone was incredibly friendly. No-one seemed to care about my age or my cluelessness. I was asked to dance four times in total, and also plucked up the courage to do the asking myself towards the end. After class, one of the girls I’d danced with came to talk to me and invited me to the pub with the rest of the group. I stayed as late as I could, feeling on a high by this time, laughing along with the others and joining in the conversation as much as I could.

By the time I left, the buses had long stopped running, but I was feeling so awake, so energised, that I decided to walk home. It was about five miles so it took me a while, but I felt so good that I enjoyed every minute of it. I couldn’t believe how well the class had gone – it had exceeded my wildest expectations. I was beginning to learn the power of listening to my true desires rather than suppressing them.

I returned the following week (nervous once again, in case I messed up after such a good first week) and had a similarly great time again. Pretty soon, dance class was firmly established as the highlight of my week. Nothing else I did made me feel so alive, and knowing that I’d trusted my instincts and faced down anxiety to get there made it feel even better.

Only a few weeks in, I started to make friends that I would meet up with outside of the class… something I’d struggled to ever achieve at most of the groups I’d been involved with, but it felt so easy and natural this time. I think what made the difference was my attitude to the whole thing: most of the other social groups had been things that I thought were logically right for me, but that I didn’t feel any real joy or enthusiasm for. The dance class was different. I loved being there, and I think that came across to the other members and made me seem a lot more approachable than normal.

But the dance class was just the beginning… finally, I was learning how to listen to my real desires and starting to shape my life into something not just bearable, but actually joyous. A whole world of possibilities was opening up.

 

My Story, part 7: Struggling to hang onto my self

I’d love to be able to say that everything started going right for me after that amazing night when my feelings returned. That’s probably what would happen in a heart-warming movie or novel. But unfortunately reality isn’t normally that simple, and indeed it wasn’t in this case.

Whilst I still felt far, far better than I had in several years, I was an emotional wreck and finding it hard to cope with reality. I guess once you’ve been living your life in such a dysfunctional, depressed way for such a long time, it takes a while to change that, even when the depressive symptoms themselves start to let up. To begin with it felt as if I was fighting against a strong tide, threatening to sweep me back into the numbness, back into my old ways of coping. I was determined, more than anything, never to let that happen, but at the same time it was getting increasingly difficult to resist.

In desperation, I reached out for anything that could speak directly to the real, emotional part of me and stop it from going under again. It was difficult to find much. It felt as if that part of me belonged to a different time, the time before The Crash… a time that was now nearly 10 years in the past and counting. Almost everything had changed since then, at least in some respects: my parents looked old and were even more set in the destructive patterns they’d been living their lives in; I wasn’t at school anymore, I was at work now; I was no longer in touch with my old friends, and some of our pets and family members were no longer with us; everything felt different. It was as if the emotional part of me had woken up after being in a coma for all that time, and although it was lovely for me to have it back, the new world it found itself in was terrifying to the poor thing. All of those differences, even the minor ones and the ones that most people would see as positive, made it want to slip back into the safety of the coma and never come out again.

(I’m not sure what to call the “emotional part”. I thought of calling it the “inner child”, but I don’t like to use that term as I’m not sure it’s quite what other people mean when they say “inner child”. It’s probably pretty close to what Martha Beck calls the “essential self” in her amazing book “Finding Your Own North Star”, but that term isn’t in very widespread use so most people wouldn’t know what I meant. So “emotional part” it is, for now at least).

I explored this strange new state I found myself in for a while, and eventually discovered that there were some things that could make me feel safe and even happy. If I immersed myself in old music, for example, music I’d known before The Crash, I could coax that inner part of me into coming out for a bit. The trouble was, I’d kept on listening to most of my old music all through the years of depression, either out of habit, or in an increasingly forlorn attempt to make myself feel something. So by this time it had lost much of its association with the pre-Crash years, and consequently much of its potential emotional power.

The breakthrough came when I realised I didn’t actually have to like the music for it to have the desired effect on me. I just had to remember it and strongly associate it with the pre-depression period of my life. That opened up a whole world of other possibilities: music I’d used to hear on the Top 40 but never liked enough to buy, music my parents used to listen to, music I’d played with the school orchestra, old computer game and TV soundtracks. I spent a few months tracking down as much of this as I could (to this day I still have it all in my music library). The effect it had on the awakening emotional part of me was amazing – even the songs I’d hated back in my teens made me feel electrified and so alive, in stark contrast to the numbness I was used to feeling when I listened to anything new.

