An Update on the Previous Update

How I would love to write life has made a turn for the better and I can feel this depression beginning to ease. Sadly this is not the case and I am firmly in the grip of this tawdry malaise. However, I shall begin this blog entry with the positives because these are far more important than the negatives.

I am being incredibly cared for by my local Community Mental Health Team (CMHT), especially my Community Psychiatric Nurse (CPN). In the past when I have reached the depths of depressive despair as I have, I have ended up in hospital. This time round I have requested not to be admitted and to remain at home. I have been heard and acknowledged which is incredibly important for me. Going back into hospital, while being a place of complete safety for me, would this time feel to me to be an utter failure on my part and most certainly be a catalyst in me acting irrationally to prevent admission. I’m determined to fight this depression on my terms and while this may be risky, I do feel empowered to make meaningfully healthy choices. For example, I decided on two occasions not to meet with good friends who were visiting the Isle of Mull and who I hadn’t seen for ages because I simply wasn’t well enough. Being the good friends they are, they understood. Despite inevitably feeling shitty for ‘letting them down’, I realised I had made healthy choices.

The form the wonderful support I’m receiving from the CMHT and my CPN is regular telephone and Zoom contact, checking in with me and being a non-judgemental ear for my depressive unloading. I am fortunate to have a really good relationship with my CPN and I trust her implicitly, so much so, I speak candidly about my strong suicidal ideations and the plan I have in place to see them through. Simply put, being able to do this is for me, one of the reasons why I ultimately choose not to follow my plan through. By speaking of my darkest and most dreadful desires with her, I find myself lancing this infected wound so to speak and releasing the building pressure. Nevertheless, she is concerned for my safety and arranged further contact from the health services while she was off duty, this being in the form of a phone call from our local GP and over the last weekend, phone calls from the Out of Hours mental Health Team. Knowing I was receiving this support and had these calls lined up helped me make an easy decision not to act on my suicidal ideation. In a way, I felt honour bound to meet the agreement that I would be available to speak with them. Additionally I deeply appreciated this level of professional care and did not want to reject it by acting out. Throughout my mental health journey I have strongly believed in meeting my care full on, and while maybe not always being totally compliant, certainly being respectful of and grateful for the care being offered.

It has been my experience that our NHS professionals have our interests at heart and work their utmost to ensure this is upheld, despite the many constraints they face.

So, I’m grateful for the professional mental health care I am receiving. Hand in hand with this of course is the unconditional love and support I receive hourly and every day from Karen, my wife. She understands me and she knows how to live with me when I am depressed like this. I appreciate how difficult I can be at times, but increasingly, the sense I am a burden on her is diminishing. Of course there are many times when I feel utterly miserable about being poorly motivated and listless when it comes to enjoying shared time in the outdoors be this going for walks and possibly camping nights away. However, having Karen’s unconditional, no strings attached, support helps me live openly with my depression rather than bury it and hide it away. As with my CPN, I am able to speak with Karen about my suicidal ideations without fear of being judged or ‘shut down’. Simply being able to state where I am with this thinking, by expressing it out loud, is enough for me to make a decision not to act on my desires or the plan I have in place. I cannot stress enough how important Karen’s love and understanding is for me.

Then there is the unconditional support I receive from my wide Social Media diaspora in the form of private messages letting me know I’m in their thoughts, to more public utterances of concern and good wishes for my welfare. Despite having not been active on my main Social Media outlets, I do not feel forgotten and therefore the pressure to contribute. It is good for me to know that people understand I’m taking care of myself and I will return to my online visibility when I am stronger.

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My shed has possibly been one of my greatest saviours. In here, with the accoutrements of creativity around my, I lose myself in hours of absorbing making and creating. Just as I found Occupational Health activity incredibly helpful for me in hospital, I find my shed has become my place of safety. It is a pace of purpose and intent and this is vital for me right now. It is in my shed where I make wearable art to sell and subsequently receive hugely important recognition for my creativity. During this period of my depression I have been reluctant to market myself but despite this I still make sales and this is helpfully rewarding for me. I feel I have purpose and I’m contributing.

Finally, I dug a pond in our garden and it is already filled with water, planted with plants and artistically fringed with rocks. The birds like to drink from it and it’s already an oasis of calm for me to sit beside.

