A few weeks back I decided to throw my fight with depression out into the world on my blog and let everyone pick it to pieces and do what they wished with it. I didn’t write those words to impact anyone. To be honest, I didn’t know if anyone would give a shit, but they did. That late night moment of exposing my damaged soul to the online world, talking about my torrid time with depression, my thoughts about suicide, and just writing it how it is, gained a lot of notice. Who would’ve thought that little old me would make any kind of difference?
I received so many messages and emails from people who are or have suffered from depression and/or suicide attempts. My heart breaks at the thought of how many people are suffering from this bastard of a disease and I was humbled by the fact that by talking about it, it made other people talk about it.
Something else came out of this that was SO unexpected. A friend, Debbie King, asked if I would speak about my struggle with depression at the ‘Out of the Shadows and into the Light’ Suicide Awareness Walk event on 9th September. Now, typing a heap of words on a laptop is one thing, but talking to a few hundred people, many who have been through hell or lost loved ones to it, is in a completely different league. I thought about it, discussed it with my girlfriend, and then decided that it would be a worthy thing to do, as well as a hell of a personal challenge. Speaking in front of people doesn’t worry me, but ripping open my soul and letting hundreds of strangers see how dark and damaged I’ve been … well that’s a different beast altogether.
I wrote the speech over the period of a week and read it dozens of times until I was ready. Then I asked my girlfriend if I could read it to her and gain her opinion. I cried/had to stop about eight times while reading.
I didn’t have an emotional reaction while reading it to myself in an empty room, but with her there, hearing memories that I hadn’t even shared with her before, it broke me. I didn’t realise how much hurt still sat inside me, hidden away, quietly and nervously waiting to be found.
I was shaky coming up to the night, but I was still confident I could make it through, and I did … but I had (maybe three) moments when the tears broke through. I can’t explain the strength it took for me to be able to continue once that emotional avalanche rolled over me. This was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done, and that’s no exaggeration.
To my surprise, it moved people. There were tears. People I didn’t know hugged me afterwards. I spoke to a wonderful guy later on that is going through what I went through. Apparently I inspired him, and just the thought of that is hard for me to understand. After I finished speaking, I stood aside, taking in deep breaths, trying to regain my composure, watching hundreds of incredible people around me who all stood as one caring, understanding group of true beauty. There are wonderful people in the world … we just need to open our eyes and see them.
I’ve had many people, who weren’t able to make it, ask me how the night went, so I’ve decided to let everyone see my speech here. It’s only in text form to save you seeing a grown man break down. Seriously though, this night was a huge personal achievement for me and has given me a brand new perspective on depression and suicide in our time. It took around ten minutes to read aloud.
I hope you take something away from reading it.
Out of the Shadows and Into the Light Speech – September 2016
I didn’t really know anything about depression until my marriage ended in 2008, and I started to drink … a lot.
My daily routine turned into … get up and shower, drive to work, make it through the day, go to the bottle shop, buy smokes and a bottle of Jim Beam, drive home, then sit on a chair outside the back door, listening to loud music, chain-smoking and drinking.
When the bottle was empty I went to bed.
Night after night … the same routine … for I don’t know how long.
After a while … it wasn’t every night …. But it was still too often.
Whenever I try and think back on that time, the recollection is confusing.
One day I’d be on top of the world, ready to take on anyone and conquer anything, the next, I wanted to dig the deepest hole and crawl into the darkness forever.
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I did have friends keeping an eye on me.
They’d drop in and see how I was doing … and I later found out that it was pretty much a suicide watch.
They could see how far, mentally, I’d fallen.
I wasn’t the man they knew.
It’s an uncomfortable feeling when you find out that your friends believe you might try to kill yourself.
But it’s a wonderful feeling to know you have people who care enough to be there for you.
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In the early morning hours of one of my drunken nights all alone, I changed my Facebook photo to a gravestone.
So my friends woke up to find that photo in front of their eyes when they looked at Facebook on their phones … and for all they knew, I’d just said goodbye while they were sleeping.
A good mate came to see me at work that morning and told me that it wasn’t on, that I was never ever to do that again, and that I needed to see someone because no one felt that they were able to help me.
Because that’s the thing with this disease, you don’t actually care about anyone else.
I didn’t do it to shock anyone or to get attention.
I just felt dead, I felt empty, I was a useless shell … and when I saw everyone else’s happy photos portraying who they were, a gravestone made sense to me.
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It was somewhere around this time that I really did start to listen to what people were telling me … and understand that I was suffering from depression.
I wasn’t just having a few bad months … I was stuck in the dark and I didn’t know how to get out.
I was told that I should see a doctor. I was sure the answer to getting better would be drugs, but because I’m a writer outside of my day job, I didn’t want to take anything that would dull my creativity.
So, instead, I tried to embrace the fact that I had a problem, and moved forward, thinking the knowledge alone would help.
