Lessons from the Low Times

A year or so ago, I had a crisis of confidence about this blog.  PDB11 and I had been reading American Gods together, and there is a scene in which one of the villains makes a saccharine eulogy over someone she has murdered, in which she reflects on birth and death as two complementary sides to life.  I started to worry that whenever my blog tried to be upbeat and positive, it was just as hypocritical – and therefore proved me to be just as evil – as this character.

When I asked PDB11 whether he thought my blog sounded similar to the character’s speech, he said, ‘I suppose there’s a little similarity, but not much.’  Later on, having thought about it, he suggested that part of the reason my blog could sometimes sound this way is because I try to focus on writing about the positive side of life, without writing about my struggles in depression.

Well, when I’m in the grip of a major depressive episode, I either don’t have much useful to say, or – and this is an important distinction – can’t allow myself to think anything encouraging as it applies to myself.  However, I will try to make this into more of a regular journal acknowledging my various ups and downs, instead of only posting during the good times.

I had thought that I was getting better.  When PDB11 and I, a couple of weeks ago, discussed our finances and concluded that at our present rate we were going to run out of money in about ten years, we decided that the one saving we could feasibly make was to stop seeing a therapist. 

It was a pity, because the one we had been seeing together was the best therapist I have ever had, but we felt that she had helped us to the point where we could survive without her.  After all, the important thing was that we could discuss our problems with each other any time, not just with a therapist once a fortnight.  We congratulated ourselves on having come so far, when we couldn’t have contemplated doing without therapy a year ago.

So in last week’s session, we started by explaining the situation to our therapist, and thanked her for all the help she had been to us.  We spent the rest of the session discussing moving on from here, and our feelings about money and work.  After all, stopping seeing a therapist wouldn’t save all that much money, and before too long, PDB11 or I or both needed to find jobs.

I realise this sounds pathetic, selfish and lazy, but the idea of going back to looking for work filled me with dread.  As a child, I had never imagined that adult life could be anything other than meaningless drudgery, so I hadn’t bothered to think about what kind of career I might want to have, or to study for a degree in a relevant subject.  When I graduated with a degree in Classical Civilisation, I didn’t think I deserved any more training, so I assumed that I would have to look for some kind of job with the limited practical skills that I already had (typing and word processing).

Consequently, for most of my adult life I have been on the treadmill of applying for, and failing to get or failing to keep, boring menial jobs, because I don't have the relevant training to do anything else.  If I eventually got a job, I felt guilty about it because I didn’t believe I deserved a job, and wondered how long it would be until I was sacked, because I ‘knew’ I couldn’t hold down a job for two years.  So I felt the urge to self-sabotage in order to prove that I was useless – which would lead to my getting sacked, confirming my opinion that I was unemployable.

The only kind of work I've ever done which felt worthwhile was working in care homes.  However, the emotional anxiety of not being able to make dementia patients happy (the ones who wanted to go home, the ones who wanted me to kill them, the ones with various delusions, and so on), plus the anxiety that my mistakes might kill someone – or might even have killed some of those who died – was more than I could cope with. 

So I was deeply relieved when, about six years ago and shortly after getting married to PDB11, I was sacked once again and realised that I didn’t actually have to rush back to searching for work, and that it didn’t matter if PDB11 didn’t pick up another contract in his work as a freelance engineer.  After all, he had taken early retirement with a pension from age 50, and as we don’t have expensive tastes, we should be quite capable of living on that while we looked for a new direction in life. 

So realising that we couldn’t afford to do that indefinitely made me feel that I was right back to square one, with the added disadvantage of now being forty-two and having been unemployed for the past six years.  I imagined that if I look for jobs again, it would be a matter of going around looking for something simple and boring like stacking shelves in a supermarket.  I knew from experience that I probably wouldn't be offered a job even in this, but after spending half my lifetime failing at adult life, I couldn't believe that I was capable of anything better, or that at this stage, I have the capacity to learn how to do anything else.

Our therapist suggested that I was writing myself off without exploring what the options are.  And she's right, of course.  But I felt that, if I was going to explore the options, I needed to have explored them twenty-one years ago when I graduated, or, preferably, twenty-four years ago before applying to university.  And when I was twenty-one, I didn’t consider what the options were, because I had already decided as a child that my life would be meaningless as soon as I turned thirteen.

The frustrating thing is that this isn’t about work or money.  Money worries are what triggered this bout of depression, but what I am really depressed about is feeling that I am useless – and feeling that if I am useless, I don’t deserve to survive.  I know that I would never condemn any of my friends who are long-term unemployed as ‘not fit to survive’.  But I always feel that they have excuses, and I have none.

My father once told me about a series of murder mystery stories by Isaac Asimov, each of which starts with a guest speaker at a club being asked to make a speech answering the question, ‘How do you justify your existence?’

I asked whether any of the characters had ever said, ‘I don’t.  Either the universe has a purpose, or it doesn’t.  If it does have a purpose, then every event in it, such as my life, tends towards that purpose, but I do not need to know what purpose it serves.  And if the universe doesn’t have a purpose, then the question is irrelevant.’

