Confessional

[raven]

Oh, I don't know where to start, I really don't. Um, yesterday I got up in the morning, had breakfast, got dressed, and before I left the house I dug out some perfume - light, spritzy stuff I got in the States - and two pairs of stud earrings. I've still got them in now: a pair of red stones, because I always have a touch of red on me somewhere, and black ones, because I was wearing a plain black t-shirt.

This isn't as trivial as it appears. If I look back at my LJ, which is actually a wonderful tool to have for these things, my rate of updating seems to have dropped to almost zero somewhere near the end of December and not picked up since. It's now January 27th - well, it will be in fifteen minutes - and I'm now, at last, beginning to be able to talk about it. I mean, I was pretty blue over Christmas, and I rememeber writing a long post of sour-grapes irritation on Christmas Day, but after that everything just stopped. I went away, and I did have a good time, most of the time, but I got back to Oxford, was initially jet-lagged, and the jet-lag, which wasn't jet-lag, didn't go away and everything went to hell.

I can't quite believe that it took me two weeks to notice that something was seriously wrong. It's very hard to describe it, now, but it was sort of like watching the world through cotton wool, with two inches of nothingness between me and my sensory perception. That's what I said at the time, I think. I couldn't sleep not because I couldn't sleep but because I was terrified of being alone in my head - as long as I was awake and doing something I didn't have to face the dark behind my eyes - and not sleeping at night meant sporadic sleeping during the day, and general happy stuff like an inability to concentrate on anything for more than five minutes at a time. And then the weird feeling of really, honestly, not caring about anything, including the passage of time, which has done strange things to my memory of the whole of first week, because all the days seem to have happened at once.

And yet I was surprised, when I fell asleep one morning at six and got up at ten and went to see the college medics, to be asked sincerely, "What do you think it is?"

I knew. But I didn't know. And actually getting the external validation that there is something wrong makes it worse, and worse than that, the narrow-eyed concern that comes with it; the constant, hollow assurances that I don't live alone and I will keep myself away from kitchen knives and first-floor windows. But here's the thing: I've had this before. I had this in Trinity, and I had it over the summer, and the only difference is in intensity. I knew that, and I didn't know it, and I went home very, very frightened.

Which really wasn't the idea, was it? But the days that came after that were worse, in that I knew there was something wrong with me, and I knew what it was, and I was beginning to lose control of my head, and wasn't able to feel anything except brief nova bursts of anxiety. And this is the ridiculously meta-referential way my brain works, that the thing that was making me scared and depressed was the fact I was scared and had depression. Er, yay? But I do think the phrase "I have clinical depression" does a lot of work - it means that I am a bright, silly, witty human being who likes writing and philosophy and sushi and Snow Patrol and winter days in Oxford, and am still that person, oh yes.

Then on Wednesday I woke up at nine am, having slept all night, and took a shower, and felt better. And that was that. I don't mean to trivialise all that came above, because it wasn't trivial. It was awful. It was oblivion with just enough lucidity to throw the rest into sharp, bleak relief, and it was killing me. I couldn't write. This is so wanky-pretentious I can't believe it, but it was the very fact I couldn't throw together prose that drove me to seeking medical help. Every word I wrote came out wrong, flat and anodyne, and that hasn't ever happened before. (I can always write something. Fiction, journal entries, and in the last resort, academic writing, but losing my footing on footnotes is new to me.) This type of low mood has happened before, though; I can see echoes of it in my LJ entries for June, and again in August, but not as bad as this.

But I know something now. I'm not floundering away in the dark, because I know that either I have an illness, an unusual cyclic type of clinical depression, or this is a facet of my personality. (I don't know what that means, what work that distinction actually does, but a discussed on the inherent relativity of mental health can wait for another decade.) But I have it, and I can deal with it. The pattern seems established - it comes on, lingers for some time, usually about a month, and then leaves as mysteriously as it came. It's not seasonal affective disorder, as it appears to have manifested in June, and it's not a good idea to treat it with medication, they tell me; the fact that I spend three quarters of the time out of it is a good thing that we shouldn't mess with. And I concur.

