The Downward Spiral

Summer 1998 in the UK was cool, wet and dull but I didn’t care. I was 26, had a good job, tons of friends, a brand new car and had just bought my first house in Liverpool where I’d been transferred for work. There was so much to see and do; cool bands played there, fantastic cutting edge art shows, and Manchester where my closest friends lived was just down the road. I got a lodger and we’d cook up feasts together, have great parties and lie flat out on deckchairs in bikinis in the garden at the faintest glimpse of sun.

Six months later, on Christmas day, a search party found me shivering and wet in a ditch in the orchard behind my mum’s house.

The first time my doctor said I was suffering from depression I laughed. It was impossible. On my request she did blood tests and a full medical to find out what was really going on but everything came back normal. The second time that she told me I was suffering from depression, I shrugged it off, I was tired, had been working too hard and I carried on, convinced that my doctor was wrong. The third time she said I was depressed, she held my hands, looked me in the eyes and said that if I didn’t deal with this now, I was heading for a breakdown. I took the prescription home and sat in my bedroom staring at it while the sun went down and shadows crept across my room.

A month later I was walking around work like a zombie and going through the motions at the pub each evening without really connecting to anyone. At night I would barely sleep, tossing around in the sheets, heart beating too fast. I took the prescription to the pharmacy three times before I actually got it filled, pretending that it was for someone else, someone who might suffer from depression because I of course, could never. I hadn’t told anyone, not even my mum.

My doctor kept telling me that I had to tell the people around me what was going on but I couldn’t; telling them would mean it was real. It was a heavy weight to carry around on my own and I knew that she was right. I told my mum, and together we made a plan for me to tell my best friend, who was coming to visit that weekend. On Sunday, it was drizzling outside and my friend and I pulled on wellington boots and raincoats and went for a walk in Croxteth Country Park. During a particularly heavy downpour we ran into a botanical greenhouse to shelter and I had the words right there in my mouth, but I couldn’t get them out. I can still remember how everything looked ultra real; sharp bright colours and crisp outlines. I stood in the street and watched my friend drive away that evening. I hadn’t told her. That night I got my mum to ring her and break the news. She was back two days later to visit.

Everything accelerated. I broke down at work and was sent on leave. I stopped being able to manage my house- stopped opening mail, didn’t pay the bills. I stopped washing and eventually I stopped getting out of bed. My doctor started paying house calls, my mum visited every weekend but I was spiralling downhill.  I started cutting myself. All the knives and sharp instruments in the house disappeared one night and days later I found them stashed in the garden shed by my terrified roommate but it didn’t matter, I used pink plastic razors instead. The razors disappeared and so I broke a glass. Some friends stopped calling, others visited every weekend. A line had been drawn and people were either in, or out.

Weeks later I was put in hospital. It was a special ward where the patients were allowed to smoke in the common room and where nurses check you off on a list every 15 minutes. We were given pills in little paper cups, no glass or ceramics were allowed but for the first time, I started to feel better. All my weights were lifted; someone else was running my life and all I had to do was to move from room to room at the allotted time and swallow my pills, have a chaperone when I bathed and sleep on a plastic-sheeted bed in a curtained off cubicle. I liked it there.

When I came out 2 months later, it was awful. My lodger was gone and I sat in my still house on my own not knowing what to do. It was then that things got really dark, then that I started scaring my family senseless and it’s only now, more than a decade later that I can even glimpse what I put my loved ones through. But at the time, things seemed very clear to me. I didn’t know how to live and if I didn’t know how to live and therefore couldn’t live, people who really loved me would understand.

And I guess that’s what I am trying to say here by sharing this story. Depression and anxiety are illnesses but unlike many things that you can solve, they are dark and complex and each person walks their own path. The people around me wanted to help but no matter what they did, they were on the outside, struggling to show they cared but desperate not to make the wrong move.

Getting better was the hardest thing I ever had to do and every day was work. I gave up everything I had; my career, my house, my car and I started from scratch, but I kept my life. Some days I didn’t get out of bed and other days I did. It took a long time, but it’s been over a decade since I cut myself, over a decade since I had a panic attack and over a decade since they had to put stitches in my arm after I hit rock bottom. Now that I am a parent I am beginning to understand the utter horror and hopelessness that my parents had to go through and I pray that I never have to go through that with my children. But we are lucky, because I made it through, and many don’t.