In time, I started augmenting my musical nostalgia sessions with old TV shows and computer games that I remembered from back then, and found myself enjoying them more than any of the new stuff I’d tried to get into. I spent as long as I could just in my room devouring old media and wallowing in the luxurious warm feelings it produced in me. I’d missed those feelings for so long.

I knew that to many people this would look like an incredibly unhealthy thing to do – deliberately immersing myself in the past instead of living my life in the present – but at the time I just instinctively knew it was good for me, and looking back now several years later, I have no regrets about it at all. Like with joining the forum, I’d had it with listening to the conventional “wisdom”, because I’d tried that for far too long already and it was getting me nowhere. I’d finally found something that would make my feelings come back, make me able to experience happiness again, able to feel like a human being again, and I had no intention of giving that up now. My girlfriend at the time was one of the few who understood what I was doing and supported me in it, even helping me to track down obscure old TV shows or songs that I thought might help. As she put it, “If sitting at home watching those DVDs makes you feel alive, and going off to travel the world makes you feel dead, you’re better off at home with the DVDs”. Also, I didn’t intend spending the whole rest of my life doing this – I suspected at the time that it would just be a stage of recovery and I would come to need less of it in time.

Gradually, the emotional part of me grew in strength. It was as if every minute I spent watching a comforting old TV show or listening to familiar music was helping it to heal, showing it that not everything had changed after all – some of what it remembered and understood was still there. Bit by bit, it was learning to trust me and to trust the world again. Eventually, several months later, I started to regain the ability to enjoy new music rather than finding it terrifying. It was a slow process, but definitely a worthwhile one.

Click here to read part 8.

 

My Story, part 6: Return of the feelings

As the tenth year since The Crash approached, I was probably in a worse state than ever before emotionally. I didn’t realise this at the time because outwardly my life seemed a bit more functional than it had done previously: I had a social life, a sex life, a bit more independence from my family, and the anxiety I felt in social situations had subsided. But behind the facade, all was still not well. Not only was I not happy, I’d pretty much lost the ability to even know what would make me happy. I’d been suppressing my emotions for so long now that I couldn’t get in touch with them anymore even when I wanted to. Looking back, I think the fact that I chose returning to university to try and have all the stereotypical student experiences as a potential way forward was quite telling: I didn’t know anymore what would make me happy, because I was no longer in touch with the part of me that knew, so instead of trying to work that out I was going to go for a generic Enjoyable Experience, the sort that “everyone” has. A generic experience for a generic person.

I felt cut off from people, even ones I considered friends, which I suppose wasn’t surprising considering I was cut off from such an important part of myself. I felt as if no-one really knew me. I socialised, but I didn’t enjoy it; I resented the obligation (real or imagined) to pretend everything was normal, to put on a front for the world even while I was finding life so profoundly unsatisfying. So I would try to have normal conversations, but inside I was seething with resentment, and it probably showed.

Things had been heading this way for years, but losing two close family members (including one that was a complete shock as he was still fairly young and healthy) and two much-loved pets in the space of less than a year had made it far worse. I didn’t grieve for them, not in the way I expected to or the way I had over previous losses. I knew I should be devastated and crying, but the tears wouldn’t come this time. All that came was an additional dose of frustration and resentment to add onto what was already boiling away inside me. I snapped at people who had the misfortune to have to deal with me, making things worse for the rest of the family who were also having to deal with all those sudden losses. I hated being that way, but at the same time I didn’t know how not to be that way. It was like I’d lost the ability to feel genuine sadness, or in fact anything other than numbness and resentment.

I still don’t know quite how it happened, but it did, and thank god it did – in January of 2007, someone managed to break through my hard shell of resentment. It was my girlfriend at the time (how I even managed to get a girlfriend in the state I was in then I’ll never know) and we were on holiday together. I think she could tell there were a lot of feelings bottled up in there and she kept asking me the right questions, persistently bringing my attention back to all the things I’d been desperately trying to ignore for so long, shining a light into the dark corners of my mind where long-neglected emotions were still crying out to be heard. One minute I was my normal sullen self, the next minute I was lying in her arms, sobbing uncontrollably, while she just held me. I think I lay like that for several hours, finally letting out everything I’d been bottling up for so long. I’d never done anything like this before… I’d always been too proud to cry in front of another person, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore. Nothing mattered except this amazing, sublime feeling of emotions flooding through me again after so long depressed.

