Following My Own Advice

Having written a piece on Seasonal Affective Disorder and ways to manage it, yesterday I was certainly put under the test of whether I follow my own advice (giving it is easier than hearing it, amiright). I had been lulled into a false sense of security: I've been feeling a lot better mentally, am generally confident about the decisions I’m taking and I feel, for the first time in a long time, that I'm taking my life in a direction that I'm happy with. I felt in control - and that is why yesterday's triple-attack took me by surprise.

Round one: the shopping list

It started early when I approached Sam with a little list I’d curated for some homeware. Black Friday was upon us, and with some steep discounts around I felt we could finally afford a little decorating. My excitement was promptly doused by too-rational comments of "I don’t think that will fit in the flat” and “we’re moving soon, let's wait until we get the new place”. Considering that my list totalled £580 and we hadn’t found our next place yet, Sam definitely had a point. At the time, however, I was crushed: my partner clearly didn’t care about our home or our life together. As silly and irrational as that sounds now, at the time the feeling was raw and overwhelming. To my horror I burst into tears. Luckily Sam has become a master of these situations and he coaxed me into sitting together and narrowing down my shopping-list into a much more realistic £100. Happy with the endorphins of a shopaholic, I dismissed the incident as just being tired, and I went on with my day. First mistake.

Round two: the choir incident

For those who don’t know, last year I joined a Catalan choir and reconnected a little with my roots. I’m not a fan of defining yourself by where you grew up, but there is certainly something about Spanish culture you can’t get in Britain (namely a melodramatic flair and unaskedfor brazen honesty). The choir helped me face my stage-fright and really grew my confidence - after all, we put on three shows a year. So far, I have been in two. So far, Sam has been to two. It feels good to have something that you’re proud of and want to show people, right? Especially when you struggle with depression and everything that comes with it (zero self-worth being a top-of-the-charts tune here). This is where the Christmas show comes in. We’d got a new director, and she is talented beyond words: she pushed us, hard, and I was wildly proud of what we (and what I) had achieved. I’d told Sam about this show a while ago, so when he walked into the room and told me his band had been booked for a charity gig on the same night as the show, the world collapsed around me. I was angry, defensive, withdrawn. Sam was, again, patient, understanding, and once I’d tearfully wiped my runny nose on his jumper, we went about our day for a second time.

Round three: the Instagram comment

The third and final strike finally took form in an innocuous conversation about Instagram. Sam is absolutely not an Instagrammer at all, so when he mentioned that he’d volunteered to start an account for the band I got excited on his behalf (it’s what I do) and offered to help, sharing the little I know and the much I’m learning. “Do you want to sit down now and create the account? I can help!” (So excited!) With a careful shrug Sam replied: “I’ll be interested in your input, but remember this is something I’m doing myself. We're not going to be doing this together.” This was the nail in the coffin as my mental illness finally got to do what it had been threatening to do all day: send me on a downward spiral of self-hatred, low confidence and an overwhelming sense of rejection. I stared at Sam wide-eyed as tears poured helplessly down my cheeks, and with a supportive smile filled with sudden understanding, he asked, “Is it a bad-brain day?” and I finally realised that it absolutely and utterly was.

Following my own advice

So, I’d ignored my most basic of mental-health guidelines: checking in with myself. I'd woken up feeling a little tired, a little cranky, but because I’d had so many good days, I’d brushed off the early warning signs (ah, the sweet sound of denial) and I’d set myself up for a difficult day straight out of bed. Post round three, I settled down on the couch with tea and a blanket (important) and made a list of the things I advised so many others to do: tell Sam I need extra support for the day; allow myself to have a little lie-in - mental illness is draining; be kind to myself regardless if I tear up at burning toast; decide to go fake-jogging around the block (running is my nemesis); have an early night - because sleep, my friends, is the human equivalent of resetting your computer - and it always, always helps.

But does it work?

The following morning, I woke up feeling a little tender, but definitely much better. I still had the strong urge to stay in bed indefinitely, but having already failed to follow my own advice the day before, I gently got myself out of bed, washed my face, changed into my daytime loungewear, and decided to go out and treat myself to breakfast. I took my laptop with me just in case I felt like working, but with zero pressure if I didn’t. Turns out getting some fresh air immediately cleared my hazy brain and the walk to my coffee shop energised me enough that when I got there, I was actually very much in the mood to write. So far, so good. I kept checking in throughout the day, since feeling productive at 11am does not mean you won’t feel a bit of a slump later on in the afternoon, and believe me when I say that allowing yourself breathing space to heal is much more helpful than forcing yourself to work and straining your mental health even more. For me, personally, nothing good has ever come from that approach, and, in fact, I find it can extend my bad-brain slump for days. Treat yourself as if you had the flu, because mental illness, as invisible as it may appear, is very, very real. When I got back home, I did some yoga and watched Netflix for the rest of the afternoon and I exorcised any inkling of guilt that my mental illness tried to bully me into feeling. That evening I felt rested, I felt I was recovering, I felt ready to take on the next day.

I guess I’d like to end this by saying that the reason I pushed away those warning signs was that since I’d had so many good days, having a bad one for no “concrete” reason felt like a sign of weakness. I had fallen into that familiar trap of believing that depression needs a reason to seize your thoughts, where in fact depression needs no reason at all to hold you hostage. Lapses will happen and that is okay. That is to be expected. It is not a sign of failure. And so I’ll end this piece on a quote that always inspires me, no matter how cliché or Instagramy it sounds:

“It’s not about the number of times you fall down; it's about the number of times you get back up.”