How to Save Your Life #1

Thanks for reading this entry. 
I’ll warn you now that when you’ve finished reading it, you might feel confused. 
I talk a lot about riddles in it, and that makes the whole thing a little bit riddlish. 
Apologies for the riddlishness.

I never thought I’d take mental health advice from Jim Carrey, but then again I never thought I’d plunge into a four-year long state of depression. And for that matter, once I was in there, I often thought I’d never recover.
Actually, there were hints along the way that I would recover. I didn’t know they were hints at the time, but there were gatherings of friends in fields and there were times that felt like Family and there were occasional spontaneous laughters – a selection of fleeting moments where, for a little while at least, I forgot I was depressed. Fleeting moments where I accidentally slipped out of it, and went back to feeling like ‘me’ again.
But behind that, whenever I returned to the plain old day-to-day activity of being me, there it was again. That lurking darkness that never made much sense, and which just would not piss off and leave me alone. Even right at the beginning, when it all started, I was already tired of it, and cross with it too. Stupid dark cloud of shit. It’s not nice being depressed.

It’s not nice being depressed and it feels like forever. I mean, happiness is fleeting, right? Those times when you’re vitally aware that you’re happy – they don’t last long. They come with friends or a poem or a crush or a sunset and they fizz for a while before they fade back to normality; and when they’ve faded, normality is usually either normal or depressing. But depression feels like forever. From the moment it begins, it brings a crushing weight and a hill to climb, and it provides no good arguments in favour of climbing that hill. After all, when you’re weighed down crushingly by the immense weight of a stupid dark cloud of shit, the last thing you want to do is climb a hill.

Well that’s how I felt anyway. I felt it deep inside myself, and carried the bastard round for four years. I suppose I was carrying the hill around with me for four years too, thinking that my only hope was to work out a way to climb it – only then would I be back to feeling like myself. Good god, I spent a long time walking around with a hill and a cloud in me. A cloud that stood between me and my ability to work out how to climb the hill. Depression seems to like paradoxes.

Along the way, while I carried my hill and my cloud around, I had a couple of relationships, made some important new friendships, changed my job, was made redundant, experienced the worst pain I’ve known, went to some new places, and functioned pretty much normally for most of the time. It was weird; I was doing Life Things, and doing most of them fairly well – some of them are my favourite memories now even – but I was carrying all this shit inside me everywhere I went. It was a load of shit that constantly told me I was useless, and which always pulled me back to Shitsville in my quietest moments. It was a shit full of sighs, which couldn’t find much meaning in any experience, and which constantly felt underwhelmed. It felt like forever.

Also along the way, I sometimes saw signs. Signs of hope. One sign was an Instagram post with a quote on it:
“Depression is your avatar telling you it’s tired of being the character you’re trying to play.“
Apparently Jim Carrey said that. I saved it on my phone, because it felt like a clue.
I looked at it every once in a while and found it mysteriously comforting.

But how do we solve a clue? Or, more accurately, how do we solve a clue when we’re in a muddle?
Annoyingly, the answer is: I don’t know. However, with hindsight, I can now see very clearly that Jim’s quote totally rocks.
See, while I was depressed I was doing all the Life Things while carrying this great burden of depression around with me – sometimes hiding it from people, sometimes hiding from it, and sometimes forgetting it completely, but always still carrying it. A cloud and a hill.

And all the while, I looked at my life and I thought everything would be alright if only the cloud and the hill would go away. I thought my life was what I wanted, but that it was spoilt by my depression. I suspect that a lot of people feel this way.
But now that I’m out of my depression, I can see what our man from Ace Ventura is talking about. I was looking at it all the wrong way. Yes, I was doing Life Things and doing them fairly well, but… They weren’t my Life Things. They weren’t what I’d have chosen to do if I wasn’t in the situations that I was in.
What I’m saying is they were Life Things that I felt like I had to do, and not Life Things that I necessarily wanted to do. I think I got so distracted by all the things that I had to do that I forgot to even want to want to do anything. I was trying to live up to a weird set of expectations that I’d perceived, imagined, walked blindly into, or had foisted upon me, and which weren’t serving me. In short, my avatar was dissatisfied with the character I was trying to play.
It all went on for a long time. Four years is long anyway, but even longer when you remember that depression feels like forever from the moment it begins. Four years of forever was loooooong.

