Feel Good 101_The Outsiders' Guide to a Happier Life Page 6
This ability to isolate my panic and fear and identify them as separate entities that cause harm has also had long-term benefits. One day, my parents will be dead. There will come a time in my life where I will exist without them. Whilst that knowledge used to paralyse me, and rock me to my core, it is now a fact that I have come to terms with and accept. It will happen, and I’ve seen it over and over again in my mind – and whilst I’ll never be truly ready for it, I know that I’m as hardened as I can be for doomsday. Birthdays are still difficult – every year on my dad’s birthday, the only thought I have racing through my mind all day is, Is this the age he will be when he dies? The (almost) funny part is that over the course of eight years, these have been my thoughts:
‘Will sixty-three be the age my dad dies?’
‘Will sixty-four be the age my dad dies?’
‘Will sixty-five be the age my dad dies?’
‘Will sixty-six be the age my dad dies?’
And so on, and so forth. My point is, worrying does nothing. Despite my worrying, my dad has continued to live, in good shape and in reasonable health. One day he won’t be around anymore. It is going to happen, it will be unavoidable, and it will be awful – but worrying about it won’t stop it from happening. Refusing to go to university didn’t make him immortal. Staying at home when my friends were on holiday didn’t change the fact that one day, he will be gone. In this sense, in being able to battle my fear and no longer letting it control me, I have beaten my monster. I don’t believe my monster will ever disappear entirely – for me, my anxiety is a dragon, that is for now perfectly sound asleep at the back of my mind, but which could wake up at any moment. However, if you’d told me eight years ago that I would be travelling the world, living away from my home town and no longer collapsing to the floor when my dad didn’t pick up the phone, the terrified, half-alive human that I once was would never have believed you.
To be honest with you, I’m not entirely sure how to relate this back to any of you guys out there who also struggle with anxiety, because as I said before: all cases are unique to the individual. All I can say is that regardless of the form of anxiety, I understand how hard that uphill battle towards a clearer mind is. I have lost entire weeks of sleep. I have had mental images of my parents that no child should have to see. I have been at war with a voice in my head that is still trying to work against me to this day. I have endured the pain of trying to explain this irrationality to friends, strangers, professionals and, hardest of all, my dad. How do you tell your dad that your brain is restricting your ability to live because it imagines him dead?
I haven’t walked a mile in your shoes, but I can appreciate how tired your feet are. Stay stubborn. Fight your own brain, and refuse to give in. Talk to a professional at the first given opportunity. Don’t be afraid to try medication. (My own meds, despite helping long-term, had awful side effects that made me extremely irritable and depressed – those side effects are not your fault. If you can’t handle them, go back to your doctor and tell them, and demand they prescribe you an alternative.) Write out your irrational thoughts and look at them when you’re feeling calm, so that you can begin to see they’re not rational. Most importantly – you are not beyond help. You are not hopelessly ‘crazy’, no matter how many people will try to make you feel that way. Hang around with people that will support you instead of mocking you. I thought I would feel this way for ever – and perhaps my dragon will awaken again one day – but even the hardest of times are temporary. You are not alone. Anxiety and panic disorders are more common than ever in our increasingly stressful society. Do not be afraid to seek help – there will be trained professionals (including those answering the helplines at the back of this book) who will understand that you have a mental health issue which is not your fault.
My life is now split into two halves – the half where my dad is alive, and the other half where he is no longer here. I am thankful that I am still in the first half, but I have spent a lot of it living in fear. Now, after years of struggling, enduring, panicking, crying, fighting, giving up, fighting all over again and finally taking control, I am living out the rest of that half enjoying however much time I have left with him. And, Dad, if you’re reading this, there was nothing you could have done to prevent this happening. It was never anything you did. Just as we can fall and break our ankles, sometimes our brains can fail us, too. I love you. Just . . . stop leaving your phone somewhere out of your hearing range!
