The symptoms of my depression have been getting worse over the past week or so. I feel much more anxious. I feel tired. I feel like crying quite a lot. I feel like a miserable failure at most of the things which matter to me. I am irritable. I am unmotivated and I don’t really enjoy doing much. It’s not fun.
It’s not very surprising either. There’s a lot going on at the moment: the background stress of the threat of redundancy and the unsettled atmosphere at work, and the return to the pressured school day. And it feels as if every day there is a new and overwhelming challenge: I arrived home to a letter stating that I had claimed free dental care that I am not entitled to, and as well as being asked to pay for it, I am being charged a penalty of £94. My entitlement to free dental care and prescriptions has, I think, come with my entitlement to tax credits. My circumstances have not changed and I did not realise I had to pay: no-one told me. I need to appeal but I am too tired. And the night before last I was up for an hour and a half with Big Girl – she woke up feeling sore and uncomfortable and crying with the pain. I ended up ringing the out of hours GP (God bless the NHS!) and getting her sorted and back to sleep, but the worry, the sense of impotence, the disturbed sleep: the cumulative effect of these challenges is that I am not sure how much more I can carry.
So, here I am at home on a Friday – it’s my day off work and now the girls are at school, it’s an opportunity to have a little bit of time and space, and to get my house tidy and make life a little more ordered. But I also want to lie around doing nothing. Or, more to the point, I want a break from the effort required to do anything. I am, always, responsible. I am responsible at home for ensuring we have food, clean clothes, an environment where Big Girl and Small Girl can be happy and healthy and feel loved and secure. I am responsible for getting them to school on time and making sure they do their homework. I am responsible for establishing a good bedtime routine and making sure they sleep. I am responsible at work for dealing with complex and unresolveable problems, for keeping customers happy, for working with staff in other departments to achieve goals. My job is actually impossible and unachievable, but I am not sure what level of lack of success is acceptable. So I would like a break from all this responsibility, just for a while.
Depression is often described as a black dog in your life. I am not sure how best to use today, my free time, to make living with this dog feel easier. I could be productive, get things done now so I don’t have to worry about them later, feel productive, feel competent. Or I could have a rest, have a break, be kind to myself. There is something about the very act of doing nothing which is beneficial: I am proving to myself that my life is not unmanageable. If my life were so very pressured, I would not be able to spend an hour watching Doctor Who. If I can spend half an hour lying quietly on the sofa, it must be ok. And so, I must spend half an hour quietly doing nothing to remind myself that actually, everything is ok enough. It is a discipline worth practising.
I’m not sure it has to be an either/or question. I can be productive and spend time resting. I can do things which need to be done but which I also enjoy – or at least don’t mind doing. Part of the pleasure of these Fridays is that I am alone and, whatever I choose to do, no-one interrupts me: no arguments or requests for drinks or demands that I pretend to be a donkey. In itself, this freedom from external accountability is something to cherish. I can flow around my house, entirely in charge of my destiny, answerable only to myself for what I achieve. So I wonder if, perhaps, it’s not so much what I do that matters, as how and why I do it.
Project Awesome 