It will happen again, they tell me. But next time I'll know, and I won't be scared.

So that's it. That's why I haven't been here very much, and haven't been talking when I have been here. A very few of you knew about this already, and I wanted to thank you in public, because you kept me held together at a hideously low point: the knowledge that you were out there, listening, stopped me from dissolving out of fear. Thank you.

And now I'm here again, and I'm feeling better today than I did yesterday and better yet than the day before. I'm getting there, back up to the surface bit by bit, and it's the most extraordinary experience. It's like waking up after a month asleep, and it's impossible to describe well, but oh, god, it's like rediscovering the whole world. I'm walking through the gorgeous winter days with my mouth open at the beauty of the architecture, the sky, the colours, the music, the food. This afternoon, I had a set of mental evaluations - the GPs declared me uncrazy, yay - and I had to go and inform my personal tutor of all this, but I had an hour to kill, so I went to a café and bought filter coffee and read a couple of chapters for this week's International Relations essay. And it was perfect, sitting there in the warm afternoon light finding something interesting. I'd forgotten what that felt like.

My tutor, once I'd told him, was very good about the whole thing, and somehow or other got to telling me about a talk Jack Straw gave in Oxford yesterday. Apparently he opened the floor for questions and some students near the front chanted, "Rubbish!" And before he could go on, they started singing, "Rubbish, nonsense, rubbish!" only with a cappella harmonies. At which point my tutor actually started doing the harmonies and I was almost crying with laughter.

Ah, yes, Cerberus, that's how he got on to talking about it. I've missed so much, through this; I wasn't able to blog about my first event as reigning Triarch of Cerberus (we also tried "incumbent Triarch", but "reigning" is so much better), which went off marvellously, and also I went to a Slovakian cocktail bar for James's birthday and I wanted to express my bemusement (a Slovakian cocktail bar? is it the only one in the world? I asked the party in general, and James's flatmate Johannes said, "No, but in Slovakia they just call them cocktail bars") and I just couldn't.

Oh, god, I've missed the world. I've barely been functioning, and now I'm actually feeling myself rising up through the murk to the point where I care enough about my life to make sure my earrings match and walk out into the sunshine. Or the snow; the other night I think I was starting to come out of it without quite realising, and in the morning I realised I'd actually written an LJ entry and it had contained real writing. If I hadn't written that, I would have suspected it was all a dream, because by morning the snow was gone. It lingers, eerily, only in the two graveyards, in flashes of white on the stones at St Cross and Mary Magdalene.

Today, January 26th, is India's Republic Day. I am twenty years and one week old, and for the first time I'm an Indian citizen on Republic Day. I'm one of the billion people in the world's largest democracy, and one of another one besides. That's a wonderful thought. And beyond that, I'm nearly myself again. I'm reserved and silly and over-analytical to a fault, but I'm a real person with passion in her prose, and I won't lose my world again. This will happen again, but I'll be ready for it.

Comments

[emily-shore.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm so glad to hear that you're feeling better. I'm looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. Hopefully we'll have a good evening.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thank you, and hopefully, yes! I plan to appear round about half six bearing gifts of the terribly sugary variety. It should be much fun.

'You've got the music in you'

[pinkishmew.livejournal.com]

It's like waking up after a month asleep, and it's impossible to describe well, but oh, god, it's like rediscovering the whole world.
Oh yes. [nods] Suddenly I could feel the trees and actually had feelings about trees again; I was dazzled by the colours - all the colours - and everything was so alive. Mine was medicated, though, and I did then spend over two hours giggling, on my own, in a library, at nothing. Maybe being stoned is like that, except the huge feeling of being awake and alive.

[hugs] I know what it's like to suddenly remember how it feels to be alive.

Re: 'You've got the music in you'

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*hugs* Thank you, and it's a wonderful feeling.