Dear anxiety
Three thousand seven hundred words ago, I was scared of writing about you. I was scared you’d come back if I acknowledged you as part of my history. I just fucking wrote about you, despite putting off this task for months, and I didn’t cry. Not once. My heart didn’t begin to race. I didn’t have to step back and take a break. I wrote about you, fearlessly, because I’m not afraid of you anymore. I’m not anxious about feeling anxious. You don’t control me or my actions anymore. I’m the one in control now. Your power over me is gone. Fuck you, and fuck what you put me through. If you were a human, I would wound you as much as you wounded me. I would make you pay for what you did to me for so long, and how you inhibited my thoughts, my lifestyle and my choices over my future. Alas, I can’t. I refuse to be ‘thankful’ for you, for ‘making me who I am today’, or ‘shaping me into a strong human’. You stole eight years of my life. You made me a prisoner of my own mind, and made me envision possible scenarios which I can never un-see. I would have grown to be strong without your ‘help’. I will never forgive you, but also – I will never let you back in. I am battle-ready now. You were the monster under my bed, but now, I’m in an entirely different room altogether – away from you, away from my panic attacks and irrational thoughts. You are done. Fuck you, and goodnight. For good. I’m making sure of it.
I’m not scared of you any more.
Depression
Whilst I describe my anxiety as a fearsome dragon that might let out a mighty roar at any given moment, that isn’t how I would describe my experience with depression. I do not envision my bouts of depression as angry or terrifying; to me, my depression is more like an injured bear, weeping and begging for my attention. I do not want it there, and yet, when it cries, I cry too; when it wants my attention, it has it, wholly and utterly. I put everything else aside for my injured bear, wishing someone would put it out of its misery, or at the very least, take it away from me so I can no longer see it. I do not have the same hatred for my recurring depressive state as I do for my anxiety, which is oddly amusing to me, as I’ve struggled with depression for far longer. I think it has more to do with the fact that when I was at my lowest with anxiety, my dragon was always present; it was me, it consumed me entirely, but my injured bear only comes to visit every so often and I often know when to expect it, and therefore it has no element of surprise. A dragon comes roaring, baring its teeth and consuming my world in a blaze from its nostrils; an injured bear limps into view, slowly, with no energy to fight.
No two cases of depression are the same. My experience with depression will not be the same as yours, should you suffer with it. Your experience will be completely unique to you, but mine can be defined by a few traits which consume my mind for up to months at a time:
Lethargy. I sleep more. I sleep all day. When I am awake, I am tired. I am tired when I work, I am tired when I do nothing.
Apathy. I have no desire to better myself, nor do I care to look after myself. I will binge-eat junk food, and to hell with the consequences. I will shut myself off from the world, and very quickly go from ‘treating myself’ to days in bed watching YouTube videos and eating snacks to purposely cutting off friends and cancelling my planned hangouts with them. In full bloom, talking with my friends in little doses brings me joy, but when I am depressed, I want nothing more than to be alone. The thought of confiding in my friends both scares and disgusts me. I will often go for weeks without making the effort to see anyone, preferring to be alone than to share my misery.
; Self-loathing. I begin to compare myself to others in an entirely different way. Whilst the colours of my world begin to desaturate into black and white, I see my peers in brighter colours than ever before, taking in every perfect aspect of their personalities and wishing I could be as happy and successful as them. I begin to scrutinise everything I do, and impostor syndrome takes hold; in my mind, I am a fraud, I am talentless and have zero worth. Everything I do is, to me, a catastrophic failure. I consider myself unsuccessful and irrelevant in my fields of work, both with YouTube and music. This is often accompanied by a lot of crying.
Lack of creativity. My job relies heavily on me being able to come up with original ideas and putting passion behind everything I do. When I am depressed, I lose the will to care about what I make, and cannot for the life of me come up with any original ideas. If you look at my YouTube channel over the course of the last five years, you can actually see a pattern: I will upload a certain genre of video for months on end, and then not upload for a while. After about a month or so, I will return, rejuvenated, with new ideas and full of passion once again. That month of silence was spent sitting in bed, comparing myself to others, calling myself a failure and crying.