The sense of relief was absolutely huge… I don’t know how to describe it without sounding melodramatic… to me there are no words powerful enough for the transformation that occurred in me that night. I woke up the next morning (despite the fact that we’d only got about an hour’s sleep in the end) feeling like a new person. It was almost on the same scale as The Crash that had plunged me overnight into depression several years earlier, only in reverse. Suddenly my mind was so clear. After years of frustration and fuzziness, I knew exactly what was important and what I should do next. It felt good to know, although very strange at first. Instantaneously, my feeling of it being “too late” for me and having run out of time was turned on its head – in its place I felt a huge gratitude for the time I had left, the people that were still there, the opportunities that were still open to me. My life may have been a mess for the last several years, but I could put things right – I knew that now.

I can still vividly remember returning to my family home that morning. I’d only been away a week, but when I returned I felt like I was actually seeing everything properly for the first time in years. I felt as if I was returning from a much longer absence, and I suppose a part of me actually was. It was all I could do not to burst into tears when I saw my mother again for the first time. I wanted to throw my arms around her, tell her I loved her and I was sorry for everything I’d put her through, and that I knew things were going to be alright from now on. But that’s not how we do things in my family and I didn’t want to freak her out, so I settled for giving her a big smile and having what felt like my first proper conversation with her in far too long. Every last trace of the resentment I’d been feeling just a few days before had gone. It felt like a miracle had occurred.

I found the same thing in my interactions with other people over the next few days and weeks… my girlfriend and I went out to a social event that night, and it was like no social event I’d been at before, at least not in a very long time. I was actually engaging with people, not because I felt it was expected, but because I really wanted to. The difference in me was obvious even to my girlfriend watching me interact with the others. I think she was quite stunned!

Straight away, I cancelled my plans to return to uni. I could see now that that wasn’t the way to happiness after all. I had an amazing girlfriend, a family who I still loved deeply despite their flaws, as well as other friends and a job that I’d been taking for granted far too much. I didn’t have any want or need to throw all that away. I was back in touch with what was really important. I mourned the loss of my uncle, my gran and my two cats and felt so much better for it. I eventually managed to talk to my mum about events in the past and apologise to her properly over them. Perhaps most importantly of all, I rebuilt my relationship with my brother, which had suffered a lot while I’d been depressed. He’d always been the closest person to me growing up, and the thought of losing what we had to my depression was heartbreaking… but in the end we got it back, and I was never going to take any of it for granted again.

Read part 7 here. 

My Story, part 5: Persistent Belief

I quickly discovered that things in the land of the living weren’t always rosy either. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I finally had a social life and some independence, I shudder to think what would have happened if I’d had to wait too much longer for either of those. But they didn’t make all my problems instantly go away. I had grown a bit in confidence, but I was still pretty shy and anxious, and the depression was still hanging around and refusing to go away. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised… a problem that had dominated my life for over 7 years wasn’t going to go away overnight, no matter how much better my life got.

I drifted from one social group to another and one dysfunctional relationship to another, still not really happy but if anything now with even less idea of what would make me happy. At least when I’d had no social life at all it was something obvious to work towards and although it often seemed an impossible goal, I felt that if I could ever get there I would be home and dry and the depression wouldn’t stay around. Now there was no longer anything so clear cut missing from my life, yet I still felt so empty inside. The capacity I’d had back in my teens to feel true joy and enthusiasm was still becoming an ever more distant memory.

For a long while I latched onto the idea that I was unhappy because I’d missed out on too much of life when I was younger, and that by the time I finally started engaging with the world it was in some sense “too late”. This was quite a devastating idea: it’s one thing to believe that you’re unhappy because you don’t have a social life in the present, because at least there’s some hope that you might be able to fix the problem by getting one in the future, however unlikely it might seem. Believing that you’re unhappy because of something in the past that no-one on earth is ever going to be able to change now is a pretty reliable ticket to hopelessness.

I think this belief came about in large part because of how adolescence and early adulthood is represented in the media. I felt like I was being bombarded with messages telling me how amazing that period of life should be, how high school and university were just one long party punctuated with life-altering experiences involving socialising, sex, drugs (legal and otherwise), and I was finding it increasingly difficult to come to terms with the fact that it had been nothing like that for me. Maybe if I hadn’t been so isolated for so long I would have had enough contact with real people to show me that I was far from alone in finding my experiences didn’t live up to the hype; but as it was, it was to be several more years before I reached that stage.

