depression
My name is Philippa
I wrote the following on November 7, 2015:
I am sitting with my laptop on my lap ready so here I go, “My name is Philippa and I suffer with severe depression.”
Does that scare you?
Does it make you feel awkward?
Is your instinct want to change the subject?
The subject of depression does affect people in these ways but it’s also okay to be honest. You can leave and go back to your comfort zone or you can read. If you decide to read it may help you to understand better.
Depression still has a stigma, depression sufferers still suffer in silence, people still commit suicide because they are at rock bottom. Me?
Well yes, I have suffered with depression for most of my life but have only been open for the past ten years. Why?
I didn’t understand that I did suffer with depression for several years. At 19 years old I had my son – that’s another story which will be touched on – and I knew I was suffering with post-natal depression. But. It didn’t stop there. I still suffered in silence. I was expected to get on with my life and act as if ours was a well-adjusted family to the outside world. But. I still couldn’t talk about how I was really feeling. I was just ‘moody’. I was a ‘drama queen’. There were people far worse off than me. Silence. I put on my mask and got on with my life. The alternative?
Death.
Mood still up and down
It’s still the story of my life that I wear my mask. I often think it would scare the heck out of friends and family if they could live in my head for a week. One minute I can be fine and coping, the next I will have horrendous thoughts of death and how much better this world would be without me. No doubt there could be many people who would consider this as selfish, self-centred and a pity party but if they have never suffered with long term depression they don’t have a clue.
I grew up within a family where there was no reason to be depressed and there ‘are people out there with real problems’. Well yes I do agree with that but depression can hit anybody at any time no matter how good their life is. I grew up feeling very lonely at times despite having a family that loved me and had friends. All I can put it down to is initially having undiagnosed deafness in my right ear therefore not hearing anybody properly. Once it was diagnosed help was put in place which included speech therapy as I wasn’t talking properly. However, social events such as birthdays, going out for meals and going to discos / nightclubs have been difficult due to the noise. It’s impossible to explain to someone who has hearing in both ears how much I have to concentrate on one conversation. A favourite stupid question I’ve been asked over the years is “What’s it like being deaf in one ear?”
I’ve never known what it’s like to hear with both ears so how should I know?
My response has always been “What’s it like to hear with both ears?”
It makes people think and I appreciate it when I have conversations with people who lose hearing in one or both ears as they ‘get it’.
Having gone through a traumatic experience when I was 19 I wish I could just get over it but I can never can as I can’t wipe it out of my life. Being expected to get on with my life, never talking about it made life intolerable for me and changed my life forever as it destroyed my future life. It’s only recent years that I’ve been able to talk to my sister and she has been told of a couple of hurtful incidents. She had no knowledge of these two (been more) but that’s not her fault that nobody told her before.
Struggling
My mood has been worse over the past few weeks and I’m so tired all of the time. Sleep is a problem as well and I’m stuck for ideas to help me sleep.
One happy bit of news is we have a new great nephew called Alex who arrived two weeks early weighing 8lbs 3oz so a very good weight. I am looking forward to when we can visit family.
The not so good news is one of my cousins is seriously ill in hospital with 1% chance of survival. I haven’t since much of him and his brothers or my other two cousins since my 20’s apart from funerals and special occasions. Yet it been great to see them. It makes me think more about my mortality as the cousin in hospital is the same age as me.
Life is a struggle
I was relieved to get the first jab done which didn’t hurt so will get the second one a minimum of three weeks later but probably more likely twelve weeks on. My sister is still waiting for hers but I hope she does soon. My brother in law got his jab done weeks ago as he is that much older than us.
Unfortunately I am very severely depressed for a variety of reasons and I have lost the battle to keep fighting back at it. Even without living through a pandemic I don’t want to see my doctor as I’m all talked out. Doing CBT is boring and I’ve done it a few times so can fly through it ‘saying the right things’. Ultimately nobody can say or do anything to make the pain any better, nobody can change my past, nobody can make one person apologise to me. I have made plenty of mistakes in my life, who hasn’t?
