Depression, sedation, and wot i learned from it

[lobelia321]

I was on sertraline for 6 months. It is a mind-altering drug. During that time of sedation, my emotions were changed in various ways. They were sedated emotions. This was, initially, fantastic as the sedated emotions replaced depressed emotions, and my depressed emotions were totally out of control.

(Note to them as wot don't me well: These pills were not sedatives in the medical horse-subduing sense. That's just the word I like to use -- that, or tranquillisers, or les pillules. *g*)


Sedated emotion
Excess emotion was taken out from everyday events.

E.g. I got an email from my line manager, accusing me of doing something wrong, formulated in a disrespectful manner. Before sedation, this would have sent me into a spiral of angst, resentment, indignation, sleeplessness, self-accusation, self-denigration. With sedation, I looked at it; felt a little bit bad for one minute; identified where the line manager was projecting his own anxieties onto me; remembered why I had done the 'wrong' thing I had been doing and recalled the reasons for doing it; recognised that the 'wrong thing' was actually a trivial matter; and emailed back, apologising in a polite tone. I felt pity for the line manager more than anything else, and I moved on.

I could devote just the amount of energy needed to each task, and no excess emotional energy.

What I learned from this
I went onto the tranquillisers because my job was making me depressed. The job depression is now fixed. What I learned from my sedated semester, is that my institution is still crap but I'm not crap.

This was a crucial lesson to learn. The place can be crap: I don't have to be crap. I spent one morning doing meaningless administrative tasks, caused by managerial incompetence and misplaced nitpickery. Before, I would have fumed at the mouth about this and despaired over the waste of my time. This time, I sat in an empty computer room, with the sun shining through the window; it was quite tranquil; I could do the menial tasks easily (they were very menial); and I thought:

I haven't wasted my time. I've wasted their time.

If they want to pay me for menial tasks that are way below my professional ability: fine. I'm doing a mindless task and I'm getting paid a professional salary for it!

Tick the boxes
This was something my counsellor told me. And it worked for me. Some colleagues at my crap institution are responding by skiving off. This, I learned, was not me. This was making me depressed. It put me in a mindset of 'oh shit, have I not done something important?' So when the incompetent managers blamed me for xyz, I was put in a panic.

I learned to tick the boxes without the excess emotion. I learned to look at things that have to be done, identify the important priorities according to me (e.g. preparing lectures, marking student work); I identified the important priorities according to the crap institution that were totally low on my own list of priorities (e.g. reformatting a document from point 11 to point 12) -- and then I did the crap priorities first, without angsting and fuming. This worked very well in getting managers off my back.

Own up.
This was something else my counsellor told me. This is why I apologised in that email I mentioned earlier. This has been an important lesson. It is connected with being good.

Being Good
I think depressed people often want to Be Good. At least, I want often to Be Good. So if I'm told by someone else, e.g. husband, line manager, about something 'wrong', my reaction will be defensive.

I am learning to say 'okay, that was stupid, sorry' (allowing myself to be Not Good and forgiving my own mistakes, and thereby also being forgiving of others' mistakes) or to say 'no, this is not something wrong, these are my reasons for it' (without apologising, cringeing, being accusatory, being annoyed, and so forth). That is: owning up.

No negativity.
My counsellor forbad negativity in the workplace. She cautioned me to avoid being sucked into the vortex of rumour-mongering and negativity-gossip. This is rife in my institution because it's so crap. She said, 'ask people what movie they saw over the weekend'. This felt fake at first but I think it's a good strategy. Sometimes it's unavoidable, and sometimes it's important, to share thoughts about the crapness, but it can spiral out-of-hand.

What is, in fact, good about my job
I like teaching the students, and I'm good at it. I've come round to a position where I try not to teach them what I feel I ought to teach them or what's written on the official document but just what I find fun. That makes me enthusiastic and self-confident. So even when I forget my notes at home (which happened once), I can still go in and do something.

The hours are flexible. If I changed jobs, I wouldn't find such flexible hours as academe offers very easily.

