The Day I Dropped my Basket

The blues. Grey days. Being under the weather. Not quite yourself. There are a worrying amount of euphemisms for depression. Why is that? Is it because we can’t face the D-word ourselves? Or is it because we can’t face the way people look at you when mention it? Either way, the result is the same. As a society, we tend to turn away from the issue, brush it under the psychological carpet and hope that the people that suffer from it keep it to themselves.

Well, I’m not one of those people. I’ve ‘dropped my basket’ (my own personal euphemism) twice now. The first time was three years ago and what a terrifying time that was. I wrote about it at the time. I remember feeling the need to do it. While most people spoke to me about my depression in hushed whispers I started to feel the need to shout about it from the rooftops. So, I sat down with my MySpace account and posted a blog and you know what? It was the easiest blog to write. Maybe it was a necessary and cathartic process for me but maybe, just maybe, I wanted to people to sit up and think, “Hang on a minute. Cat’s depressed? Really? I’d never would have seen that coming!”

You and me both. I think if you’d have asked my childhood/teenage/university friends who would be most likely to suffer from depression, I honestly would have been way down on that list. I am the quintessential ‘glass-half-full’ girl. I’m a believer in positive thinking. I hunt down silver linings as if my life depends on it but three years ago, for some reason that quality within me withered and died.

It’s a very weird feeling when you wake up in the middle of the night and you don’t recognise yourself. One of the symptoms of depression is sleeplessness. When you’re lying in bed at 3.30am overwhelmed by weighty feelings and thoughts that feel entirely alien to you it doesn’t take long before you realise that it’s the loneliest place in the world. Of course, the more sleep you lose, the more tired you become, the more unable you are to handle the stuff that life throws at you.

All the things I loved to do – run, read, write, go out, watch TV – I couldn’t bring myself to get excited about any of it. More than that, I couldn’t concentrate on any of it. Not only could I not watch an episode of Eastenders all the way through without losing my mojo to these newly discovered dark depths, I couldn’t even concentrate on managing my life. Trying to write a to-do list was the hardest thing I could attempt. If, by some miracle, I managed to compile a list of things that needed doing the chances of me being able to finish a job were slim to none (there was more chance of me poking white hot needles into my eyes and cooking them for dinner). I couldn’t hold my own in a conversation. All my confidence and humour was magically sapped from me. As for making a decision? It would have been easier to try and fit the proverbial camel through the eye of a needle.

Just as I started to wonder who the girl in the mirror was staring back at me, I began recognising the same confused looks on the faces of my friends and family. I knew I loved my family and friends but for the life of me I couldn’t feel it. I would spend time mentally searching through the emotional caverns of my psyche and nothing would buzz. I’d feel nothing. I think that was the scariest thing. It wasn’t always that I felt overwhelmingly sad (although doubtless, that was often the case). It was more that I felt nothing; I was joyless. It was as if the real me had been put to sleep and no matter what I did to try and wake it from its slumber it remained numb, unfeeling, deadened. Sooner rather than later, I gave up trying to rouse it.

And so I spent a long time feeling isolated, lonely, tired and very scared. I had no idea what was happening. I was from the north. Depression didn’t happen up there. If you felt blue in Yorkshire you pretended you were a pair of bathroom curtains and pulled yourself together. You called up mates, had a couple of drinks and got over it. If you mention therapy up north they need a dictionary to figure out what you mean and once they know, they’ll think it is American. And Prozac? Well that’s what they use in Hollywood isn’t it?

My parents observed this change in me for some time. Just like me, they were unsure about this usurper. Who was this girl? Is this invasion of the body-snatchers...for real? It wasn’t until my mum found me on the doorstop, just before Christmas, not just dropping my metaphorical basket but turning it upside down, emptying it out and throwing it repeatedly against a wall. I was inconsolable. The depression had won. I had lost. The tiniest hope I’d had of ever feeling normal again had disappeared.

A trip to the doctors was all it took.

It wasn’t long before I fully understood what had happened. Yes, it was probably exacerbated by stress and maybe the time of year. Yes, it was a chemical in-balance that caused my brain to malfunction temporarily and yes, I let it go on for a lot longer than I should have done. I simply didn’t know that there was anything wrong. I honestly believed I just needed to get over it. The relief I felt when the doctor explained the reality of what was happening to me was indescribable. This wasn’t my fault! It could be easily fixed!

It took a little prejudicial adjustment on my part to come to terms with being on medication. I had to separate ‘mental illness’ from ‘crazy’. I had to embrace the fact that depression wasn’t a far-away illness that happened to other people and for me that meant writing about it and talking about it. I recovered and began to feel my old enthusiasm rising up through the cracks. The ball of anxiety that had taken up squatter’s rights in my chest began to melt away and day by day, I remembered what it was like to wake up in my own life again.

I think the biggest surprise was the realisation that depression had ‘happened’ to more people than I realised. Without warning, the most unsuspecting of people would listen to my story and reply, “I went through a similar thing...” I began to realise that this was happening to more people that I could ever have imagined.

