Previous Post…Depression…I do !!

It was Monday the 9th of May 2016 and the excitement of the last few days had subsided to the point where I was now in an unusual state of numbness.  I felt like I had been in a washing machine but in a way it had kept me from thinking about my predicament in any depth.  Everything now had stopped, family and friends had returned to their homes and Katrina had started back at work and I was now alone in the house with nothing else to think about except those things that had blown my world apart.

The experiences of the last few days had at least kept some light illuminating into the hole I was falling into…with the euphoria now past I was plunged into darkness and my mental loneliness was about to become my only place of solace.  In my world I was alone and what was to happen over the next few weeks would leave me with an invisible scar that no one could see except me when I looked into that mirror.

When the weekend finished and the light was extinguished I was left with what was in my head.  The wedding had given me some respite as the happiness of the occasion took hold and gave me some relief from the troubles that had haunted me.  Now all those things that I got pleasure from were  gone and banished to a world that I didn’t know anymore.   When you start on that rocky path into depression everything that is important to you slowly seeps into the back of what’s left of your mind and recovering them becomes a challenge that last for months and years. The negative thoughts that infest your head then slowly devour what’s left of any hope that you had and you are left with all those thoughts that drove you to depression in the first place.

The place I entered was dark because there were no positives thoughts. You concentrate  on nothing as your mind bounces around trying to find something that  is positive, something that will make you smile or be happy, even just for a few seconds.  My mind was like that continually….it was bouncing around looking for something positive but all it found was all those things that I regretted in my life, all those things that I had done and hadn’t done in my personal and work life.  When your thoughts gravitate towards those things you panic because you don’t want to deal with them and your mind bounces off and starts looking for something else. Its useless really because finding something positive was impossible for me and as a result I became physically and mentally exhausted.

What happened to me was that after a while I became tired of playing a game of mental gymnastics and I eventually tried to gain control of my thoughts by attaching them to those issues that I believed sent me over the edge.  You may think that strange but having your mind concentrating on one thing stopped the turmoil of an over active mind…even though that one thing was a negative.  I started concentrating on all those bad things and began over-thinking what was going to happen.  I thought about all those people I let down, all my friends, family and work colleagues who had relied on me.  I thought about people who had helped me and what they now thought of me as someone who had let them down. I was smothered with a feeling of hopelessness as I sunk further into depression analysing to death the issues that for me were way to big to deal with.

Those were my feelings that dominated the next few days of my life.  A feeling of hopelessness that weighed me down so much that it hastened my delivery to rock bottom. Depression ultimately took hold or me and squeezed the life out of me through a torrent of tears that I couldn’t control.  All I did was try and manage where that uncontrollable emotion took place so that people didn’t see me.  As it happened hiding didnt work because the Mental Health Crisis team were going to dig way too deep and I was going to cry a fair bit over the next couple of weeks……