The pay is a professional salary with annual leave, sick-leave and a pension.

Most of my colleagues are, in fact, okay. It's just the 4 to 5 very bad managers who are the bad eggs.


Face reality
This is something I read in Gwyneth Lewis's book about depression. She thinks not being depressed is not about being happy but about facing reality. You can, however, only face reality if you can identify what reality is.

To me this is connected with:

The trap of feeling what I ought to feel
This is, for me, the biggest single cause of depression. I do what I think I ought to do. I do what I think is expected of me. I hide those things that I do that I think will cause disapproval. I try to feel the way I ought to feel.

This is still a huge trap for me. It went away during sedation. I found it easier to identify reality under the influence of les pillules. I could own up more. 'Today I spent five hours playing Sims2.' I could say that and not feel bad. Now I'm back to struggling with that kind of thing. Because my depression-prone mind tells me 'Sims2 is frivolous; you oughtn't to be frivolous; you ought to be doing a Useful Thing' -- best not to tell anybody about it, and then it will be as if it hadn't happened.'

Not feeling what I ought to feel but facing reality and admitting what I actually do feel is the biggest task I struggle with.


Moving forwards
When I'm depressed, I get trapped in time. Moments are like honey and keep me glued in them. So I will play Sims (to reuse that example) and then stick with it, even when the fun has gone out of the game. I don't seem to be able to move out of a moment. Time becomes treacle. Then I end up feeling very bad: 'another day wasted'.

When sedated, I was able to spend a morning doing something, then thinking 'hm, that was dumb, I didn't really want to be doing that', and move on. I would use even short half-hours to go into Caffé Nero and do something else. I could do what Flylady preaches: You're not behind; jump in where you are.

This has to do with the next obstacle:

Trusting myself
I find this very difficult. I find it hard to trust myself to jump up and do something else with my time. I think, 'I'm trapped here forever; I've wasted a morning; I'm hopeless; I may as well not bother trying anything else', and so forth.

When I was on the anti-depressants, I found myself saying to people 'yes, I seem to have a gift for writing; I'm really quite good at it.'

Wow! In my non-sedated state, I find it very hard to admit (and to feel) that I can do something well.


Why did I decide to come off the anti-depressants?
The job thing had been fixed. The limited range of emotion was starting to be a hindrance, no longer a help. I didn't care whether t'h was here or away. I had zero libido. I had lost the Yearning. I felt that the Yearning was necessary to be creative. I felt disconnected from what I was writing; it felt mechanical.

I didn't burst into tears when I saw athletes winning something or other, or when I heard a sad story on the radio, or when the music swelled up in a movie as a little boy is reunited with his mother. Normally, I always burst into tears.

I realised that it is more important to be me rather than to be happy.

This was a revelation. I had always really wanted to be happy. I don't know whether that's a specific lure for depressed people: the lure of happiness. I didn't understand what self-help manuals, spiritual gurus from the 1960s and agony aunties meant when they said, 'just be yourself'. I did (do) not know what it is to be myself. (This has to do with identifying reality and feeling only what I ought to feel. So the lure of 'being myself' never held much interest. It was always the lure of 'being happy'.

I was surprised to see that towards the end of the 6 months I was missing my old 'self', and that I was attached to this old 'self', with all its problems.

It's not about happiness; it's about life being meaningful
I read this in a book at my parents' house and it made an immediate impression. I think that's true (for me.)

One thing about being prone to depression is that I don't trust myself to feel bad. It's easy being happy; I can do that. Then, the next day, I'm feeling low. Immediately, the fear kicks in 'oh, no, I'm depressed again'. I don't trust myself to come out of it. I find it hard to deal with non-depressed normal lowness. Often, I can't even identify it; I recoil in horror and feel 'happy' as I ought to feel, so I'm not facing reality, and things go pear shaped.

Also, unhappiness connects you to humanity. Doing what feel I ought to be doing makes me look down on people who're not feeling as they ought to be feeling. Plumbing the depths and allowing my own mistakes and miseries, makes me forgiving of other people's mistakes and miseries.