It turned out to be a horribly insidious belief, capable of undermining anything positive that happened to me. It didn’t matter how well I did at “catching up” socially, at experiencing all the things I’d missed out on for so long… there was always that little voice in the back of my head saying, “Ah, but it would have been so much better if you’d done it 10 years earlier like everyone else did. What you’ve got now is just a pale imitation of what they had then”. And for a while I believed it. It put a dampener on everything, even the things I’d been craving for years and had finally achieved, and made it all feel pointless.

On some level I could see that it was probably an irrational belief (and certainly a destructive one), but I was at a loss as to how to get rid of it. I tried challenging it using the CBT techniques I’d learned, but it seemed too overwhelming and too deeply engrained to respond much to those. In desparation I came up with a drastic plan: to go back to university.

Returning to uni might not sound like a particularly drastic idea. After all, plenty of people do it these days and it’s often a positive step towards improving their lives. But what made it unusual in my case was my motivation for doing it – I didn’t particularly want another qualification. I wanted a complete fresh start with my social life.

The way I looked at it, my adult life had been a disaster so far. I’d been depressed the entire time, I’d been isolated from other people for years, and even now that I was interacting with them I constantly felt alienated and dissatisfied. I knew other people would tell me I should build on what I had. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t like what I had, in fact I hated it. I didn’t want to build on it. I wanted to throw it all away and start from scratch instead so that I had a chance of building a life I didn’t hate. I knew that I couldn’t literally rewind back to the start of adulthood, but, I reasoned, starting something completely new surrounded by other people who were new to adulthood was probably as close as I could realistically get. I hadn’t felt ready for university the first time round. I’d been far too anxious to make a good go of it, and losing my best friend a few months in had knocked me for six. But now… now I felt different. Now I felt like I had a chance of doing this thing and getting something out of it.

I got quite far with the university plan. I attended several open days in different places and put in applications for their courses. I looked into the financial implications and worked out that I could just afford to do it if I was careful. I arranged to move back in with my parents temporarily so that I could save up as much money as possible before quitting my job. I actually started to enjoy making the preparations – it was the first thing I’d felt genuinely excited about in as long as I could remember, which was a lovely contrast to the numbness and frustration that still accompanied me through most of my life.

Then things started to change in unexpected ways. I’ll talk more about that in the next part, but right now I will say that it caused me to abandon the university plan. I think that was for the best. With hindsight, I doubt it would have worked out the way I’d hoped… because my problems were mostly in my own head, and they would have come with me no matter how much of my outward life I managed to leave behind. That insidious belief about having left everything too late wasn’t going away that easily; no matter how good a time I ended up having in my new life as a born-again student, it would always have been there to remind me that this was nothing to what I could have had if I’d done it at age 18 like I was “supposed to”.

The real problem wasn’t that I didn’t have opportunities to build a fulfilling social life and relationships in my current life, it was that as long as my view of the world was so skewed, I was never going to be able to enjoy those opportunities, or indeed any other opportunities that came my way in the future. For a while it looked as though that was never going to change… eventually, though, it started to. More on that next time.

Read part 6 here.

My Story, part 4: The Forum

The 7th year since the crash rolled around, and still there was no sign of the waking nightmare I’d been living in ever since ending. I was now nearly 25. I hadn’t experienced true happiness or friendship since I was 18, and the idea of having anything more then friendship in my life seemed so far outside the bounds of possibility that I just didn’t even think about it. Other people my age had dreams and aspirations: careers, travel, relationships, important stuff like that. I had only one that mattered: to go back to how I’d been before the depression.

In my head I always saw it as “going back” rather than going forward. I was highly suspicious of and scared of the future, with (what I considered at the time, at least) good reason. I’d been fed a bunch of lies about how things would get better, how great university would be, how the therapy and medication would help me. I couldn’t trust anything anyone said anymore. The past, on the other hand… I knew the past. I knew for certain I’d been happy then, and I knew that was never going to change. It felt safe and familiar and trustworthy. Of course I knew it was impossible to “go back” in a literal sense, but I would settle for regaining the feelings I’d had before the depression hit.

At times I wondered whether what I was feeling was even a “problem”, or whether it was simply adulthood. It felt almost unbearably horrible, but maybe this was what everyone had to endure once they hit age 18, and I was just particularly bad at enduring it and was making a fuss about nothing while everyone else grit their teeth and got on with it? After all, it had appeared soon after I became an adult and showed no sign of ever going away again. (Of all the theories I’ve ever formulated about what was wrong with me, I’m especially glad that that one turned out to be completely false!).

