Life in depression/anxiety

I just submitted and shared a post explaining the situation I have found myself in - on the other side of the world from my normal support system in a depression/anxiety relapse and trying to cope while also trying to get home as quickly as possible.

What I want to do in this post is explain a bit what it feels like to me. Something I need to make VERY clear is that every person who has depression or anxiety issues will experience things completely different. Some may have similarities to how I experience it, but no two people will have the same feelings and reactions. So this is not how anyone with these issues experiences them, it is how I experience them. Particularly how I am experiencing them this time, as it is different than from when I was younger. I have more life experience now and it changes how I feel and how things affect me.



The depression side of the coin:

While the two issues are incredibly and inextricably linked I am going to try to separate out my thoughts into those that would be considered more "depression" and those that would be considered more "anxiety".

Depression involves a number of things for me. One is simply uncontrollable crying. Sunday morning I spent four hours lying in bed sobbing. If you asked me why I was crying I would not have been able to tell you, I was just crying. This had been happening a lot over the last few weeks, I would start crying (sometimes with a trigger, sometimes with a seemingly trigger but not really about that, and sometimes for no reason at all). I could still experience happiness and have fun - I really did have fun at some of the social events that happened recently - but then when alone the tears would start.

It also involves a feeling of physical fatigue, where the body just says no. Getting up and going into work was getting harder and harder each day. And while I was still enjoying things, the enjoyment was always a little bit tainted. Like I was looking at everything around me through a dim lens.

The depression side of its coin reaches its worst when the suicide ideation begins. This was the line in the sand I had drawn. Don't get me wrong, I had already been at the point of "maybe if I get hit by a bus I don't have to deal with work and all this stuff for a few weeks while I recover" but last weekend was when I reached the "maybe I should just walk into the North Sea. Either I'll drown or die of hypothermia, but either way I won't be here anymore" point. Why? Because I was so overwhelmed I just couldn't imagine another day. Why didn't I? Because there's a part of me that remembers just how good it can get, and knew that there were better ways out.

Self-harm is another issue all together. People self-harm for a variety of reasons and I don't want to make it sound like I speak for anyone but me. The last time I self-injured was in University (either first or second year). I was dealing with depression and anxiety and a lot of stress and it just kept feeling like the emotions and problems were building and building and building inside of me and becoming pressure. Cutting was a way to release that pressure. I remember exactly where the last time I cut was - on my right leg just below the knee. As things got better this stopped happening and I never self-harmed again. I really didn't even have urges anymore, it was part of my past. But a big reason I knew it was time to step away here was that the urge was back. The pressure was building up and building up and building up and I knew I could make it release. I knew I could get temporary relief, but I didn't want that. I wanted things to get better for real. Instead I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed until I fell asleep, then woke up sobbing some more and made the decision to save myself.



The anxiety side of the coin:

Anxiety affects me in a large variety of ways, and one of the ways is by interacting with the depression just discussed. A lot of the crying fits are initiated by an anxiety trigger first or by the feeling I can't cope which is the anxiety speaking.

But there are other effects to anxiety. Physical, emotional, neurological.

To explain what an acute anxiety attack can feel like I want to go back to the last one I had before this. It is actually the only one I've had in the last 5 years, and it didn't worry me too much because it was well explained. I had been training as a runner (still am, or at least will be when I get home). I ran a few 5K races and then decided to join a friend of mine running an 8K technical race. I had no idea just how technical they meant it was. I'm pretty sure there's a blog post somewhere describing the comedy of errors that that race was, but suffice to say that by the time I was having an asthma attack 2 or more km from help and with no one else on the trail my anxiety was pretty high. Looking back it is really interesting to try to separate out the two attacks as they are so similar in certain effects - with either one I can't breathe. I feel panicked and scared and my lungs just won't work. I think I cycled back and forth between the two: the asthma causing an anxiety attack which kept me from regaining my breath so furthered the asthma attack. It was a horrible, horrible experience.

An acute anxiety attack always is. I stop being able to breathe, I have to fight for every breath into my body. I burst into tears and I can't stop moving. Or sometimes I can't start moving. I often keel over into the fetal position because my body stops being able to support it's own weight. Sometimes I think I'm going to die. I had a couple of these over the last few weeks, usually out of the eyes of anyone else. They are not pleasant.

So there's acute anxiety attacks. But what about just generalized high anxiety? Well that's where I am mostly at now. The depression is receding but the anxiety is still very very high. I wake up in the morning and it feels like a physical presence weighing down on me while at the same time my heart starts racing. The last couple days I have spent a couple hours in the morning focusing on nothing but breathing until that starts to feel like a normal activity again and I can start doing other things. From there the anxiety will ebb and flow during the day. Sometimes I am almost me, other times the weight comes back and I can't breathe. I become irrationally obsessed with things that are either not that big a deal or a fixable problem. But I can't see past them. So I sit and I breathe. And I breathe some more. And some more. And if that isn't helping I take a sedative and keep breathing. And eventually it recedes again and I can resume trying to solve the problems. If you get a really intense message from me it is probably during one of these crests of anxiety - I apologize.



I hope that gives you an insight into what it is like for a person (or at least this person) battling depression and anxiety. A lot of people ask how they can help - keep in touch with me. Even if you don't know what to say, send me random thoughts and messages. The more connected to people I feel the more I stay in the low anxiety zone.