One important characteristic of depression, I think, is the way it makes a person

feel both abject and superior at the same time.
When depressed, I feel 'I'm a speck of useless dirt; it's all my own fault'.

But I also feel 'I'm at the centre of the universe; nobody is as miserable as I am'. There's a strange hubris about depression. It makes me self-absorbed and self-centred.

I'd like to turn the depression around and turn it into melancholy -- which is a positive, connecting-to-humanity state of mind.

Connect with people
This is something I had learned during my previous bout of depression in 2003. I need to see people.

When depressed, I shut myself off. This is very bad for me. I need to make an effort and organise meetings.

When sedated, I lost the Yearning. So it was nice to see people. But if I didn't see anybody, I didn't care, either.

This is why I lost all interest in LJ. My commitment is still not up to my pre-sedation levels. It's the Yearning that makes me want to write fiction, that makes me want to put Sheppard's mouth on the genitals of the wraith, that makes me want to comment and post on LiveJournal, that makes me want to drool over footballers and their elegant, Armani-coated, silver-templed managers, that makes me want to watch silly television series for the odd glimpse of Jocelyn Rutger, and because these things connect me with other people who want all these things, too!

Have a fitness routine
This is what they all say, and it's true. I have to keep remembering this.

I go to L.A. Fitness once a week, and it's important. And it's good to walk into town; it's not 'more convenient' to take the car because walking allows my body to move, and I can read en route or listen to podcasts.

What I love
This is very difficult for me to access when I'm feeling low. So here is a top-of-my-head list for me to remember:

• sitting in a café
• writing in a café
• reading a novel I really feel like reading (that is, not one that I 'ought' to feel like reading; learn to trust my guts here, not my mind: judge books by their cover all the time)
• the sun (I tend to forget that I feel better as soon as there's a sunny day; I blame gloominess on myself, not on my latitude)
• walking in the desert of the Red Centre of Australia
• extrapolating from the previous: walking
• seeing a Bollywood movie
• seeing a Bollywood DVD

Other things that make me feel better:
- meeting people
- connecting with people
- seeing people I tend to forget while depressed or sedated (the two PHs, CCO, SvdV, CCE, JW/S, t'sister, t'parents, t'K-Ss, MR even)
- seeing old friends (CMc in France, CM in wherever she now is, JMc in Paris)
- making an effort to visit people, even if it involves booking a flight
- doing a writing workshop
- going to t'aah conference used to make me feel great but I haven't tried it since 2006
- going out with t'h, away from family routine
- going on a family holiday (actually, this could possibly go in the 'I love' section, except that the planning and travelling process tends to freak me)
- going to art can make me feel better but 'tis a bit fraught still
- having a bath with candles and the laptop propped on the loo, playing a streamed BBC Radio Four broadcast of either Just A Minute or The News Quiz or Bookclub or Open Book or A Good Read

Final words
That's all that I can think of now. I'll do updates-to-self as I think of them. One thing I've left out is my current in-between and unsure state vis-à-vis my vocation. That shall be left for another post.

Don't get trapped in time. Keep moving forwards. Keep busy!

Trust your guts. E.g. even if you bought the 'wrong' book, it'll still be the 'fun' book because you bought it with your 'guts'. This to be extended to other areas of life, too (such as: Do we move to Stanford, California? Do we move house or get an extension?)

Let others be. I was totally good at this when sedated. Now it's all about the nagging and the getting-irritated again.

Don't assume about others. 'I won't tell x this because x will think I ought to be feeling someway else.' This is assuming that x will think this. This is mistrusting others as I mistrust myself. Remember that in the past I've told people stuff (I write online fiction) and they haven't minded; they've even sometimes been interested.

And even if they do mind: learn not to mind myself. Tell them, anyway, because it is good for the soul.

Avoid resentment. (My counsellor said that resentment was my prime emotion when I first came to see her last January. I hadn't even realised. It was eating me up. Apparently!)



Hm, that's about it. Turned out kind of long. :-)