Back again. I scheduled this one because the last post already went over 2000 words and I don’t want to bombard anyone who still reads this site with too much in one go.
Something that has seemed weird to me during the process of trying to deal with mental health issues is trying to apply any sort of scale to how depressed you are feeling. Whenever I had to go to the consultant psychiatrist he would always say without fail “On a scale of 1 to 10 if 1 is down in the dumps, how do you feel?” to which I would usually give my stock answer of 6 because honestly I find it impossible to do.
You might think that the lowest I have felt is in summer 2009 when I tried to kill myself but the truth is that I didn’t even feel that bad compared to times in the past or since then. I find it impossible to put a number on this, it doesn’t feel like a simple continuum. People have tried to find out from me what caused me to try and do that to myself, they seem to think there must have been some event that pushed me over the edge but there really wasn’t. I hadn’t planned it on that specific day, it had been months since I had made the preparations for it and I can’t even remember what was going through my head that evening.
To me it seems like a combination of things makes up how depressed I am. The usual stuff like a sense of hopelessness and lethargy, general sadness, feeling trapped and the big one for me: whether I can see a way out of it.
The time when I’ve been at my absolute lowest was when I was working at my first job. I have probably written about it before but there were several reasons why I hated it so much. First of all I had to work from 1.30pm til 10pm which meant I barely got to see my family, and since they are the only people I really talk to this meant that I would essentially go all week and hardly speak to anyone at all (although that’s not a lot different to my current situation..) because they’d gone to work in the morning and went to bed either before or not long after I got home from work. I hated the job itself, never realised how much I couldn’t stand phone calls especially with angry customers until then. The people I worked with, with the exception of a couple, would make fun of me every single day from the moment I got in the door because of how quiet I was and I couldn’t talk to them at all. I hated them.
Due to me not being able to drive, I used to have to leave the house at 12.00 to get there on time so it would be hours of each day spent in the place that I hated more than anywhere, counting down the minutes til I could at least escape for a while and sleep, which was the only respite I had. Because the only time I got to myself was late at night, I didn’t really have a chance to do anything that I wanted to do. Even if I had some kind of social life before, it would have gone out of the window when I started that job.
I can’t express how much I detested it even though I was only there for a few months. If I had to go back again, there’s absolutely no way I could cope. Towards the end, I would have to try my hardest to stop myself from crying or having a panic attack before I left the house to go to work and while I was there I had to hide in the toilets on numerous occasions to try and compose myself. It was an open plan office so there was no hiding from anyone during the day.
If you think that I felt worse then than I did when I tried to kill myself then you can get an idea of how bad it was.
The thing that worries me most is that I will feel like this wherever I go. The overriding feeling is that there is no escape from it. When I was there, I could see no end in sight, all I could think was that I had 40+ more years of that to contend with. I remember telling my sister at the time that I felt as though I had nothing to live for, nothing mattered to me. All I wanted to do was get out of there at the end of the day. Knowing what I know now, I have to ask myself is that kind of life really worth living?
The Social Phobic 