Love don’t live here anymore

I don’t know what I was like during my initial black. I tried, after some prompting, to be more open about my feelings and all that sorta thing with my wife. It was difficult as I do tend to internalise.  It’s just the way I am. Sometimes I could talk but sometimes I could not. This, I imagine, didn’t make me the funnest of individuals to live with. My wife helped me a lot during those first dark months. After all she was the one who got me to the doctors, the one who cuddled me when I was pouring out with tears and feeling very low and very un-masculine (because no matter how much of a hormonal realise tears are I always feel so stupid crying. Mostly because of the look I know my face is making and the noises I would be making were my voice high enough) and she was the one who offered her ear whenever I needed it. So far so grand. Now prior to the doctors obvious diagnosis I had the odd bout of extreme black, the sort where you can barely talk to anyone or even motivate yourself to leave the house. On one such occasion my wife’s father came along. I was in no mood to entertain less still to go out but I did go out because I knew that my wife despite her telling me that I didn’t have to, would take it badly. Sure enough she did anyway as she said that her father thoughts that he had done something wrong to facilitate my glum mush and quiet demeanor. Weeks later I told her the reasons for said glum face and quiet demeanor. I am still not sure whether she understood or whether she still thinks I was just being a moody glum face for the sake of it. 

Suicide was something that I mentioned during my dark days to her. This was difficult as I knew it would have an effect, I mean, telling your loved one that your keen on the idea of ending your life isn’t going to have anything but an effect and a bad one at that. The thing is, not telling her or anyone at all was hurting me but seeing her reaction was also hurting me so what to do? I’ll tell you what I did. I resorted to something I had done ten years previously during my last big black. Self harm. Or SI (self injury) as some call it. My wife knew my previous on this as she was one of a small group who knew about it. I resorted to it again as things got to be too much. Now SI is a topic all on its own and I’m only going to go into it with regards to my own experiences of it. Why would I do such a violent thing to my own body? I can’t explain it perfectly but basically it is a way of making the black real, bringing it out onto my body so I know that a) I’m not making it up b) there is evidence of this ugliness inside and I can now see it in some sort of tangible form. It can also break through the numbness you feel too and sometimes act as a conduit with regards to the suicidal feelings that get pent up deep within. Now that probably makes bugger all sense but to me it makes some sort of sense and in an illness where sense isn’t exactly brimming over it’s the best yer gonna get from yours truly right now! Now when my wife found out about my latest SI she took it reasonably ok at first but then a bit later on quite clearly did not take it even close to reasonably ok, first being angry and then crying and blaming herself before blaming me. She wanted to know why I hadn’t contacted her during my ‘urge’ to SI and also why I didn’t hold my promise not to SI? I didn’t and still don’t recall this promise but apparently promise I did. So this of course made me feel worse and also made me wary of telling her if I slipped again. And slip I did about a month later. I tried to keep it away from her but when you’re living with someone well, it’s not that easy. The sudden appearance of a bandage kinda gives it away. I tried to keep the marks hidden and not in visible places but of course once unclothed that’s it isn’t it? During my urge to SI I couldn’t talk and the one time I did was when my wife happened to be there during an SI urge. There was no talking as I didn’t know how to say what I was feeling or indeed what to say. Her cure was unconventional but did work. Sex basically. Great, except she couldn’t always be there to replace one of my urges with another.

So all of that probably didn’t help matters as you can imagine and coupled with my suicidal tendencies and well the only outcome is stress. For her as well as me. During this time I was taking anti-depressants (and still am) and they did help but I’d just started taking them and sometimes the side effects could make things worse but considering I was like this before the tablets I couldn’t tell the difference between side effects and the black in me. But slowly things did improve a bit. I’d got a job and I was drawing and trying my best to stay afloat. Unfortunately my wife was becoming distant. She said that I’d changed which made her change towards me. First there was talk of me moving out so I could, ‘get better’.  In talking and in my clumsy way I thought me comparing this to a bad outcome, separation, would make her quickly protest. It didn’t. When again this came up, me moving out, again in my very clumsy way and seeking reassurance I threw divorce in, not a request by me but I was hoping, again, just mentioning the word would make her protest quickly. Alas, no and so it came that just before our 1^st anniversary of being wed we agreed to split. Well, I didn’t so much agree as realise that me protesting; which I did but my rebuke of, I need you, was swatted away with, you say you need me but you didn’t say that you wanted me. So I knew pursuing it wasn’t going to be a good outcome. Seeing a couple of ‘Happy Wedding Anniversary’ cards a few days after that and also finding out that I’d lost my job and that she was quickly moving out and had already secured herself a house made me wonder if I’d really upset the deity up in the sky that some of us follow. It also told me that when the Dogs D'Amour once sang this they really had a point. So facing a divorce I now had to tell my parents, friends and my best man which was pretty damn horrible. It all really hadn’t sink in, until now. And now well, now I’m facing up to it and feeling its effects. So much so that I broke.

Superunknown

Before I carry on with my spiel for today here’s a link that may help you in finding out about the sorts of depression you may have or may know someone else could have.

