Depression feels like a weight on my chest

In my dream, I rode a great, grey wolf over dirt paths through a Hanna-Barbera, mustard-yellow canyon, to find a train to go...somewhere. It wasn't hot or cold, and there were no smells. It was wonderfully and comfortably sterile. I rode the wolf to a station in the rocks. While I waited at the station, a beautiful Japanese building of almost black wood with wide slats through which light spilled, I discussed sideburns with Jack Black. We were cowboys in what must have been the Wild West. We laughed and complimented each other, and I was happy for the train to never arrive.

When I wake, I lie in bed and wonder why I had to leave that world for this one. 

I suffer from a disease called Clinical Depression. I was diagnosed in my twenties. For that decade, I was defined by my unwillingness to let depression define me. Now, older and less successful in society's eyes (and my own), I have accepted that clinical depression will sometimes ride me. My brain and its chemical imbalances will sometimes be in the saddle I so vehemently claimed as my own in my twenties.

It was a sunny day when I sat on the worn steps in the cemetery opposite my house, drinking an iced coffee, and I weighed my life against the silt. It wasn't an emotional, knee-jerk thing. It wasn't a cry for help. It was a carefully considered and deliberate equation. It was, at the time, and to me, perfectly rational. I weighed the good I felt I could bring, the joy I could derive from continuing to live against the weight of the sand, the silt in my body. The sum was unmistakable and unquestionable. There was literally no benefit to anyone in my continuing to live. Least of all, to me. 

I sat in the cemetery and very calmly worked out exactly how I was going to do it. It wasn't particularly original, and in fact, a much more intelligent, better, and more creative man than me had just done the same thing less than a week before. Nevertheless, I sorted it all: where, when, and how. The Thames, four in the morning. Rocks in my pockets and a walk into the frigid, slow-moving water. I'd hold my breath until it hurt, until I couldn't anymore. And then water would flood my lungs, and I'd cough once. Only that would let more water in, and I'd start to fade, my mind and life drifting away as my body drifted towards the Thames Barrier, some miles to the east.

This is my experience of depression. It is a cancer that has already metastasized the moment it has formed in your brain. There is no cure for it. There is only management. To stave off the sand and hold back the silt, you must medicate or talk to someone regularly to reassure them that your experiences are not creating an equation where the answer is zero. You must sit in a place that is not yours, on a chair where hundreds of others have sat, and embarrass yourself. Confession without even the pretense of anonymity. Bare your soul, confess your sins: self-doubt, self-loathing, self-hate, apathy, misery, anxiety, being overwhelmed by breathing. Penance? One hundred milligrams of sertraline. See you next week.

There is no relief, of course. No therapy or treatment can cause complete remission. Only abating of symptoms. Flushing of the sand, perhaps, so you can get out of bed, eat, and sleep. A pharmaceutical filtering of silt to help your brain do the math and not reach a zero-sum. Eventually, be it days or months, as a trickle or a torrent, the sand will return.

I take my medication and undertake confession to combat what is, in truth, a physical medical condition. My brain does not create enough serotonin, a hormone responsible for happiness and appetite. Also, it helps regulate the body's sleep cycles. When my brain does make it, my nerve synapses absorb it so quickly that the happiness is stolen before it is truly experienced. It's like an auto-immune disease; my body feeds on the hormones it creates so aggressively that I am incapable of experiencing things the same way as others, if at all. 

With thousands dying every year from issues relating to mental health, from the sand that fills them until it hot-freezes to glass or drags them under with its weight, how is it that as a society, we continue to dance around this subject? Who are we sparing from not encouraging men and women to speak up when they struggle? Who are we helping by this strange, unspoken agreement to sanitize the difficult conversations if any conversation is to be had?

Lip service to help is not enough. Saying that we care but then not actually plowing money into research and treatment saves no lives.

For me, being empowered to say I am struggling. I am scared that the silt is overwhelming me. The math is coming back to one answer, without it resulting in awkwardness, in coughing and subject changes, can save my life. It means that, in the words of the late, great Scott Hutchison – who lost his battle with the silt and the sand in 2018 – I think I’ll save suicide for another day.

And yet, I am one of the millions of people in the world struggling with 'mental health issues that have nowhere to turn, no free and readily available avenue to find support.

Society needs to encourage open and honest conversations about mental health and push young men and women to share their feelings and anxieties. To witness them, not look away, brush them under the family carpet. If someone announces they have a terminal disease, we research and learn how to support them. We drive them to appointments, and we are open there for them. We, as humans, need to learn to do this for other illnesses: anxiety and depression, for PTSD, and BPD.

Perhaps, one day, I'll wake up and not feel the silt swirling in my veins, the sand's weight holding me to the bed in defiance of the stark reality of my misery. I genuinely hope so. Until then, I will continue to hope that I stave off my own demise. And I will find my joy in riding that great gray wolf in my dreams.