The Tsunami Sweeps In

As a long-term sufferer of depression, I’ve used a lot of metaphors to try to describe a state of being that people who have never experienced it simply cannot comprehend. I’m glad they can’t. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. Well, hardly anyone. Usually the metaphors involve a force far greater than myself, an essential element of the description that at least begins to convey the sense of scale and helplessness – that when depression comes crashing down like a rockslide, when it roars in like a tsunami, when hurtles towards me like a ten-thousand-ton freight train, I really am powerless to resist it. It crushes me under its terrible weight. It wipes me out like I’m nothing. It drowns me. It drains me. It obliterates me. It shuts me down. All positive emotion gone, replaced with a pervasive, all-consuming terrible sadness, an agonising anguish that devours everything good like a swarm of locusts, leaving only waste and devastation in its wake.

But it used to do more than that. It used to warp my thinking too. It used to make me hate everyone and everything. All of the people who didn’t give a fuck about me. All of the people who let me down and didn’t come to help me or support me or just keep me company. All of the people out in the world living their lives, making it look easy. All of the people out in the world suffering worse than me, making me feel bad for feeling bad when I’m so privileged compared to so many – the majority I would argue. All of my failures, haunting me. All of my dreams, taunting me. It made me hate myself. It made me want to end everything, which of course is just a sanitised euphemism for murdering myself. It made me a victim.

I’m doing much better than I was, but I’m still very vulnerable to this terrible, all-consuming, debilitating force. Particularly as I continue to grapple with the issues that have caused me to be paralysed in suffering for so many years: my feelings surrounding my father, and the many ways in which he has been neglectful and abusive and cruel, even into adulthood – even now. And then he casts himself as the victim if I ever call him out on his callousness, and he complains about how he did his best and I should be grateful and did he do anything right and was it all bad? No it wasn’t all bad and yes he did some things right, but he got it wrong more often than not, and it wasn’t – and isn’t – that he was and is incapable of doing any better or getting it right more often. The problem is his sheer arrogance and immature defensiveness that causes him to refuse to take any responsibility, even as he projects this out onto others and accuses them of not taking responsibility for their situation.

Well, I do take responsibility for my situation. And I am working very hard to heal all of my wounds. Because I’m not ever going to be like him. I learned to be a victim from him. I learned to be depressed from him. I could have ended up like him. But I fought it, and I choose something better. I choose not to be a victim. I’m a survivor, and a fighter, and I will keep surviving and keep fighting until I am thriving, and don’t need to fight quite so much or quite so hard any more.

So even as I sit here, crushed, barely functioning, because my dad chose to lash out at me and stick the knife in deep – and probably didn’t even realise he was doing it, because it’s so easy and familiar and habitual, the habit of a lifetime from a few years after I was born – I choose not to hate everyone and everything. I choose not to hate myself and want to kill myself. I choose to want to live. I choose to face the suffering head on, and endure it. I choose to fight to just do my basic daily routine if nothing else while I feel like this – more if possible, but if not I will rest, and be kind to myself, and understand that self-love is the quickest route back to feeling good. I’m still reading and writing every day, coming up to three weeks now. I’m still doing my daily activities that are designed for all aspects of my well-being – physical, mental, emotional, creative, spiritual, social. Today is not the day I stop. That’s what I did in the past. It may be a brutally hard day. I may be suffering badly. But today I choose life, and I choose myself, and I choose getting the balance right between keeping my momentum and healing this latest wound.

And, most importantly, I choose to recognise that whereas before I was just suffering, now I’m suffering with purpose. Each incident, each relapse, gets me one step closer to the point when finally I will be ready to confront all of this, to resolve it all, and to let it all go. My father’s power to hurt himself I’m sure he’ll retain until the day he dies, and there’s nothing I can do about that – he’s beyond my ability to help, and believe me, I’ve tried many times, for both of our sakes. But his power to hurt me will soon come to an end, because I’m going to take it away from him. I will reclaim that lost power and bring it back into myself, so I can move forward as a whole person and live the life I truly want to live and deserve to live and am meant to live. Today isn’t one step back. It’s just another step forward.