Working with energy

Nope, not a New agey post from me today, more a pondering of how the biology works, or in my case, doesn’t, partly prompted by reading some excellent material from Dorothy Abrams. I don’t have a deep understanding of bodily energy systems, but I can observe, and am starting to notice, and question a few things.

For the last ten years or so, I’ve run flat out whenever I could, punctuated by times of illness and burnout when I could barely move at all. To do this I have learned to ignore pain and exhaustion, which is something I’ve been trying to unpick for a while. Yesterday I noticed that my muscles can be tired, while the rest of my body jangles with restless energy. It’s like being on a caffeine high, without drinking the coffee, and it contributes to not being able to sleep. My guess is that it’s the adrenal system.

Adrenaline is there for short term bursts of life saving fight and flight activity. It’s there for emergency dashes to the water hole, and for when you’re going to need to walk a long way to find any food. It has its place and its uses, but we aren’t supposed to use it all the time. I find I’m easily tipped into anxiety and often feeling threadbare in a way that leaves me wide open to depression, and I think this is because I’m pumping more ‘energy’ into my body than my body is realistically able to use. What I’ve been calling ‘running on willpower’ might better be labelled ‘running on adrenaline’.

In the last few months I’ve started to feel like I need to take proper care of me. I’m tired of living with pain, and the depression and anxiety are no kind of fun. I’m looking for root causes. Most of the circumstantial causes have gone, leaving a legacy of thought and behaviour habits to tackle. If I kick into fear/adrenaline mode at the start of each day, I start pushing and forcing myself from the moment I get out of bed, and then later fall into bed so wound up I don’t sleep, thus perpetuating the whole cycle. I can afford to stop doing that now, so am trying to get my adrenal system to step down.

This is another form of being vulnerable. Risking saying ‘no’ to things, and people. Not trying to do everything right now. It’s a process of learning not to think of myself as a commodity that should be available on tap, but as a person. I still struggle with that one, it’s another legacy issue. When people don’t treat you like you’re a person, you can end up believing it – it’s such a tidy explanation, you don’t have the same rights as real people because you’re too flawed to count. Intellectually I’ve been resisting that for a while, but the emotions often move more slowly.

I think that to move forward, I’ve got to explore making the constant adrenaline drive stop. I’ve got to let myself be tired and sluggish and a bit useless for a while. Then perhaps I can get some better rhythms going around being able to rest and recharge. There’s every reason to think that if I can sort this, I can reduce pain, exhaustion, depression and anxiety such that I end up with more energy and more scope for doing things. That helps me feel less self-indulgent about the process, because I still struggle with ‘because it would be better for me’ as a justification for anything.

Being with someone who supports me, and who will manifest that support in practical ways, is a huge difference. Being with someone who soothes my anxiety with gentle physical comfort, and who encourages me to take care of myself, not because I’m a massive inconvenience if I get ill, but because I am worth taking care of. Having the space in which to do this is so important. Head space as well as right physical environment. Having the inspiration from other Pagan writers to challenge my ideas about physical and emotional pain. I’m going to try and do something radical to change my life, and to be well.

Psychological violence

The brain is a physical structure which is shaped by what we do with it – learning, practice, habit, life experience, memory – this is all part of the mix. Our minds are not amorphous things separate from our bodies but real, tangible structures that respond to what happens to them. Hit someone in the leg with a hammer and you will get nasty bruises, and possibly a broken bone. As a culture we take that kind of thing seriously. However, we seem to assume the mind is a whole other thing. Violent assaults on the psyche are not assumed to cause breakages in the same way. Now, when it comes to considering criminal damage, it will always be hard to produce evidence of psychological trauma, but I see no reason why that should make it culturally acceptable. I find myself wondering if depression and anxiety are to psychological damage what bruises are to the hammer.

For many the idea of psychological violence will involve really overt forms of torture. In practice we aren’t talking about watching puppies being drowned, or being threatened with death for not complying. Most psychological violence is far more every day. As a child I was taught the rhyme ‘sticks and stones will break my bones but words can never harm me.’ It’s a commonly held idea. Bullying words aren’t causing you real pain, is the theory. We’re taught to accept this kind of bullying and to feel ashamed if we are hurt by it. This only serves the abusers. Humiliation, denigration, ridicule, dismissal, all undermine the sense of self. These things take away self-esteem and your feeling of being a person. The lower key, more mundane stuff is insidious, and can be inflicted daily. I remember a woman whose husband shouted at her all the time. She was a mess, but did not feel she could go to the police because she expected they would tell her she was being silly. He hadn’t laid a finger on her, but her nerves were tattered. I do not know how that one ended.

