Comfort in the Rain

Depression has this little habit of sucking all the joy out of life. It clouds things and shrouds everything in darkness under its stormy skies.

When I feel myself getting worse again, I often describe it as though a storm cloud is rolling into my mind, and I know it is soon to be joined with the thunder and rain. The clouds become dense in my head and it makes it hard to see past the storm, it makes it increasingly more difficult to see any sunshine.

This is something I have become accustom to. Mostly, these days, the storm brews less frequently, or for shorter periods of time. I remember a storm lasting for a good few months in the past, where as now it is rare that it lasts much past a week or two.

To clarify, these are the times where my brain is throwing depression at me with no rhyme or reason. Not when I have an actual, clear, understandable reason to be sad. This is not sadness, this is not feeling a bit down because life is hard, this is depression.

Depression is more of a full-on assault on your system. It smothers you and suffocates you and leaves you drained and exhausted and at the end of your rope. It leaves you feeling like there is no hope left in the world and nothing will ever be good, nothing will ever get better and nothing will ever help. The key, for me at least, in getting through this, is usually to remind myself how many times I have felt like that, and to remember that it passed and good things followed. That is not an easy thing to do, and I have massively simplified it there, because I honestly don’t think I could put into words the full-scale battle I have to have with my brain to even allow myself to begin thinking positively in those moments. The point being, it passes.

The thing is though…I don’t know if I would trust life without those darker, stormy moments.

A therapist once asked me. “If you could press a button and make your depression go away forever, would you press it?” I stared at the man in utter confusion as to why that was even a question. Of course I would…right? Right? Who wouldn’t want to be better. Who wouldn’t want to be healthy and happy? RIGHT? But I just could not make myself say yes!

I view it in rises and falls. The higher you rise, the further and harder you will fall. Good days are great, but there is a certain inevitability that a bad day will follow. In the same way that there will inevitably be a good day that follows a bad. It is not possible to exist without having both good and bad days. I know that circumstances mean some people suffer life a lot more than others. Likewise, some people seem to skip though life like nothing bad ever occurred…but that is never the reality. Also, good and bad look different to different people. I digress.

For me, the way depression works in my brain, is that my highs are never really that high. This seemingly prevents the lows from feeling so low.

Days out, events, weddings, birthdays, romantic getaways, films and music and anything I am really really excited about or looking forward to…they come with the understanding that they may not work out the way I hope and it might all fall apart at any moment…so enjoy it whilst you can, but it won’t last. Thanks, brain.

To me, there is a certain amount of comfort in knowing the depression is always round the corner. It is always ready to roll back in and engulf my mind once again. There is a program called Big Mouth that has a character in it called the Depression Kitty, honestly the most studding visual depiction of how depression feels I have ever seen. The Kitty swaddles you and entices you back into the folds of comfortable fur, weighing down on you and cutting you off from life and energy. Like a huge, weighted blanket, that becomes immensely difficult to get out from under it.

When you are in that space, when you are depressed, when those clouds have blocked the light and the weight is on you, you feel the ground beneath you. You can’t fall when you are on the ground. You can’t get disappointed when you have no expectations from anything. It is not a good place to be, but there is something about it that feels safe.

That is why it is so hard to get or accept help. It is so scary trying to get better, because getting off that floor and out from under that blanket can lead to failure and it can lead to getting your hopes up and getting hurt. There is so much comfort in the rain.

But when you do begin to push through and start to see the sun beams dancing round the edges of the rain cloud, when the oppressive weight slips from your shoulders, when you start to breath in hope…it feels so good.

I wouldn’t get rid of my rain clouds, they bring me comfort, but I will let in the sun and enjoy watching the rainbows.

JT