On The Edge — My Breakdown, Part 1
I had a complete meltdown some years ago which was related to anxiety, dark thoughts, depression and stress. Let me describe it like this. Imagine feeling like it’s the night before the most important exam of your life, and your driving test, and you’ve just had one of the worst arguments with someone you love, like no one values you, like you’ve just been attacked by someone on the street, and you’ve just heard devastating news.
Imagine those levels of stress, anxiety and adrenaline with your heart racing, your hands shaking, your head thumping and your body in a state of shock. Imagine constantly feeling like that day after day and week after week without a single break from it and imagine feeling that way without knowing what the direct cause is. I thought there was only one way out of this situation but I opted to seek help.
After confiding in family about the horrific state I was in, we decided that a change of scenery and some drastic action was needed. Fortunately I had family abroad who could look after me and a highly recommended doctor was able to take on my case. I saw him pretty much as soon as I arrived in the country. One of the first things he said to me was, ‘How you’re still alive is a miracle. The fact that you haven’t committed suicide is remarkable’.
Essentialy, I was told in no uncertain terms by the psychiatrist in front me that I was lucky to be alive, I was told I needed to be checked into a clinic immediately. I misread the urgency of this. I read the subtext as ‘he’s nuts, let’s lock him away’ and I found the news disturbing. This fear of being admitted into someone else’s care and not having any say over what I was doing was immense. I remember I was working on the music for a commercial at the time and it was a high stress job. My main fear even at this time where I was having a complete meltdown was ‘how can I let them down?’.
Once I’d calmed down the doctor explained to me that this clinic wasn’t anything to panic about, it was just that I had suffered enough and the faster they could treat me the better. This meant a cocktail of various prescription drugs administered intravenously over the course of a few days.
All I can say is once I was in the clinic I breathed a sigh of relief. The medication calmed the chaotic stress and anxiety that had been plaguing me for so long. I’d forgotten what it was like to be calm and I needed medical assistance to achieve this initially. I didn’t know what I was taking. I didn’t know how long I’d be taking it for. All I knew was that I was going to be away from home for several months in another country and that I could breathe again. This treatment saved my life. This treatment also gave me a host of other problems further down the line, but let’s focus on the victory. I was alive, calm again, and about to start what my doctor called ‘reconstructive psychotherapy’. What was great about this doctor was that he really did offer amazing insight that helped me gain much needed perspective with regards to my condition, my thought patterns, my life, my childhood and so on.
One particular pattern we discovered was in relation to me setting myself impossible or unrealistic goals, working like an obsessive maniac trying to achieve them only to collapse from exhaustion and then cut myself down for failing the task in question. We mapped the ups and downs of my life and we found severe depressive episodes at the ages of 7, 14, 20, 21, 24, 26, 27 and 28. Just seeing that written down was quite humbling. Being told that I wasn’t to blame for these things, rather, I’d been shaped into a person who lacked certain fundamental tools for coping with life was a great relief.
I don’t wish to delve too much into my upbringing at this stage, but I was the child of divorce and I spent a lot of time under the care of people who didn’t understand or acknowledge depression. So any time I would feel depressed I was told to hide it or disguise it and I was led into feeling ashamed of it. I was so unaware of what was going on that I didn’t understand that I was depressed, I just thought I was weak.
So my sessions with the psychiatrist involved him helping me piece together elements from my past and at times he expressed great outrage at some of this things I’d endured and experienced. He diagnosed me and finally gave a name to this decay that had been eating away at me all this time. As I see it, there are times where being labelled hinders us or makes us feel marginalised, but in my case I needed a name/label for what I was feeling. The lack of a diagnosis was putting more emphasis on me and what I perceived to be my own hideous inadequacies. I concluded that if I wasn’t suffering with depression then my feelings were the result of me being pathetic and undeserving of happiness. I felt such a sense of relief when I was told I was bipolar.
This was just the beginning of my treatment and I was coming to understand that having survived such an intense and severe condition for so many years without treatment, without acknowledging it, without really discussing it etc. was something to be proud of and was a testimony to my strength. I decided to see it as me being a sucker for punishment but let’s say it’s down to strength for now. In our subsequent sessions we covered a lot of ground in a short space of time. I continued to take the medication I was prescribed (5 different kinds) and I put my trust in this person who began to resemble a father figure in some ways. As much as this not an advisable attachment, I think these associations were inevitable for me. This person was saving me, or at least, giving me the tools to start saving myself.
On The Edge — My Breakdown, Part 1
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