But the 7th year was the year things finally started to really change. Maybe I’d finally had enough and was prepared to do something drastic enough to make a difference, no matter how big a risk it seemed. It was only the beginning of a very long process that’s still going on now, ten years later. If I’d known back then, I don’t think I would have believed quite how long it was going to take.

Ironically, the thing that first kickstarted the change was something I’d been tempted to do for a long time but had resisted up until then: I joined an online mental health support forum.

I’d resisted this out of a fear that it would make things worse: I didn’t want to end up dependent on the internet for my only social interactions. But by year 7 I was starting to realise that years of trying in “The Real World” hadn’t brought me any meaningful social interactions; so if I could find some online, that would surely be better than having none at all. When I found this forum, it was like a breath of fresh air… people actually talked about the kind of stuff I’d been feeling all this time… I wasn’t the only one after all! They also seemed really friendly compared to most online forums.

So I signed up, then took a deep breath and posted my story on there (a slightly shorter version than this one!). I was scared to look and see if I’d got any replies… so strong was my belief that everyone under the age of about 40 hated me that even in a community full of people suffering from similar problems I fully expected to get no replies or maybe the occasional post saying “F**k off, loser!”. But what actually happened was I felt more welcomed and understood than I had in a long time.

Things changed amazingly quickly after that. Only a month after I joined, I went to one of the real life meetups organised on the forum. I had to travel four hours each way on a packed train and stay overnight in a run-down hotel but it was worth it. Socialising with fellow sufferers was so different from what I was used to – there was no pressure to pretend everything was OK, to pretend my life had been like everyone else’s, with dates and flatmates and four years of uninterrupted fun at university. The “black hole” inside me was still there but it didn’t seem to matter so much anymore. I wasn’t having to hide it… these people knew it was there and they still liked me anyway. I started to become a regular at the meets (thankfully they weren’t all so far away) and was amazed to find people actually remembered me and wanted to stay in touch.

Less than two months after I joined, I started chatting to a few forum users in private as well as posting on the public boards. My belief that I could never make a friend again was blown out of the water as I got closer to some of the others, having deep and meaningful conversations almost daily, telling them things I’d never expected to be able to tell anyone. Within a year of signing up on the forum, my life was almost unrecognisable: I had friends, I was socialising regularly, I’d finally moved out of my parents’ house to a flat of my own, and I’d had my first sexual relationship. For a time I thought all my problems would be over soon, but things weren’t that simple…

Read part 5 here.

My Story, part 3: The Dust Settles

For a while after the crash, I still clung onto the hope that this was just a blip and everything would go back to how it had been. Every night I would pray (not literally as I’ve never been religious) that tomorrow would be the morning I’d wake up to find my old life waiting for me again. Every morning I was disappointed.

But gradually the dust settled and I realised the change was permanent. No matter how much I hated it, this was how my life was now and there was no getting away from it. To begin with I just went through the motions of life, getting up and going to uni as before, but it was different now… every moment was hurting me terribly. It all felt pointless and on a number of occasions I came very, very close to giving up on everything, but someone (usually my mum) would talk me out of it. It was a long, long time before I was able to feel grateful that I kept going through those dark days.

Reluctantly, I accepted that my former friend was not coming back into my life – or at least if he did, it was going to be on his terms and not something I could rely on. If I wanted to have friends at any point in the future I was going to have to go and make new ones. So after an achingly lonely and depressed long summer break, I resolved to make a renewed effort to not be so isolated in my second year of uni.

Things didn’t get off to the best of starts. On the first day back I saw someone approaching in the corridor who I’d never spoken to but recognised as one of the ten or so students from my tutorial group. Forcing myself not to bottle out, I smiled at him and said “hello!”. He looked at me as if I was out of my mind and walked straight past. Joining the university orchestra was slightly more successful. I managed to talk to a couple of people at the first rehearsal: my desk partner, who was actually a staff member rather than a student but was quite young and very friendly, and a girl who introduced herself as we were setting up at the beginning.

Over the weeks and months I gradually got slightly more sociable, though even at my best I was still painfully shy compared to most people. I spent more time with my lab partner; we’d often go for coffee together between classes and sometimes to the pub or the shops after uni. He introduced me to some of his friends, but in all honesty they were way too cool for me and I never knew what to say to any of them. Later on, as we got onto modules that involved group projects, I finally had a chance to talk to the others in my class, but we rarely talked about anything except work, and I hardly ever saw them outside of class.