I thought this was a reasonable answer, but my dad retorted irritably, ‘No, of course not.  None of those characters would ever have said that, because they all have worthwhile jobs.  And anyway, it’s just a series of murder mystery stories, so why are you taking it so seriously?’

I’m not sure my father had actually heard what I said before dismissing it.  I think he was just working on the basis that, since it was me speaking, anything I said was likely to be defeatist, self-pitying claptrap, and so it was best not to listen.  In fairness, since he knows that I suffer from depression, this was a statistically reasonable assumption.  But, of course, not being listened to just makes me feel depressed all over again.

It’s tempting to blame my depression on my upbringing, or on the Bible, or on the frustrations and disappointments I have experienced.  But the truth is that I am depressed because, ever since I was a child, I have had a filter which blocks out any information which encourages me, and acknowledges only that which condemns me.  No matter how many times my parents said they loved me and were proud of me, I just thought, ‘Well, that’s just parental bias, so it’s irrelevant.’  The one time my father said, ‘You’re a waste of space,’ I thought, ‘I already knew that I ought not to exist now that I’m a teenager, but if my own father admits it, it must definitely be true,’ and set about living to prove that I was, indeed, totally useless.

Sometimes I think, ‘Instead of just teaching us in Sunday School that Jesus loves little children, why couldn’t they have told us that he would still love us even when we grew up?’  But in reality, we did sing, ‘Who will help me to grow up?  God is sure to help me.’  I just didn’t pay any attention.

I complain, ‘Why couldn’t they have told us that it’s all right to be happy and that God doesn’t necessarily want us to be miserable all the time?’  But in fact, I was brought up as an evangelical Christian child at the height of the happy-clappy era of worship music, with tons of songs about joy, joy, joy deep down in my heart.  I just didn’t believe them.

So when I stop inventing justifications for my depression, I have to admit that, really, I’m depressed about the fact that I’m depressed.  I’m depressed that I haven’t done much with my life.  I’m depressed that I insist on holding onto irrational beliefs even when I know they aren’t true.  I’m depressed that my low moods make PDB11 feel depressed, and he will go on feeling depressed even after I’ve cheered up, which makes me feel guilty about not sharing his suffering.  I’m depressed that, when I thought I had made progress, it turns out to be so shallow-rooted that the slightest worry can send me right back to the depths of despair.  I’m depressed that I wasn’t born with whatever mental quality life gives to normal people to enable them to see themselves as having intrinsic value.

However, one thing I have learned through all this is that writing helps.  Not blogging about myself, but writing answers on Quora.  These may be messages to people who are going through similar difficulties and posting questions like

 

Is it weird that I feel like I’m forcing myself to feel depressed? Like I’m just forcing myself to have negative thoughts about myself all the time? 

 

Or they may be answers about people going through these difficulties, such as

 

What do we do if our 35-year-old son has no desire to work or anything and only sleeps and eats? We are at our wit’s end. 

 

However, they can equally be answers about something completely different which take my mind off my own worries, such as

 

Do people in England have mostly American commercials?

 

Similarly, writing stories helps.  For some time, as I described in my last post, I am working on a fanfic, The Reformed Villains Support Group, in which Severus Snape and Sergeant Bothari, my favourite character from the Vorkosigan Saga, become carers for Darth Vader, with Cheiron the centaur acting as mentor and supervisor to them.  My friend excessivelyperky had warned that in practice, this was likely to mean Snape’s needs being overlooked because he is more nearly sane than either Vader or Bothari (and also so used to being unloved that he wouldn’t be likely to ask for help).  I decided that almost the only way to ensure that Snape gets enough attention and consideration and freedom from worry was to have him be accidentally transformed into a kitten, so that the others have to take care of him for a change.

In this latest chapter, I had Cheiron explain to Bothari some of what Snape is going through.  But I opened the chapter with a conversation between Cheiron and another of the reformed villains he mentors: Erik, a.k.a. the Phantom of the Opera.  Writing it made me realise how much of what Cheiron says to all the other characters, including Erik here, is what I need to tell myself.

Writing to penpals also reminds me to keep on writing.  I was struck by conscience to realise that the prisoner whom I write to through the charity Human Writes had written several emails to me without my having noticed or replied (the first one had come just after I had last written to him, when I hadn't had much to say in reply, and then I'd failed to notice the next one, so by the time he wrote the third, he must have been wondering whether I was even receiving his messages).  So I needed to write a reply with, as well as explaining some of what I have been worrying about lately, also responded to his own news and found space to talk about more encouraging topics, like the spring, the lambs and kids in the fields, the arrival of the swifts, and the swarming of the bees.

I have heard it said that ‘write what you know’ is limiting advice (do I have the right to write about male characters when I’m not a man?  Or about wizards and centaurs when I’m not a wizard or a centaur?), and that it is better to work on the principle of ‘write what you need to know – what you need to find out.’  But often writing is a combination of the two, writing the insights that we didn’t know we knew.