[leiascully.livejournal.com]

I am glad you are back to feeling you can write. My flist felt rather empty without you. But I know how you feel. The not writing, it kills.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thank you, and it's good to be back. :)

[flickgc.livejournal.com]

It's very hard to describe it, now, but it was sort of like watching the world through cotton wool, with two inches of nothingness between me and my sensory perception.

Oh, god yes. I have used this phrase so many times. It's fucking hard to explain it to people: hand gestures don't make the point.

Drugs do help, really. I probably came off them sooner thsn I should have, but they do help.

Right now? Doing great. I have a fucking brilliant shrink, really, he's lovely.

Arse: I sound like a crazy person. Damnit.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

You don't sound like a crazy person at all, dear. Quite the reverse.

[deepbluemermaid.livejournal.com]

That was extraordinarily moving to read; thank you for sharing it. I lock almost all entries that are even vaguely personal, so you're much braver than me. In any case, I just can't write coherently - let alone beautifully - about my depression.

I've been going through a bad period as well, so far as sleep is concerned. Getting to bed at 4am has not been uncommon! It started off as jetlag when I got back from New Zealand, but it's become a bad habit. It's not insomnia; just internet addiction, inertia and a preference for being nocturnal. Tonight was going to be an early night, but it's now after 2am.

It'll be hard to drag myself to the national library tomorrow, especially as it's only open until 1.30. I miss Oxford, where the libraries are all within easy walking distance and have (comparatively) generous opening hours!

Most of the libraries and archives I use in Rome are only open until 1 or 2pm - weekdays only - so I have to get an unpleasantly early start. And many of them are some distance away (up to an hour by public transport).

Anyway, enough rambling. Bedtime...

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

And thank you for reading it. :) This has made it so hard to commit words to paper that the second I started coming out of it, I wanted to write, and write, and write. But I can only write about it in retrospect.

Will you be back in Oxford? Not that I'm begrudging you Rome - sunshine! no animal protestors! - but it would be good to see you.

[deepbluemermaid.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'll be back in August (to start the third and hopefully final year of my DPhil), and will be popping over once or twice before that.

We must meet properly at some point! Ppossibly with sitting down and liquid refreshments and all that, but I'm not too fussy.

[rosariotijeras.livejournal.com]

You're pretty much incredible.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, darling, I'm really not. But thank you so much for thinking so.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Oh, sweetheart. I hope you never, ever feel like this again, but perhaps it's inevitable, and if so, I hope I'm someone you can tell, and I hope you remember this entry well enough to come back and read it and find somewhere in yourself that remembers how it feels to find your way out of it. I've never been depressed, but your account strikes a chord in me, in the way that many of my friends' accounts haven't.

(And because I'm all about this sort of thing, how do you get on with Sylvia Plath and the Bell Jar imagery? I never found the point of it, but your cotton wool metaphor sounds similar. Maybe it's one of those things that makes sense when you have someone you give a damn about talking about those same emotions.)

Oh fuck, it's as awful and as pointless and as potentially creative as any physical injury or illness, innit? I hope so much for your sake that it's something that comes in vaguely manageable bursts of a few weeks, not something that colours your life for ever after. Take care of yourself. I hope you find a way to manage it. I think you're brill, and you will continue to be. Much love, our kid. xxx

[biascut.livejournal.com]

and happy Independence day! Go you and your dual citizenship!

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you, thank you so much. That is part of the reason why I wrote this: to record feeling like this, and not feeling like that.

(It's been a long time since I read The Bell Jar, but I'd not go with the bell jar imagery - it implies suffocation, whereas mine is more like disassociation from reality - in favour of another image she uses elsewhere. I'm not sure if I'm getting this right, but it's something like a vision of the future as frames of black and white, day and night, each the same as the one before, endlessly to forever, and that did come to mind during this episode. Each day was stultifyingly identical to the one before, especially because my time perception was shot to hell.)

I'm managing. Bit by bit I'm coming out of it, and I'll be far better prepared for the next episode of it.