This pattern continued throughout the rest of my time at uni. Although I was spending time with people a bit more, I still felt terribly lonely and very down about the future. I seemed to have lost the ability to make a friend or have any kind of meaningful connection with another person. There’s a saying that fighting is a form of intimacy; maybe that’s why I caught myself at times almost longing for the days of being back at school on the receiving end of bullying. It may have been unpleasant but in a funny sort of way it felt more real and engaging than this dead feeling of isolation that had defined my entire adult life so far.

In truth, though I didn’t realise it at the time, I wasn’t even giving anyone a chance to get to know me. I never talked about my real feelings or interests. Partly this was because it felt too risky, but a lot of the time I didn’t even know what I was feeling… the only way I’d found to deal with the anguish I felt when my world started falling apart around my ears was to bottle it all up, and once you start bottling feelings up it’s hard to unbottle them again. As for interests, nothing seemed to interest me much anymore anyway, and the few things that did seemed too weird and private and geeky to share with anyone else.

Miraculously I made it to the end of uni without giving up or having a full-on nervous breakdown. At the same time the depression had never lifted and I felt just as hopeless about my future. At that point I could honestly say that it was nearly 4 years since I’d last had a day when life really felt worth living, or anyone in my life who I could describe as a true friend. I decided it was time to get some professional help, regardless of my mother’s increasingly shrill assurances that there was nothing really wrong with me and it would all sort itself out in time. I can sympathise to an extent with her desire not to believe there was anything serious wrong, but at the same time there comes a point where it gets so bad that you can’t deny it any longer, and I felt as if I had already passed that point many years ago.

Over the next few months I was seen by doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors, diagnosed with clinical depression and social anxiety, and prescribed medication and cognitive behavioural therapy. The medication did very little – I’d never expected it to work as I believed my problems were caused by the circumstances I found myself in rather than being chemical in nature, but after 4 years of living through this hell I was willing to try anything to get rid of it. The CBT helped a bit more, but the improvement tailed off quite quickly after the sessions ended, despite my best efforts to keep doing the exercises.

The next few years were more of the same. If I had to choose a word to describe how I was feeling then it would be “numb”. Maybe that’s an improvement on the constant heart-rending grief I was feeling for the first few months after the crash, but it was still far from normal and I knew it. I saw no point in living that way as I couldn’t experience genuine happiness even when good things happened. The only thing that stopped me from ending my life was knowing the effect it would have on my family, as well as the possibility (however tiny it seemed) that maybe things could get better some day. I felt a bit better temporarily after the CBT, and also after a couple of major achievements (getting my first job, and passing my driving test). But I knew the depression was still there and that it would come back as soon as those things started to fade. It did.

As time went on I became increasingly convinced that I needed meaningful contact with people outside the family, but also increasingly despairing of ever getting it. I tried out various social groups in the hope of making friends, but all I seemed able to get was casual acquaintances who I could have a pleasant enough chat with on my better days, but who I felt no real connection with. The idea of a real connection seemed even more impossible than it had back in my school days. For starters, even if I was wrong about everyone in my age group wanting nothing to do with me, how was I ever going to explain the last few years to a “normal” person? I didn’t even understand it myself. My life hadn’t felt worth living since I’d hit adulthood… I had no enthusiasm left for any of my former interests… I’d hated my time at university… I hadn’t had a proper friendship since high school and had never had anything more than a friendship. It felt like such a massive gulf now between my life experiences and everyone else’s… how could that ever be bridged? And what hope was there of a meaningful connection to anyone if it couldn’t be? A lot of advice I’d read suggested focusing on the positive aspects of your life so as not to scare people off. But the positive aspects of my life seemed tiny and meaningless compared to the gaping black hole where my adolescence and early adulthood should have been.

Read part 4 here.

My Story, part 2: The Crash

Contrary to popular belief, it actually is possible to have a horrible time at university, though I wish it wasn’t.

Towards the end of high school, I thought things were going better. I had a friend who seemed reliable for the first time in my life. The bullying I’d suffered throughout school had mostly stopped as the bullies had either grown up or left. So as the time came to start university, I was actually fairly happy.