Types of black

So this past Friday, 22^nd June in case yer interested,  was a bad one for me. Night time was even worse as sleep wise I got none until the break of day. What made it worse was that I had an assessment and a long(ish) drive the next day. Which didn’t happen. Fatigued and out of it, I would have failed it for sure.

You see with black you either don’t sleep or you sleep too much. There is no balance. Sometimes you consume a lot of biscuits and tea too and tend to watch films just to keep your noggin’ occupied from its continuous thoughts that is if you’re not falling asleep of course through being too tired to do anything. Reminds me of being a teenager. Or a student.

So during my time in bed and not sleeping I got up and made a cup of hot milk and cinnamon and warmed up a slice of hot fudge cake. I thought it might relax me, which it did but not enough to allow me to nod off.  But to heck with it it sure was yummy! The thing it did achieve however, aside from eventually making me feel a bit spacey, was help turn my thoughts down. Sometimes, especially before bed, when the lights are off and it’s you and you alone, the inner voice awakes from its daytime slumber for playtime in your head. Everything and anything is up for its exploitation. The depression, the consequences of it (more on that later) what the future won’t hold, the failures, the list is endless. It’s your worst critic because well, it’s you and who knows you, good, ill or bad, like you. Nothing is spared and the only recourse is to tell yourself to shut it or do something else anything else to silence the critic within. The critic within that is like an unwanted DVD commentary that you can’t turn off. That in itself becomes wearing too, the constant battle against the self. Everyone has an inner critic but on bad black days its non-stop and always seems worse at night just before you need to relax and sleep. So thanks to that my sleep pattern is a bit off at the moment which of course helps nothing and contributes to feeding the black. Prior to the black, as I told you, I didn’t really know what caused it and I still don’t really. Now however I have a reason for it to continue.

 Song of the day: Soundgarden: Fell on Black Days

So Why So Sad?

So why so sad?

So sang the Manics and when you disclose the issue of black to some they sometimes ask a similar question. ‘So what’s making you depressed then? What’s causing the depression? What have you got to be depressed about?’ I myself when answering tend to shrug my shoulders and say, I dunno. 

Because I really don’t know. I see my black’s origins like a pie chart, a certain percentage of this may have contributed followed by a larger percentage of that. Ultimately I don’t know why I am depressed, it could be combination of actual events, a lack of positive mental attitude (though that’s more the symptom now rather than the cause, I think) or a lack of those feel good chemicals in my melon of a head.

Depression to some though seems to be more a feeling than an illness. The word is bandied around so much in our language, (I’m a bit down and depressed today) that when you tell some that you have it they see it more of a temporary passing feeling than the knock you on your botty illness that it is. Imagine if there was an illness associated with the word happiness. ‘I’ve got happiness. Have you? What have you got to be happy about then?’  Adjectives and illnesses cause confusion. And they annoy me as I have to answer the same flipping question everytime I let slip about the black!

Song of the day: Manic Street Preachers, So why so sad?

Blue is the colour...

Blue. It’s a colour, it’s a (sort of) film genre and add an ‘s’ and it’s a music one too. When it comes to describing how you feel it can sum it up quite well, feeling blue. But when it goes beyond the simple, feeling a bit blue after listening to some Alice in Chains, watching ‘Warhorse’,  watching my team lose again, etc and carries on for days, weeks and beyond, is it the blues then? Hello depression my old friend. This is when blue melds into black because although rarely stated that is the colour of depression. It’s also something I’ll be calling it from now on.

Black.

I’ve had it and currently have it at the moment. It started (officially) at the start of the year although I suppose if I think about it it started long before that, maybe last Oct/Nov time? Looking back it was the  way I felt about everything or rather didn’t feel about everything. I was starting to feel numb to it all. Confidence ebbs away, not a big wash out it just slowly ebbs like a tiny leak in your mind and along with it goes your hopes and aspirations and any sense of a future doing anything. Before you know it that get up and go that keeps you on your toes or even keeps you out of bed of a morning has quite simply done one. You’d try and find it but you just feel too damn tired and low to even try. Small fears become magnified too; kinda like looking at an ant under a microscope, without it it’s a small tiny ant you’d normally ignore. However, under magnification it looks huge, frightening and something that could easily overwhelm you. And that’s the effects of black. I remember going to bed of a night, quite late and sliding under the covers with a sense of fear fear of the future (or lack thereof) fear of what I was going to do and a fear of meeting the very next day. My mind was constructing its own prison and parole was nowhere near in sight. Suicide cropped up in my thoughts and one day attempting to kill myself, to my mind, seemed like the most natural thing to do. I didn’t and I haven’t yet but the thoughts are still there. I knew something had to give when out driving back in Jan. I was listening to Pink and her song, ‘Don’t let me get me’, and as I was listening I kept thinking how the lyrics were practically describing my thoughts and my life as it was, ‘don’t wanna be my friend no more I wanna be somebody else.’ It was as Rik Mayall has been saying of late, Bang on. Coming home and listening to more music and feeling as though my world was crumbling around me I told my then wife and she had me go to the Doctors. My black had officially begun and been recognized.

Today's song choice: Pink! Don't let me get me