It’s so easy to make clear to a person that they are worthless, useless, a nuisance, unwanted, unloveable, unacceptable. The martyred air of one who is having to go to some lengths to tolerate you, is soul destroying to encounter. Having holes picked in the smallest things that you say and do, as though your small tastes and preferences are stupid. Being blamed is another one. Having your emotions ridiculed. Try being bullied to the point of tears by a person and then have that same person call you melodramatic and irrational for crying. A bit of you dies on the inside.

Being shouted at, being mocked, being the butt of cruel jokes. Your body treated as a sexual object, not a living expression of yourself. Or, your body treated as disgusting, or as something to laugh at, or as something you should feel ashamed of. Try telling someone they’d look so much better if they wore what you told them to, day after day, and see if their self-esteem holds up… or don’t if you’re any kind of decent human being. Lecture, demand, punish, tell off other adults as though they were especially stupid children. So often the one dishing it out is painfully insecure and only doing it to big themselves up. That flailing, fragile ego can be a source of so much pain and destruction.

Evil is often small. The worst things we do to each other are often mundane. Most of us will not be literally stabbed in the back. It’s that other stuff, the bruising of soul, the cutting up of identity, that causes the damage. The wounding to feelings is not fantasy, it’s not something we *should* be able to shrug off. Emotional experience is no less real than the hammer, and the brain is no less a physical structure than the leg.

What worries me most at the moment is the campaign of psychological violence being deliberately waged. The perpetrators are in the media and in parliament, and the people they are working to destroy, are the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Slackers. Scroungers. Worthless, useless, sponges, waste of space… and who, being presented with that on a daily basis, does not feel themselves dying on the inside? Who can hold out against that and not start to feel that the world might be a better place if they were dead?

Depression kills people. If you bully a person to death with sustained psychological violence, they are no less dead, and you are no less guilty of killing them then if you had done it with the hammer instead. The law might not be able to judge it, but a culture can. We do not have to lie down and take it. We won’t fix it by taking up the same arms and using psychological violence back. That’s just another way of losing. Of course it’s tempting, of course we feel justified, and want to lash out and even the score, but all that gets in the end is more pain, more damage. We can say ‘not good enough’ and we can disagree, non-violently. Not just with the politicians, but anywhere people start taking word-hammers to other people’s minds.

The season of rebirth

There have been springs when I knew I wasn’t feeling it, so much of my life innately wintery that emotionally I couldn’t engage with the return of light and life. Emotional winters are a lot easier when the rest of nature reaffirms them, but once all the nest building and sap rising gets going, it can be hard not feeling like a part of that. This winter has been deep and dark for me. I’ve been really bodily ill, I’ve gone through yet another round of awful depression, I’ve had a real intellectual crisis around my work, and some kind of emotional meltdown to boot.

The sun is out today, the snowdrops are up, and Imbolc approaches. The time of seasonal rebirth is upon us. This year I’m not feeling a barrier between myself and the season. I can go with it. I’ve had some profound revelations about the changes I need to make in my work. Opportunities have opened up, and my body is healing. I have a long legacy of fear and distress to deal with and a pressing need to rediscover myself and figure out who I am. That’s all a part of the rebirthing process, some of it may hurt, but, so be it.

I’m aware of how much my upheavals and dramas impact on the people around me, how they can be interpreted and understood. I’ve been told that, having found the person I claim as my soul mate, I ought to be able to get on with living happily ever after. I think there are times when Tom feels he ought to be able to magically fix everything for me. Of course that’s rubbish, and the love of other people is never going to save anyone. Support, comfort, friendship, patience and encouragement are incredibly valuable, but you cannot forcibly love someone out of depression or personal crisis. You can just keep holding them and reminding them how to keep going. Rebirth is not the same as birth – no one else can do it for you, or to you.

That said love has always been an essential part of life for me. Love where what you give is returned, is a healing and inspiring experience. Love that seems one sided, that becomes an excuse to cause pain, love that is all about demand, and ownership, and control, is only love in name, and what it does, day after day is to make it harder to give and to care. I’m starting to recognise how shut down I’ve become, how unwilling to share my heart. It’s not just a fear of rejection, it’s a fear that I am somehow an affront to other people. That’s my history speaking. I’ve been told how destructive and hurtful my love can be, but I don’t have to believe that any more.

The sap is rising, and by slow degrees I can feel my heart opening up again. Tragic news stories make me want to cry. But that’s okay, and perhaps as it should be. Depression is a non-feeling state, a defensive retreat from painful excess. I don’t want to be there anymore. I do want to care, and feel, and open my heart and give more freely of myself. I know that birth is a messy, visceral, dangerous and painful sort of process. Without birth, you don’t get life. Time to come out of the darkness and learn how to love again. How to love life, and people and places. Also, how to love myself, which has always been beyond me. That needs to change.

I’ll end with some lovely words from a February song by Jehanne Meta

I’ll not expect this year to bring
A fortune then, or anything
But love, and just the chance to sing
All these new songs in my pocket.