I didn’t see moving up to uni as the milestone that it was. I treated it more like the jump from primary to secondary school… as if I was just moving to a bigger, more advanced, slightly further away school. I never seriously considered the possibility of moving away from home – I simply didn’t feel remotely ready for it. I felt far too alienated from my peer group to go and build a new life with them, leaving my family and friend and all I had ever known behind. So I didn’t. All the unis I applied to were within commuting distance from my parents’ house. I chose one that seemed nice but not particularly exciting. I didn’t do all the Freshers Week stuff other students were throwing themselves into… the most I managed was to go along to the societies fair to see if I saw anything I liked the look of. I didn’t, which was not surprising, since anything that involved spending time with people in my age group seemed scary and dangerous. Not to mention pointless, since I’d had it drummed through my head for years that other young people wanted nothing to do with me.

Anyway, I was happy enough with how things were for the moment. I had my friend, my family and my spare time interests. Being at uni just meant I was going to a different place during the day for classes. I didn’t plan to change how I lived the rest of my life any time soon.

For about a term, this worked quite well. During the day I’d go up to uni, enjoying how lax the rules were and how in-depth and interesting the work was compared to school, but not really interacting with the other students much at all. I got to know one guy who was my lab partner – he introduced himself on the first day and was one of the very few others who was staying with his parents – but we didn’t talk much about anything personal. In the evenings and at weekends I would still go to my school friend’s house like before, or work on one of my hobbies. Uni wasn’t exactly the blur of partying and experimenting and bonding that a lot of people seemed to think it would inevitably be, but it was fairly pleasant… certainly compared to most of my time at school.

Everything began to unravel in the second term. With little warning my friend, who’d been essentially my entire social life for almost three years at this point, cut me out of his life. At first I couldn’t even take in what had happened. All I could think of was to get him back and make things go back to how they were before, but after several increasingly desperate attempts, it became obvious that this wasn’t going to happen. I felt lost, adrift, devastated. And for the first time in my life, I felt properly depressed.

It happened literally overnight. My energy and will to carry on – gone, just like that. I went from being able to easily manage the four mile, mostly uphill cycle to university each morning to barely being able to make it to the end of the street without stopping for a rest. The energy loss was so dramatic that I went to the doctor to get checked over for any possible physical causes, but they couldn’t find anything. It was horrible. I felt as if the whole experience had broken me irreparably. But worse was still to come.

With my friend gone, I threw myself into my spare time activities with an increasing air of desperation. I stayed up for hours programming the smart new computer I’d bought for my uni work. Only a few months previously I would have been thrilled to have this computer and all the creative possibilities it opened up. Now it all felt hollow and meaningless. I didn’t want it anymore. I didn’t want anything except my friend. As well as my energy, my enthusiasm for my hobbies was suddenly gone. I’d never had this happen before… my whole life I’d been restlessly creative, just itching to try out new things and see what I could do with them. Now all I could do was force myself to try and carry on as before, but it wasn’t the same. The spark was gone… the excitement and inspiration were gone, and nothing I did felt worthwhile anymore.

I felt as if my whole world was falling apart. It was bad enough that I’d lost my only real friend, most of my energy, and the enthusiasm I’d always felt for my hobbies… but I was only just starting to see the full horror of my situation. Slowly but surely, two terrifying realisations were permeating through my mind, and once I’d seen them there was no unseeing them. Things were never going back to the comfortable way they’d been before. Ever.

Realisation 1: socially, I’d fallen a long way behind others my age and was falling further behind by the day, and I didn’t have a clue what to do about it.

Realisation 2: family life wasn’t going to stay the way it had always been. My mum was finally fed up with my dad’s behaviour and wanted a divorce. In any case, even if that hadn’t happened I couldn’t just plan to stay with them forever and live as a child forever. It’s not that I had consciously planned to do that, more that I’d just never given it much thought before and now that I was thinking about it it terrified me.

It was all too much to take in. With hindsight, of course, it probably shouldn’t have been too much for an 18 year old, but at the time it felt absolutely overwhelming. The obvious answer was that I needed to stop living in the past and move on (and some people did try to tell me this), but that meant I needed to have something to move on to, and it didn’t feel like I did. Most 18 year olds are moving from a life built around their family to a life built around relationships with people closer to their own age, if they haven’t already. But for me, there seemed no chance of meaningful relationships with my peers. The last time I’d had any interaction with more than a few of them, the interaction had taken the form of them bullying me mercilessly. The one member of my peer group who I thought I had some kind of a positive relationship with had ditched me, turning my life upside down. I was losing everything I’d ever known (my family, my friend, even the activities I used to find solace in) and the only thing that could possibly replace all that was something I had seemingly no hope of ever getting. It seemed hopeless.

Read part 3 here.