However, with every cycle of extreme happiness followed by a wave of depression, I become better equipped for my injured bear. Having struggled with bouts of depression since the age of thirteen, I have become able to detect when a depressive wave is coming. It’s sort of like how animals can detect an impending earthquake and flee the vicinity of impact, only I can’t run away. I know it is approaching, and there is little to nothing I can do about it. The night before a depressive state takes hold, I just feel off. It’s hard to describe it to anyone, but when you’ve lived in your own body for so long, you know when something isn’t right. Sometimes, my depressive state is triggered by an event, and other times, my injured bear will just turn up and expect me to sit and whimper with it until it feels satisfied with its received sympathy and waddles away for a little while, only to return when it feels lonely and neglected for too long.
When I first battled depression, I didn’t know what it was. I’d heard the term before, but even just twelve years ago, when I was thirteen, it wasn’t as widely accepted as a mental health issue as it is today (and of course, we still have a long way to go in terms of educating young people and teaching them that mental health issues are common and not to be stigmatised). I was hurting from my parents’ separation, more so than I’d let on to either of them; I was succeeding at school, but was teased and bullied by my peers for being ‘ugly’, ‘greasy’ and a ‘dirty emo’; my crush didn’t like me back, the kids I thought were cool didn’t want to know me – I was completely and utterly alone. Whilst school was my escape from my situation at home, home was my escape from my school situation. I was unhappy in both of the places I was forced to be, on top of trying to deal with adolescence and all of the hormones and insecurities that come with it – and so I acted out.
I began going to the local skate park at weekends, listening to heavy metal and drinking cheap wine, becoming romantically involved with anyone who showed me the slightest bit of affection and doing anything I could to feel happy, even just for a split second. I don’t even really remember when that first depressive state lifted. When I was fifteen, my half-sister Febe was born, and I remember that being a huge turning point in the broken-down relationship I had with my mum. For a few years after she was born, and following the birth of my half-brother Travis, my mental state began to improve; I focused hard on doing well in my exams, trying hard to make my dad proud after rebelling against him for so many years. I went to college and finally found friends who made me feel appreciated for who I truly was, and I stopped trying to be somebody else; I bit the bullet and joined two different bands and finally began to take steps towards building a music career . . . and then I got stuck in a dead-end job.
Suddenly, that feeling of hopelessness came rushing back, as the new-job honeymoon phase died out and became stale-job melancholy. Feeling trapped and being forced to do things against my will is a surefire way of setting off my depression, and this time, my depression spiralled into anger. I lashed out at my boss, my coworkers, my customers, my parents, my friends – anything that would have slightly irked me before now enraged me. At twenty years old, for the first time since I was fifteen, I took up smoking again, after my supervisor offered me a cigarette. I would come home from work, sit in front of the TV, eat the dinner my dad had cooked me, and then go up to my room and cry, before going to bed just to wake up and do it all over again.
Although I love my current job more than I have ever loved working for someone else, my depression didn’t simply go away after I became my own boss; in fact, due to the sudden reliance on my own creativity in order to make a living, the pressure I felt to be good at my ‘job’ soared through the roof. Suddenly, my job wasn’t nine to five, but 24/7. I had to watch what I was saying, as well as post about my life enough to keep people engaged and interested but not too much so as not to annoy my audience, and come up with ideas that others had yet to think of, lest I be a ‘copycat’ of another creator. Any and every negative comment written about me, whether it was on one of my own videos or a forum where people would discuss me in the third person, would make my stomach drop. I had gone from making videos I enjoyed as a hobby for a few hundred people to having hundreds of thousands of people watch me and scrutinise every little thing I did or said. I was being called ‘ugly’ and ‘annoying’ by people who had never met me. Whilst I wish to stress how much happier I am doing what I do now, having what feels like the entire world criticising you and remembering your slip-ups does things to a fragile person. No job is without its downsides, and I do not ask for pity; this is the life I have chosen to lead.