I’m working on the new songs, too.

Rethinking my Depression

I’ve been wrestling with depression on and off for years now. It’s not a welcome addition to life, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to manage it – CBT, counselling, talking to the doctor… I’ve managed to stay away from anti-depressants. I’ve also put in time trying to understand it, working on the theory that if I grasp what causes it, I can reduce if not eliminate the problem. A significant part of what went into making me ill came from outside, a consequence of the behaviour and actions of others. I had no control over that, and attempting to step away brought me several years of hard struggle, which made things worse.

However, this stuff from outside is a contributing factor, not the whole story. I observe that depression for me is a direct consequence of mental, emotional and physical exhaustion. Sometimes just the one, often a combination. It’s what happens when there’s simply nothing left to push with, and I keep trying to push anyway. I think depression, for me, is a manifestation of my body saying ‘no, just not possible, we are stopping now.’ If the only way to make me stop is to put me on the floor… well, sometimes I end up on the floor. Finding I am down, I then feel useless, powerless, vulnerable, incapable and of course the inspiration dries up too. That makes me feel worse, creating an emotional pressure that keeps me down for longer.

I tend to assume that I should be able to keep going. I should be able to work and keep house/boat and be a full time parent, wife, lover, author, Druid, volunteer and do everything that needs doing. The ‘what needs doing’ is vast beyond anything I could do, there’s a whole world out there. I am a finite being who has spent a good decade refusing to recognise that simple, critical fact. I don’t have infinite supplies of energy. I cannot take an infinite amount of emotional battering. I cannot run my mind at fever pitch forever. When my body gets close to its limits, the answer is not to always try and push further. Maybe that’s worth doing sometimes, but not, I am concluding, every time. Every day.

I was very, very ill over Christmas. I think I had pneumonia. It took me several days of trying to get on as normal with a desperately ill body, increasingly struggling to breathe, before I admitted that I couldn’t cope. That’s normal for me. Often I do push through but there comes a time when if you keep trying to do that, it can really, actually kill you. It’s that whole being a finite entity thing again.

I’m going to try and rethink my depression – not as failure and shortcoming or proof of inadequacy, but as a simple, biological response to running on empty. If I feel depressed, I need to slow down and be gentle with me until I feel better, not try to keep running anyway. I’ve mostly moved away from situations where there is any external whip cracking, and the emotional pressure from outside is passably low at the moment. I can try to keep it that way, but life does what it does. If I allowed myself a bit more slack in the system to begin with, I wouldn’t be so exposed when unexpected things come in from outside. I’d have more resilience. I am going to be less tolerant of external pressures and demands, too.

Underneath this I think there’s an issue of how I value myself and how, as a consequence, I have permitted others to treat me. I had a lot of help with the under valuing, but I can step away from that and rethink. I do not have to be bound by the opinions of a vocal minority with questionable motives. I have no doubt that I will on occasion push to my limits and beyond, there are times when it’s called for and it makes sense, but it’s not a viable way of life. Other people finding me inadequate should not be the only factor here. I need to accept that if I do as much as I can sustain, that should be good enough most of the time, and if it isn’t, I’m not the only person who can shoulder responsibility. While I value myself only in terms of usefulness and achievement, I can’t actually look after myself properly. I wouldn’t ask this of anyone else, so why am I doing it to myself?

New year plottings

I’ve kept a diary since I was eleven, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Each year, the New Year’s resolutions have gone in, and for most of my life that’s been a yearly ritual of beating myself up a bit. For most of the way the intention to become thin and somehow attractive has underpinned my intentions every year. I did not have a good body image in my teens, I can’t say my twenties represented a vast improvement, while pregnancy left me with a lot of bulk. I’m nothing very unusual in any of those things. The standard New Year’s resolution to get fit, thin and healthy, is mostly about the thin bit. I’ve also made an abundance of worthy resolutions, to do more, try harder, achieve something. In essence these are all ways of reminding myself that I’m not really good enough as I am.

Over the last few years I’ve become more conscious of the ways in which I beat myself up. It helps that I have no external encouragement to do that anymore. I’m working on not doing that. I’ve also learned, via some self help and New Age books, the rather important truth that negative statements don’t work. “I will get thinner” is in so many ways a negative statement. “I will have a healthier lifestyle,” is a better way to be thinking. Positive affirmations are easier to work with and fulfil, and encourage warm thoughts about the self. Very few of us are going to benefit from having a stick to beat ourselves with.

Still, as the New Year rolls round and the arbitrary calendar date approaches, I still get the inclination to make resolutions. Old habits die hard. Plus its traditional, and I’m a total sucker for that. 2012 was a really hard year for me. For most of it there was just one horrible challenge after another, with a lot to stress over, a lot that did not go smoothly, the pressure of constant scrutiny (now mercifully at an end) and some legacy mental health issues that have been painful to face, much less fix. A bloody hard year, made harder by the incessant rain. I’m hoping 2013 will be gentler with us, although there are several big challenges ahead that I know are going to demand a lot of me.