My Story, part 1: High School

I pledge my commitment to the Blog for Mental Health 2014 Project. I will blog about mental health topics not only for myself, but for others. By displaying this badge, I show my pride, dedication, and acceptance for mental health. I use this to promote mental health education in the struggle to erase stigma.

Click here to read the Blog For Mental Health launch post.

I’m not sure if this will be of much interest to people in itself, but I think a lot of the other stuff I want to write will make more sense if there’s some kind of context for it. So I’m going to start with a series of posts about how mental illness has affected my life, and in turn how my illness has been influenced by past happenings.

Up until I was about 18, I thought I was doing OK. Looking back now I see that I wasn’t doing OK at all and it was only ever a matter of time before all hell broke loose, as indeed it did later on.

For a start there was all the bullying and social exclusion I was going through at school. The majority of it was things that would have been fairly trivial by themselves – incidents of name-calling, mostly – but something that’s trivial if it only happens once or twice can become a lot more problematic if it’s happening frequently. In my case it was happening numerous times per day at its peak, on the way to school, on the way home, in the playground, sometimes in classes right under the teachers’ noses. I would even get abuse in the street from random strangers in my age group who I’d never seen before. The “reasons” for the abuse were, as I say, trivial – my accent, my hairstyle and the brand of my trainers were common ones – but it wasn’t so much what they were saying that got to me.

What really hurt was the feeling that everyone (or at least almost everyone) in my age group was picking on me. It wasn’t just a few of them… it was the vast majority of them, or at least that’s how it frequently felt. For roughly the first half of secondary school, I kept on trying to socialise regardless. But the constant bullying was gradually wearing me down, and after one particularly bad lunch hour in third year it was as if something snapped inside me, and I just thought “Sod this. It’s a waste of time even trying with these people”.

So from that moment on, I didn’t really try anymore. I still went to school but I kept to myself as much as I could and had as little to do with my classmates as I could get away with. I took to going home for lunch, even though I lived so far away that by the time I got there I only had ten minutes before I had to start walking back again. At break times I didn’t have time to go home but I would often leave the school grounds and wander the nearby streets until it was time for my next class.

To most people this probably seems like a really unhealthy way to react, so in my defence I should point out that it was the last resort. Over the years I’d already tried pretty much everything that normally gets suggested as a solution to bullying: ignoring it, answering back, fighting back, telling the teachers, laughing it off, even trying to change myself to make myself more socially acceptable. None of that had worked. I withdrew socially because it seemed I had no other option left. Everyone has a limit to how much crap they can take from other people, and on that normal-seeming day I reached mine.

None of the adults in my life seemed to notice how lonely I was. I think the teachers were just grateful that I was doing OK in their classes, keeping my head down and not causing trouble, while my parents were glad they didn’t have to worry about me getting involved in drinking or drugs or under age sex (it’s a bit difficult to do any of those things, especially the last, if you don’t have anyone to do them with). The truth is, things at home weren’t going great either. My father was an alcoholic who frequently spent his money and time getting drunk in preference to anything else. He never got violent or abusive; he just didn’t do much at all really. Home never felt fully safe. The electricity and phone were cut off multiple times due to non-payment. Broken appliances (most notably the fridge) remained broken for months on end as money was spent on beer instead. If I ever had money in my room it was in danger of suddenly disappearing – sometimes I would get it back later, sometimes not. On one occasion I even came into my room to find my dad had sold some of my stuff without any warning. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like this: often the atmosphere between my parents was thick enough to cut with a knife, and I was usually caught in the middle.

Despite having essentially no meaningful interaction with my peers, and despite the unstable situation at home. I still managed to stay reasonably happy for a while longer. Since most of my encounters with other kids had been negative anyway, giving up on them didn’t feel like a big loss. I had other ways of coping. I was closer to my family than was probably normal for a teenager, and I had a lot of outside interests: playing the piano, messing around with computers, writing, going for long walks in the country. It was enough to keep me occupied. I would have liked to have friends, but based on past experience it seemed that wasn’t possible for me, so I mostly didn’t give it much thought.

Towards the end of high school, things even seemed to pick up for a while. For the last two years I had a friend, someone who was in quite a similar position to me when it came to bullying and social exclusion. It took me a while, but eventually I accepted that he was a genuine friend and wasn’t just trying to get close to me so that he could hurt me more effectively as some people had in the past. Soon we were at each other’s houses almost every night, playing computer games, exchanging CDs and talking about everything under the sun.

Read part 2 here.