And in some ways it did.
I started dating someone … and the quantity of really bad days declined.
But they didn’t go away.
They kept coming back … they were impossible to escape from … and this went on for a long time.
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Most of that time was a blur … that’s the simplest way to explain it.
But I do remember one evening more clearly than anything else.
I was at home, sitting at my computer, and for no reason I just fell to pieces.
It was like a tsunami of emotions slammed into me and I couldn’t stop it.
I felt trapped and claustrophobic and couldn’t breathe.
I walked out the back door, crying, and stared out across the neighbourhood.
I could see dozens and dozens of houses.
I just stood there, tears streaming down my face.
My girlfriend had followed me outside and asked what was wrong … a question she had to ask way too often.
I said … “How do they do it? … How do they get up every morning, go to work, come home, and go to sleep … knowing they are going to do that same fucking thing every day of the rest of their lives. Nothing will ever change. That’s all they have to look forward to. Nothing else. The same fucking thing over and over and over again ………….. Why aren’t they all killing themselves?”
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Something else happened later that night … something I’m not proud of but no longer hide from.
I went online and was chatting to a friend, someone I’d never even met face-to-face, and I sent her a poem I’d written and asked her to pass it on to my family … I couldn’t handle it any longer … I’d finally had enough … I was going to kill myself … and this poem was my goodbye.
She kept me chatting on MSN messenger for nearly 2 hours until I said goodnight.
This person, someone I hardly knew, went to bed that night expecting to wake up to the news that I’d taken my own life … knowing she’d have to tell my family that she was the last person to ever talk to me.
Instead … she managed to talk me out of it and I went to work the next morning.
I have no recollection of what was said between us that night, but knowing my own mind and how I was back then, it would have been darker than most people could understand.
It’s a pretty safe bet that she saved my life.
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I just gave up giving a shit about everything.
I didn’t care about my appearance.
I grew my hair long and grew a beard because I couldn’t be bothered shaving and getting my hair cut.
I put on a lot of weight.
I’ve never been a slim guy, but that was the heaviest I’ve ever been.
I was demoted at work from my management role.
I was drinking too much, smoking all the time, eating crap food, and not caring about anything.
The ups were so high and the lows were worse than I like to admit.
I wasn’t a nice guy a lot of the time.
I can admit that now. I have to.
Because you can’t hide from your past. You can only learn from it.
The journey I was on destroyed my relationships with women.
It crushed some friendships.
It wrecked my job.
It hammered my health, physically and mentally.
And the stress on my family was terrible.
And even though I didn’t take any prescribed drugs because I didn’t want to screw up my creativity, I didn’t actually write a word worth reading during that whole time.
I look back at that time in my life and wonder if it would’ve been easier if I’d seen a doctor and gained some help but I’ll never know.
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Somewhere along the way though, for whatever reason, I slowly started to claw my way back.
I’d never wanted to travel but it was time to do something unexpected in an attempt to jolt me back to the me I used to know, so I decided to do a solo road trip holiday in the USA and gave up my 30 to 40 a day smoking habit, cold turkey, to pay for most of it.
When I gave up smoking I started running a bit and ran the Burnie and Devonport 10k runs.
This was a huge personal achievement.
The shadow hadn’t left me … but I was starting to win.
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See here’s the thing …
People are not designed to be alone, it’s not in our make-up, and that’s where depression gains its strength, because it forces you into the shadows, it talks you into being by yourself.
Depression makes you think that isolation is YOUR idea.
And because of that, you like it. You even crave it.
When I let the darkness in, the more isolated I am, the better … and I hate myself for it.
This is why having caring people around you is so important.
Without them, that son-of-a-bitch gets us every time … and we, all of us, need to make sure it doesn’t win.
Talking about depression and talking about suicide is so important. Bringing it out in the open takes away the control it has over us.
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People ask me how long my depression lasted for, because it seemed like such a long time.
When I look back, and if I don’t sugar-coat it, I had depression for 4 very tough years.
Now that seems like ages … but I realise now that I will have depression for the rest of my life.
I still feel it there, scratching at me every time something goes slightly wrong or if I drink that little bit too much.
It’s like there’s an extra shadow walking with me everywhere I go, and it’s just waiting for that right moment to creep inside my skin and wear my face like a mask, pretending to be me, when in truth, the real me would be inside screaming to get out.
That’s why I got my first tattoo, 2 years ago, a reminder of a truth within me that I will constantly face.
It’s on my right arm and reads “You’ll discover that the monster you are running from is the monster in you”.
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I understand and accept that this disease is with me forever … and that I’ll always be fighting it.
The most important thing to me now is to be happy and mentally fit. It’s my life-long promise to myself.
There’s so much beauty in this world and I’m not going to let anything take that away from me.
Depression can go to hell … because I’m not scared of it … not anymore!