It’s one thing dealing with my own mistakes but why should I suffer for what someone else has done to me?
I am so tired of life, tired of existing, tired of pretending I’m okay. There should be more to life than just going from one day to another knowing I’m one day closer to dying. Having pets make each day bearable, being married to someone who also suffers with depression is a challenge.
Too good to be true?
We have had to put up with an idiot neighbour for a few months due to him accusing us of different things. Apparantly we have 10 cats when in reality we have 2 1/2 – one has two homes as one of her sisters lives across the road hence the 1/2 – my husband is a wife beater and a couple of other things. The ‘screams’ he’s heard have been when I have fallen and yelled out for help getting up or when I’ve yelled at our dogs as one was ill so could be aggressive at times. She has since passed on and our other dog has calmed down.
Since then the neighbour as claimed our dog barks 24/7 which isn’t true because we wouldn’t put up with it. When we leave him to go shopping or the health club. Our friend, who is owned by our eldest cat’s sister, will sit with him for 10 minutes so we can slip out or sometimes till we get home. If our dog does bark our friend will check to see if there is a reason but our dog doesn’t bark continuously even then. We suspect the idiot neighbour upsets him by walking past our home but we can’t prove.
The neighbour has threatened my husband then had the cheek to ring the police and claimed he was threatened. On that day he hurled abuse at me after the call as I had gone to our car to get a mobile. What he didn’t know was I had set my mobile to record so when the police came out we were able to prove this. The police weren’t impressed that he had made a claim then was abusive towards me after his phone call.
Right from the first incident the neighbour has been parking his van where we normally park up just to annoy us. He’s has filmed us going from our car to our home, been very noisy and has been spying on us so when we’ve gone out into the garden or come home from an outing he will stand at his gate staring at us until we go in.
A few days ago his van went so we have been able to park up where we have wanted to and he has stopped his bad behaviour. I’m not completely convinced that he’s seen sense that his behaviour has been bad. It could be true or it could be because he has cancer. One of our immediate neighbours recently died due to cancer, yet, he was a lovely neighbour.
I’m still struggling with depression but I am getting there slowly with being motivated.
Dark days
I don’t think anybody realized how much COVID-19 would affect our daily lives or how it would globally. On a personal level my anxiety levels have gone through the roof quite a bit. One day, in the early days of lockdown, I had a mini meltdown in Tesco as there was hardly any cat food and what was left was expensive. The next day we went to Darlington as our car needed a new MOT so we went along to the closest shops for something to do. We went into B&M and I was very relieved that there was plenty of cat food there so went back when we collected the car.
Going shopping was stressful when there were stricter rules so more often that not I was wearing a mask. Some days it was unbearable as the weather was so hot. More recently I read about Hidden Disabilities which sell lanyards, cards and other stuff. It helps shop staff aware of people who may need extra help but people can also now buy face mask exemption cards. Legally shops, public areas such as railways etc can insist that people still wear masks. The only place that has insisted that we wear face masks has been our health club but that’s only till we go to the changing rooms and the same leaving.
Both of us are still struggling with depression even though we are getting back to some kind of normality. Neither of us like being out too long but I’m hoping when we go on holiday that it will help our moods.
Wearing a Mask
For most of my life, I have suffered from depression although it was 2005 that I finally accepted that. I didn’t have any reason to be depressed and I didn’t like feeling unhappy when it reared its ugly head.
When I was 19 years old I had a son who was adopted by forced adoption which is illegal but I didn’t know that until over 23 years later. That was the time when I became severely depressed but I thought it was just postnatal depression. At the same time, I emotionally shut down and lost trust in everybody. After all, if I couldn’t trust my family who could I trust?
I also suffer with OCD which I manage quite well most of the time and PTSD but doctors don’t associate that with adoption.