Weeks 1 – 7
It was the first week when I realised things had changed. The shift was comparable to the feeling of the floor giving away underneath you right now while you read this sentence. No warning signs, or no obvious ones anyway. One minute I felt OK, frustrated maybe and a little exhausted, but that was to be expected after 6 months of coronavirus lockdown. The next I felt like I was falling into a very big black hole. At first I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, I tried to do all the things I had done before. Work, cook, binge drink, sleep, see my friends, make plans, exercise. All the while the darkness seemed to get bigger and darker. The more I pushed it away and tried to ignore it the more I sank into it.
It was the second week when my thoughts began to race uncontrollably, that I started to worry. I’d invite friends over to dinner and even in the middle of conversations I’d be thinking about the impending doom. I felt like I wasn’t really there, as if I was in the garden peering in from the darkness, trying the windows and doors to get in, but they were locked. I’d wait for them to leave before breaking down, laying curled up on the sofa for hours sobbing. Holding everything back I wished them goodbye, willing them out of my house with my entire being so I could capitulate alone. At this point I found myself jealous of people I passed in the street going about their normal lives. I wished I was anyone else, a supermarket cashier, Deliveroo driver, a child walking home from school, the train driver. I wanted to be literally anyone else just for a bit, just for a break.
It was the third week, when I went on holiday and I stopped eating, that everyone else started to worry. I’d muster a few bites and then stare listlessly into the distance or talk incessantly about how bad I felt, chattering, fixating on things until I was exhausted. In her perfect Italian, at cafes and restaurants and bars, my girlfriend tactfully asked waiters for takeaway boxes, hoping I’d regain my appetite later. I never did. I’d sit on a balcony overlooking the sea and reread the same sentence in my book over and over again, trying to stop the thoughts pounding away in my brain. I wondered when I stopped enjoying all the things I used to love.
It was the fourth week, when I felt like being alive was just too hard, that the doctors started to worry. After my girlfriend begged me to call them we went through the standard questions on the phone. “Would you hurt other people?” No, I was very sure of that. “Would you hurt yourself?” That was a harder question. I wanted to punish myself because I hated myself, but in reality I probably wouldn’t hurt myself. “Are you having suicidal thoughts?” That was even harder. The answer to the question in theory was yes, but I had no plans to kill myself, I didn’t want to die, but I couldn’t go on feeling like this forever. Because that’s how it felt, like this was going to last forever.
It was the 5th week, when I agreed to stay with my parents instead of living at home, that I admitted how bad things were. It occurred to me just how much support I needed to exist in the world. I’d forgotten about the responsibilities of laundry, making food, drinking water, seeing people, leaving the house. It was taking all my energy just to make it through the day. I was tired and I couldn’t pretend any more. When people asked what was wrong I was too exhausted to lie both to them and myself so I said exactly what the doctor told me “you’re going through a period of intense depression and anxiety.” But it didn’t feel like that was enough. I wanted to explain how catastrophic this had been and that just didn’t cut it. The term mental breakdown has a lot of negative connotations and rightly so because that’s how it felt, a complete breakdown of my normal life, a breakdown in my understanding of who I was.
It was the 6th week, when I read a whole chapter of a book, without thinking about anything else, that I thought things might be getting better. People checked on me and reminded me I wasn’t a bad person. I saw friends in real life, they cooked for me and made me laugh. I left my parents house for a walk on my own. I wrote something. I had to have a lie down afterwards but I did it. I still couldn’t listen to music, making an instant coffee felt like a mentally draining task. Being alone made me nervous and things felt pretty dark, but only some of the time. Sometimes I felt like maybe this wouldn’t be forever.
This is the 7th week. Sometimes I wake up in the morning feeling exhausted and making it to the end of the day seems impossible. I remind myself that I have made it through all the other days before this one, admittedly with varying degrees of success, but I made it. I sometimes wake at 4am, heart racing, hyperventilating, unable to stop my mind spiralling through all the worst case scenarios, but it’s not every night. I laugh, I annoy my girlfriend and my parents and my cat. I speak to the doctor on the phone and she says we’re moving in the right direction. I tell her I have no idea what the destination is and she tells me it’s wherever I want it to be. –