But here’s the thing. Or, more accurately, here’s another thing. Jim Carrey also said this:
“You should think of the word ‘depressed’ as ‘deep rest.’ Your body needs to be depressed. It needs deep rest.”
I saw this quote for the first time today and it clicked like a key in a lock. I realised that all those years of doing Life Things that I didn’t want to do were my deep rest. Of course they were; I was depressed. I was depressed and I didn’t want to do anything, except to feel better, and my mind was having a rest. And bless my mind: like a kindly aunt, it gave me a bunch of paradoxes to dig through to keep me occupied while it rested. Perhaps unfortunately (and definitely paradoxically), it also gave me a busy life full of things that I didn’t want to do. But then again, how was I supposed to want to do anything, if my mind really didn’t want to do anything except feel better?

I’m not quite sure what triggered the change, but I think it came from my time with my counsellor. It’s funny, I’ve never mentioned the hill or the cloud to him, but somehow he’s helped me to realise that the hill and the cloud are just pictures that my mind gave me while it had a rest. More paradoxes. A different type of puzzle.
And I think my escape from depression came when I just accepted it. I said, ‘OK I’m happy to have a deep rest’. I mean, the resting part of depression is OK – it’s the shit that comes with it (the cloud and the hill) that are the pain in the arse. But here’s yet another thing: the cloud and the hill went away when I stopped treating the depression as the enemy. There was no challenge to it anymore. All I had left was an acceptance that I felt that way at that time.

This leads me onto another thing, which I will discuss briefly here: they say ‘Depression is when you get stuck in the past, and anxiety is when you get stuck in the future‘, and I think that’s a pretty damn cool way of looking at it all. Now, I could write a lot about this here but I don’t want this entry to be 230843 words long so all I’ll say for now is that the last sentence of the paragraph above this one is the whole Big Thing Point that I’m trying to make.

At the end of each day, when we become tired and need to rest, we know how we feel in that very moment. We say, “I’m tired,” and we go to bed. And THAT is how to accept how you feel at that time. You feel the feeling and you respond to it appropriately. “I feel hungry” is another one. You eat. This is called Acting Out Of Inspiration. But sometimes we feel something that we don’t like feeling, and which is less tangible than hunger or tiredness. For example, sometimes we feel like shit, and we feel guilty for feeling that way, so we fight it.
Can you see what I’m getting at? Fighting a feeling is called Not Acting Out Of Inspiration. And I think that’s what leads to our suffering from depression. If we feel like shit and we feel guilty and instead of fighting it, we accept it and do something about it (like having a deep rest), then we are Acting Out Of Inspiration, and even though we might feel depressed, the suffering – the cloud, the hill, and the bag of paradoxes – tends not to come with it.
That’s what I think today anyway.

I did make some changes to my life. You don’t need to know what they are. They just happened anyway; I didn’t really make them – they were inevitable. The changes happened and they removed me from the busy-ness of it all and I accepted that I needed a rest, so I had a rest.
I had a little cry too, which was rather good. I think I’d been avoiding crying because it felt like it might push me over the edge. But even though, while I cried, I felt like that would go on forever too, I finished crying after a little while and then I felt quite a lot better. I had a bit more deep rest then, and pretty soon the cloud and the hill simply evaporated.

You might ask: ‘Sam, how do you’re know I’m out from yours depression?‘
Or you might phrase it like a human who can speak English. Like this:
“Sam, how do you know you’re not depressed anymore?“
And if you did ask that, I’d say this:
Normality is not just normal or depressing anymore. There’s a third option now. Normality feels nice. I feel like I’m in the moment now, for most of my moments. I’m not in the past or the future, and if I feel like shit I just say ‘OK I feel like shit but that means I need a rest’, and I have a rest. I’m not fighting it anymore, which means I’m no longer trying to work out how to climb a hill. And when I have a rest, it doesn’t need to be a deep rest. I think I’ve had my deep rest. I think my avatar feels more energised now. I mean, I think my avatar feels more energised NOW – as opposed to any other moment, which can only be lost in the past or in some imaginary speck of the potential future.

So… How do I conclude this? I think I’ll give some advice.
If you’re depressed, have a rest. Try not to live a life that is too mental. If your life is busy, just ease off a bit, please, for your own sake. And talk things through. Talk to your mates. Talk to your mates about how you feel and don’t worry if you start to cry. Nobody’s going to mind. See a counsellor. There’s no shame in it. And watch some Jim Carrey movies, but also watch some interviews with him from recent times, because he seems to have some decent things to say.
Oh, and whatever you carry around with you – whatever hill or cloud or sack full of riddles… You’ll be fine without them. They’re just pictures and puzzles that your brain has invented to keep you occupied while it has a rest. So go and have a bloody rest. And drop me a line if you want to have a chat. X