With that said, since I became an ‘online personality’ (or ‘YouTube sensation’, as is the common tagline used by the media, which always makes me laugh. What does that even mean?), my depression has been in a constant state of come and go, as though my injured bear is stuck in a revolving door. I can be creative and happy for months, until one comment will send me spiralling, making me doubt everything I’ve ever made. Willingly putting my life out on the Internet for the world to see and scrutinise has seen my depression hit me in waves, as often as every couple of months and lasting for weeks or months at a time. However, just as with my anxiety, I have long since felt as ‘in control’ of my depression as I possibly can be. I can predict when it’s about to happen, and I am aware that it is a temporary state of being; I know when to take it easy, and try to stick to goals and targets in order to feel accomplished and battle through my lethargy and apathy. If I can’t create, I will force myself to do the admin work I’ve been putting off, such as emails and meetings. I will try my hardest not to back out of seeing friends, because I know I’ll enjoy my time with them once we’re actually hanging out, and company helps me put my life back into the right perspective. Most of all, I’m able to tell myself that this isn’t my fault. I am not worthless, nor am I an untalented fraud – that is my injured bear trying to control me, and not who I am at the core of my being.
It has taken a lot of anguish to make peace with my depression and to allow it to wash over me before letting it leave again. I am not angry at my injured bear for always pestering me, because acting violently towards a bear will just make it act violently in return. Instead, I try and look on the bright side. I am thankful for my friends and family. I am so grateful for the freedom I have in being my own boss. I am not in poverty, nor am I in chronic pain. When I am depressed, it can be hard to see the positive things in my life, as they are so greatly overshadowed by the negativity that I let consume me, but the weeks and months of feeling lost and unhappy are nothing compared to that day when the dark fog finally lifts, and the world is no longer a dreary black and white.
I made a Feel Good 101 video on the topic of depression back in 2013. I still stand by what I said in that video, four years ago:
I will say that 2013 Emma didn’t state the obvious – that climbing up a rope with a broken leg would definitely still hurt – but option two is certainly more efficient than option one. Trying to fight through depression alone, especially when you do not know how to cope with the intensely negative feelings that come with it, can be extensive and often futile. Talk to someone. Demand help. There are trained professionals (including those on the helplines at the back of this book) who can and will help you. I will always recommend talking to your family if you feel as though you can, although I know just how tough that can be. Depression is still stigmatised, and still something we are taught to see as shameful, as though we are defective and a stain on the clean shirt of society. Listen to me: you are not a let-down. I can guarantee that there will be people you will confide in who will tell you to get over it, or tell you that you’re being silly. If you are experiencing prolonged feelings of hopelessness, or contemplating self-harm or suicide, you are not being silly, and fuck anyone who thinks so. If your parents or doctors won’t take you seriously, it can be soul-crushing – but keep going. Find someone who will take you seriously – including medical professionals if you can. I am fortunate to live in a country with free healthcare, but regardless of your situation, please make it your main priority to try and speak to a doctor or counsellor, and demand that they help you treat your depression. It’s often talked about how we as a society see a broken leg as a medical emergency, but we do not perceive mental health issues to be just as severe, mostly due to their lack of physical symptoms upon first inspection. Throughout my teenage years, I never told my parents I felt depressed, even after I realised that’s what I was going through, because I was terrified of their reactions. I was worried they would feel as though I’d let them down, or worse, that they’d let me down. I did my best to hide how miserable I was, and it wasn’t their fault that I didn’t feel as though I could confide in them – it was the shame that society made me feel for having a mental health problem. We are fortunate that we are developing into a society where the upcoming generation of parents is more aware of how common depression is, and that in our lifetime we will all hopefully be treating depression, anxiety and other mental health problems such as OCD and trichotillomania as legitimate illnesses, just as we do cancer and other physical conditions. It may take many years, but I am hopeful – we are learning more about the human brain every day due to progress in science and research, and hope will always lie with the youth; our ability to be open with our struggles and communicate openly about them is the only way to break the stigma of mental illness.