Worryingly, some of those people still live in fear of the social backlash, the prejudice and the downright ignorance that still surround this issue and resist ever getting the support and help that they deserve. Imagine you wake up one morning and your back has gone. You can’t move. You’re in pain and there’s nothing you can do to make it go away except perhaps take some medication, get some treatment and wait it out. No one would question your illness. No one would question your temporary inability to lead a normal, happy existence. ‘Dropping your basket’ is exactly the same thing. The only difference is, people can understand a bad back. People aren’t uncomfortable with bad backs.

To ski or not to ski?

So, I stand at a crossroads. Well, actually, I’m not quite there yet but as I check my metaphorical life map I can see this fork looming in the road up ahead and frankly, it’s a little terrifying.

We’ve all had to make life-changing, or life-forming, decisions but the irony is that these tend to fall naturally towards the beginning of our time in the big bad world. Just like a small child learning how to ski, there’s little that will stop them from heading head-first down the steep, avalanche-likely slope.

At the tender age of 14 or 15 we are asked to narrow our options. So, blindly and with little thought, we select some GCSEs to keep us busy. Then, after two years, depending on how those GCSEs turned out, we may select A Levels. Or we may not. The point is, that we are always blithely unaware of how defining those choices are. When we are barely exploring our teenage years and at a time when nature makes us our most indecisive, fickle and uncertain we are asked to look down the lifelong corridor of open doors and decide which ones we are going to lock up forever.

Of course, the reality is that when we are making those decisions, there are teachers and parents and universities who have developed finely tuned PR skills to make us think that doors are actually opening; more than that, we are actually discovering new doors. What a clever ploy they have going on there and how perfect that we are at our least able to realise how deftly they are manipulating us.

But please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t believe this is a negative thing. It’s a necessary thing; just like puberty in all its horrible glory, and your first break-up, all these things are necessary to get us to define what we want, who we want to be and where we want to end up. Our ignorance is the anaesthetic that makes all these gut-wrenchingly difficult choices manageable. And believe me, they are gut-wrenching because for every child who fearlessly learns to ski without a worry in the world, there is always an anxious and much more wobbly adult hankering nervously behind somewhere.

While the child simply revels in the excitement of the experience, the adult with their oh so important perspective and hindsight suddenly realise the enormity of what they are doing. Does no one else realise that this is a crazy idea? I’ve just attached two pieces of fibreglass (or whatever skis are made from these days) to my feet and planted myself at the top of an unusually steep hill and now I’m supposed to enjoy the ride down while the very real possibilities of serious breakage, or even death, loom over me? Er, I think I’ll sit this one out.

And that’s the cross roads that I find myself at now. Do I sit it out or do I throw myself headlong into something that could be potentially very risky? Is it very risky, or has my anaesthetic simply worn off? Am I skiing with the wind in my hair or am I in the bar drinking vin chaud, warm and comfortable but, frankly, a little bored?

A career change is doubtless a terrifying concept to imagine. For someone who’s nearly thirty, earning decent money and living a comfortable life in London the prospect of giving that up seems crazy and yet, as a 22 year old in the same situation it didn’t bother me at all.

Immediately after graduating from university, I fled to London Town in search of a career. I honestly had no idea what I wanted to do, but there was a boy who lived down there and that was a good enough reason. What other factors were there? I landed myself a Buyer’s Admin Assistant job at a prestigious fashion company in the West End. What a coup! But after a year of office work and scrimping and saving in London, I abandoned it.

Without much more than a second thought I jacked in a job that a million fashion graduates would have chewed their own Vivienne Westwood boots up for. I left. I flitted around for a bit. I did a TEFL qualification. I worked for a ski season in Courchevel. I did some work in a florist. I turned down a job offer at Ralph Lauren (despite the anaesthetic, that does still hurt a little) and I didn’t care. I seemed to have this unflappable belief that it would all work out in the end. Finally, I moved back up North and applied to do my teaching qualification at the University of Leeds and here I am…five years later teaching English in an inner-city London school.

So, what changed? After five years of teaching there’s something in me that’s asking, “Is this all I can do?” It’s not that I hate teaching. I hate elements of it for sure, but all in all, teaching is a pretty decent gig. Yes the workload is excessive. The hours are long. The holidays are great but there’s always work to be done and after what feels like a very long five years, there has not been a lie-in, a Christmas day, a long-hot bath or a run in the park, where I’ve been able to relax, stop thinking about work and say to myself, “I’ve got this under control.” Teaching is a ‘live to work’ profession and I think, I’m looking for a work-to-live job at least for now. At least until I’ve had a rest.

What I did at 22 seems so alien to me now. Can I justify jacking in a job that allows me to live the life I want to live? Can I justify walking away from such a noble profession to be, let’s face it, more selfish? Do I dare to do these things? There’s no doubt about it; I am the shaking, nervous adult standing behind the ballsy child ready to hit the nearest snow park and land some gnarly rides having barely removed his snow equivalent to stabilisers. But what’s the worse that can happen? I’m sure there’ll be wobbles and maybe even the odd fall, there may even be a metaphorical leg-break but it’s unlikely that it will kill me. And, what if it doesn’t work out as smoothly as I hope? Well there’s always the bar and the vin chaud waiting for me.