Having written about the positives, I now find I’m unable to write about the negatives. I’ll rephrase this - I do not want to write about the negatives, suffice to say I am so very tired, exhausted in fact, fighting with what seems all my might to remain in this world. I long so much for the peace I experienced when I was in the sea after leaping from the ferry in 2019. Expending my energy on fighting my depressing seems to me to be such a sad waste because I have none left to enjoy what I want to enjoy, this being my kayaking, wilderness immersion and all the joys the summer months have to offer. Having just written this, I realise the possibility of reversing this energy flow from sustaining my depression to sustaining my recovery from it. If only this were so easy. I can see the possibility for this but right now, it’s frustratingly beyond my grasp.

Writing like this is hugely helpful for me and I’m grateful to those of you who read my ramblings. As I type these words now, I sense a positive shift within me and recognise the glimmers of change ahead. I know this tide of depression will turn and I will once more be moving ahead with the flow of life. My head tells me this truth constantly but my depression is a wily opponent and manages to sow the seeds of doubt and manipulates my frailty with so very powerful beliefs of my inadequacy and a strong sense of self-loathing. I’m longing for the strength to begin to turn these beliefs around. Until then, I trust in all the positives I have outlined here in this blog entry and hold close to me heart the words Karen so often tells me - “I think you’re amazing for your strength”

Thank you to all of you from the bottom of my heart,

State of Play

I’m staring down the rabbit hole of my depression and I’m scared shitless. I don’t mind admitting this. I have been in touch with my Community Mental Health Nurse and I have in place the support I need to keep me safe. Within an hour of me texting her this week, she phoned me back and we have been in regular contact since. I cannot express anymore than I have before, how much I appreciate the professional support I receive from our NHS mental health team. However, no matter how caring the folks are, at the end of the day. my keeping well is down to me. This rabbit hole is a familiar one and this time it’s a particularly dark one. I have an urge to express myself and write about what I’m experiencing. I have a sense this may help me work my way back to the bright, colourful sunlight of the summer. Thank you for taking the time to read this and to hear me out.

The warning signs were there a few weeks back. I noticed changes in my thinking and how I perceived myself and how generally my mood was slowly beginning to diminish - I was losing my spark. The contentment I had been enjoying in my life was being eroded to be replaced with increasing thoughts of self-criticism and self-dislike. “It’s a blip” I told myself. “I can expect my mood to dip from time to time.” So I decided to sit things out and wait for the beginnings of this deepening gloom to shift. After all it was early summer, the months of May and June which are my absolute favourite months of any year. It is when the fecundity of Nature and life, which abounds during these weeks inspires in me a sense of joy. Indeed, there was a long period when all my stars were in alignment. I was engaging in what I love most in life, immersing myself in wild nature and in turn I was rewarded with some truly incredible experiences which reinforced my hard won conviction that life was worth being around for - to be lived at its fullest! There was entering Fingal’s Cave in my kayak on a perfectly calm day. Sitting alone with the early summer Puffin arrivals on the island of Lunga, enjoying my human solitude and my companionship with the wild life around me. Then there were the three days of exploring the Small Isles in my kayak when I was privileged to encounter a friendly and exuberant pod of dolphins just below Ardnamurchan Lighthouse, the film footage of which went viral and propelled me into a short period of recognition from around the world. It seemed then that I was reaping the rewards of steadily speaking of my connection to Nature and how this helps my mental health. I met the dolphins again about a month later and again their obvious enjoyment in swimming alongside me in my kayak captivated nearly 200 000 people on Twitter.

In these early weeks of the summer months my life was as joyful and unencumbered with depressive thinking and feeling as I ever remember it being. I truly believed recovery from my depression was within my grasp.

Now, in the space of a few weeks this bonhomie I had been enjoying with myself has evaporated to be replaced with a self-loathing so fierce, it has taken even me aback. To explain this self-loathing a little. It’s literally looking in the bathroom mirror and hating my reflected image. Not how I look (though I do see myself as a complete shaggy disaster), but the face of a man who I dislike immensely. I’m a person who rarely takes against people, in general preferring to see the good in most, but in those rare moments when I do, my dislike is fierce and uncompromising. Right now, I am the person I most hate in the world.

