An unfortunate aspect of my brain chemistry

People don’t get it. They really don’t.

Depression is hard for people to understand if they haven’t gone through it. Before I went through a triggering event, I had such an unconscious understanding of what it felt like. I thought “gosh, get your shit together”, “why are you like this?”.

I get it now. It’s like a blanket that muffles your screams, or a frosted glass that stops you from seeing clearly. I’m dealing with my depression much better now a days. I’ve done therapy and I’m on medication and I understand my highs and lows much better now. But it doesn’t stop the deafening silence falling over me every few months.

And that is probably the hardest thing to explain to other people- especially people you work with.

I’m kind of a fringe dweller, interested in creating positive change using uncommon frameworks that require people to totally shift their perception of the world and themselves. My work requires a lot of intellectual power as well as a large emotional reservoir to connect with people on a deep level. Which means that I need to spend a lot of time recharging after spending a few months developing ideas and working on creating frameworks.

My co-creators and I dream of a future where there are new types of work scenarios, new types of organisations that run sustainably in a financial, environmental, societal and mental health sense. We are essentially the prototype of what that look and feels like- I have depression, they don’t and they want to be part of my recovery. They want the organisation we’ve created to be a safe space for me. And I love that, I want that- it needs to be the future of work.

We’re a relatively newly formed organisation and so this is our first time working through what this future of work looks like with my current depressed mood. When we started I felt my heart open up when they told me it hurt when I withdrew when I was depressed. I heard them, so I’ve been making an effort to include them in my experience- but it’s been hard, especially since they don’t have my experience.

We’ve been using Theory U and Systems Thinking to help me unpack, and the more I unpack the more I feel like I’m the cause of my own problems. That I should be doing the whole mediation-exercise-eating well dance, and if I did that I wouldn’t feel like that- DUH! The answer has been staring me in the face all along *eye roll*.

But that’s obviously not how depression works.

My friend who has bi polar symptoms gave me a great metaphor to hold this tension I’m feeling. He said you know the steps you need to take to get from where you are now to your destiny. You can reverse engineer it to plot out the key steps you need. But depression is like psychological jail- its prevents you from following those steps. And you feel like you’ve wasted all this time- and then you compare yourself to other people, and you feel like you’re falling behind. That’s exactly how I feel. I keep thinking I’m just fucking up all my opportunities, I’m fucking this company up. What am I going to do when they realise what a shit stick I am and leave?

And the thing is you can’t really control when the cloud descends on you. And this cloud of depression is stopping you from doing the mediation-exercise-eating well dance which can help keep depression at bay when you’re in a good space. But it’s not enough to pull you out of it.

The misunderstanding people have of how to overcome depression can be a mental stress for those with depression. They have to hold the tension if they want other people to understand them. I feel like I’m on the edge of giving up, every time I try I feel a bit shittier. I can see their frustration at me for being confused and not knowing how to cure myself. I can see them getting frustrated that I’m not eating well, or exercising or meditating. I can see them imposing constrains on my depression- asking me to promise that I will maintain a level of self awareness while depressed, which seems easy but feels impossible because that’s the thing about being depressed- it takes away your self awareness when it locks you in psychological jail.

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