Thanks so much for this comment. I appreciate it, and you, so much. :)

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if I'm getting this right, but it's something like a vision of the future as frames of black and white, day and night, each the same as the one before, endlessly to forever, and that did come to mind during this episode.

I know exactly which image you mean, because weirdly enough, it's the one that always haunts me when I'm feeling down. It's during that period where the narrator's suffering from insomnia, and she writes:

I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.

...Sorry to be morbid in the comments to such a good, hopeful post. But that's so right it's always scared me.

[birdsflying]

:squashes you a lot because words are not working today:

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

*squishes right back* Thank you.

[dougs.livejournal.com]

That doesn't sound strange, and it certainly doesn't sound like wangst. It sounds like you understand what's going on behind the scenes with your condition, and you're using that understanding as one of your techniques for dealing with it, which is excellent.

There's a lot of it about, you're not alone. And, as you demonstrate, it's not permanent. Hurrah!

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this. I'm glad that you are feeling better. I think that 'we' as a society (though the limits of that 'we' are probably open to debate) have become increasingly sensible about depression over the past couple of decades.

Congratulations on Republic Day. (I'm tempted to juxtapose that statement with my Charles I icon, but won't because it would appear to undercut the sincerity of the statement, and poor Charles I would be appalled anyway.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thank you, and yes, I think you're right. I've had enough friends and relations with mental illness to be less frightened than I would have been otherwise, if that makes sense.

Charles I would have been truly traumatised. :)

[tmpe5t.livejournal.com]

Glad you're back! And yes, it's wierd, but when you go to the doctor and say "help!! i think i'm going mental!!!" and they say: "yes you are." it immediately makes you feel better...

[hathy-col.livejournal.com]

I am useless about what to say in such situations, other than the usual promise to be there for anything that is needed, etc, etc. And I'm glad the world is starting to make sense again, if you know what I mean.

And hurrah for Republic Day. I wrote about Indian independence in my history exam for reasons unknown to myself other than 'I know what year that happened' and hell, now I have a vague idea of the actual date, too. Hurrah for that!

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean, and thank you.

Independence Day is actually August 15th, confusingly. Republic Day is January 26th because that's when they installed the constitution? Something like that, anyway. My historical ignorance is shocking.

[amchau.livejournal.com]

I was actually starting to wonder if you were okay-- the communications semi-blackout is a clue for me (e.g. I think you never did tell us whether you got your phone back). I'm glad you're feeling better. ::hugs::

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thank you, dear. I told you about the parcel, I think? If I didn't, I did get it, and thank you for that, too.

[amchau.livejournal.com]

You did tell me that, yes. Glad it arrived safely.

If you are up for a phone call, let me know. :)

[chiasmata]

Ohhh, sweetie. I'm so, so glad you're coming out of it - and thank you for writing this.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reading, and for listening the other night. *loves*

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

HUGS

Glad you're feeling better, and belatedly Happy Republic Day!

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thank you, on both counts!

[tau_sigma]

It is lovely to have you back. :) That, actually, is one thing I would have said last night had my internet connection not been misbehaving so badly: I have missed your entries these last few weeks, and I'm glad you're back, and more than anything I'm glad you're starting to feel better.

And a belated Happy Republic Day, and ya for your and your dual nationality. (I seem to know an absurd number of people of dual nationality now. Goodness.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

It is lovely to be back. I've been a grotty friend and human being lately, and it hasn't been fun. We must catch up properly, next time your internet's working. :)

Dual nationality is the best thing EVER. *g*

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

God, I have missed hearing from you, but I figured the reason for your AWOLness was along these lines--sometimes dealing with yourself is so overwhelming that other people are out of the question. In any case, I'm so glad you're back, in all senses of the word. You are wonderful; never forget that.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, I missed you too. You're right, it was dealing with my own crazy that was taking the time, but it's so boring, being depressed. I guess that sounds ridiculous. But it is, and it's so good to be back.