No matter what positive messages I receive from those who love me and who are my friends, I only hear what I believe is unsaid - criticism of who I truly am. The man in the mirror who I hate is a fraud and this man is me. I talk of Nature being healing and yet I do not allow this to be true for myself. I’m good at talking the talk and because of this I hate the sound of my own voice. So much so I choose to speak as little as possible to prevent me hearing the words uttered from my mouth. Most of all though, I hate who I am and who I have been. I look back and see a swathe of errors of judgement, mistakes, wrongs committed on others, hurt, pain, slights, deceptive inauthenticity and general misdeeds. A recent visit to my family down in England served to reinforce many of these thoughts and beliefs, after all, I consider myself to be a total embarrassment to my family who deserved (and continue to deserve) so much more from me.

I think by now I am making my point. I dislike myself intensely.

The odd thing with all this is that there is in within me the knowledge that all the self-hatred I’m experiencing right now is untrue. It is my depression which is causing me to think like this and as I so often tell myself, this period of intense discomfort will pass. I will come through to the light again and begin to realise the good within me and my capacity to positively touch the lives of those around me. Somehow though there is a corruption of my positive synapsis’ and instead any thoughts of hope are diverted and quashed. This is where I wish I could describe this in greater clarity. There is within me a battle for supremacy, my depression over my authentic healthy self. It is not that I see myself as a ‘poor victim’ and need saving by anyone who wants to save me. Far from it, I seek the support I need and accept this is an internal battle I must fight myself. However, this can be exhausting - literally so. It takes considerable effort to remain coherent to the world around me while at the same time internally fighting feelings of alarm, fear, self-hatred and desperation. Quite literally, I ache for the time to go to bed when I can take my dose of Zopiclone and ease myself towards the relative haven of unconscious sleep. Only this respite is fleeting because I normally wake again in the early hours to a rush of disturbing thoughts.

When I started this post, I said I was scared. I am frightened of being really ill again. I do not want to be so ill I end up in hospital again and yet, I crave the release suicide would give me. I am thinking of my suicide and consider seriously the benefits my death would bring for me and those who I affect through my tumultuous way of living. I wrote a blog post in 2018 about my relationship with suicidal ideation which I think expresses with some clarity what I face with this - here. It is sufficient to say I’m fearful where my thinking about suicide is leading me at the moment. Basically, I’m so fucking tired of fighting this illness, I ache for the release my suicide will give me. Death will be so absolutely final, and while this is the reality, it is an incredibly attractive one.

However! And yes there is a however. There is within me a notion of self-preservation which is why I reached out to my CPN and asked for her support. I’m prepared to trust myself to the professional help available to me. Additionally, as much as it may seem so through what I have written so far, I have not given up and I continue to function, even to the point of continuing to make jewellery, one thing I find gives me a sense of purpose and a level of internal peace. Admittedly, I have Transglobal Underground playing loudly on repeat through my headphones to distract me from my thinking, but each day at 5pm I close my work-shed with some sense of accomplishment.

This then is the chink of hope, even if at the moment I cannot see hope or even feel it. After all my desire to do the things I normally enjoy such as walking and kayaking have completely disappeared, replaced with a self-incriminatory lethargy. One thing I know is to work within these chinks as they appear, to appreciate them and to accept every opportunity towards recovery they offer. Right now, creating wearable art is the one thing which is offering me positivity in the midst of the descending blackness within me. I notice as I write these words, there is a recognition that not all is bleak, and despite what I might believe to be true, I am not totally useless. Finding my way into making a small living from my creativity is proving to be more than I could have ever hoped for.

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This Week’s Production

So, what now? I am here and I’m not ready to give in. I hate where I am right now (within myself that is) and I am desperate for respite from this. At the moment I am safe and I make assurances to remain safe. I have more than enough cognitive resonance to understand what I am living through at the moment is pretty tough but this purely is due to my depression and will ease over time. My fear of sinking further into my depression is real and exists and this leads me into the tangled web of it all. It’s like untangling a hopeless knot of string - there just seems to be no solution or end to it all.

Please don’t be overly concerned for me. The fact I have written this and shared it so openly is an indication I am positively working to overcome this particular bout of severe low mood. Thank you for reading what I have written and please know I truly appreciate all the generously warm comments I receive here and on my various Social Media platforms.

I sincerely hope what I share is of interest and help to many.

Thank you.