Resolutions then. No diets. No worthy, virtuous try to turn into a much better person sort of projects. I’m a work in progress, and I accept that. What I really want for myself for this next year is to get the depression and anxiety under control so that they stop sucking the marrow out of me. To this end, it is my resolution to devote more time and energy to fun things. This will include getting to more events, where I get to meet cool people, travelling to see friends, taking time off, and making more time for the good things in life. I expect there will be a lot of work along the way, but this next year is going to have some play time in it as well.

The art of breaking

Every time we use our muscles, there’s a complicated process of tearing down and rebuilding going on. I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics, only that our bodies grow and develop through a constant process of destruction. I’ve had conversations on and offline with other people, Druids especially, about the importance of breaking in other ways too. You can’t build a new way of living, seeing and being without breaking the old one.

From a training perspective, the easiest way to get rid of old ingrained habits / conditioning is to simply train yourself into a new set and replace them. Old behaviours disappear, but if the ideas, feelings and beliefs that gave them sense are all still hanging around, it can get messy. New behaviour plus old thoughts equals total chaos.

I’ve learned to see breaking as a helpful thing more than a fearful one, but this has taken practice, and the practice has been messy. I remember the fear I felt knowing that I was not going to be able to hold together, that emotionally and mentally I was falling apart. I also remember the words of the dear friend who gently explained to me that I was going to have to do it, that my whole sense of self and world view were in such a mess that the only way to heal required me to first break down the old. It hurt like hell, but I walked through it, crawled my way back and started the rebuild.

I know there are more coming. We did a little experiment last week. I drew my body shape. Tom drew my body shape. They clearly weren’t the same person. I had a strange experience which triggered it, seeing myself by accident and thinking I was seeing a fairly slim person, realising it was me and watching the reflection become fat. My body image is clearly not the same as how Tom sees me, and I need to deliberately break the beliefs that are making me see myself in certain ways. I’m going into that one voluntarily.

I can see other things ahead that are going to be emotionally intense, and bound to take me down into the darkest places in my own mind. I fear this. I fear the inevitable pain. I also know that trying to protect myself by not facing it will hurt a lot more in the longer term. There are things that have to happen. Only when the egg cracks can the chick emerge. Only when the seed splits open is there a new shoot. Birth is never clean, tidy, or painless. Mending broken things is a bloody, visceral sort of process. Healing hurts. Dead things coming back to life always hurt. (bonus points if you can place the quote). I’ve spent time in the numb, dead place that is depression, and I know that however bad it is feeling pain, not feeling pain is one hell of a lot worse. Where there is pain, there is life. Not feeling, is hideous and whatever else happens, I am determined not to go back there.

So, as my muscle tissues break and reshape, so does my mind, and my whole emotional system, which is also innately biological. I break to rebuild, I look round for examples of how this works other places in nature, and I am hugely grateful to the people who have helped me get through.

Contemplating the self

I’ve been doing a lot of navel gazing over the last few weeks, inspired by the loan of some books from a good friend. I’m exploring Cognitive Behavioural approaches to tackling depression and self esteem. I’ve thought about sharing the work, but it’s mostly too raw and personal. I’m normally fairly open here, but this would be a bit much like bleeding into my dirty laundry in public. I shall wait until I’m at the washing it stage!

All of our life experience is filtered through our perceptions and beliefs. Some of those, possibly a lot of them, are not consciously known to us. I’ve been striving for as long as I can remember to be as conscious about what drives me as possible, so it’s come as a bit of a system shock to realise how much I’ve been carefully hiding from myself for much of my life. That’s the first big danger of contemplating the self – there will be things you don’t like, didn’t want to see, were pretending didn’t exist. They may not all be awful things either, and that’s one of the most horrible ironies around using CBT methods to tackle depression.

Quite a lot of depression is underpinned by negative thinking, particularly about the self. A better sense of self may be the solution to finding happiness. Oddly enough, that can be terrifying. There are consequences to thinking well of yourself, as anyone who doesn’t probably knows. This is how we keep the monsters under the bed from sneaking out at night and eating us, metaphorically speaking. There may be other solutions.

It’s not terrible easy to have a good relationship with anything, or anyone else, if you do not know yourself, or cannot be honest with yourself. And the older and more tightly tied the knots in self awareness are, the nastier a business it is trying to get that sorted out. But if relationship is central to your druidry – as in theory, it is to mine – then the self put forward into that relationship, matters. It’s hard to hold honourable relationship with no sense of self. I have to recognise that accepting dishonourable treatment from others does not an honourable relationship make, for example.

There are traps, rat runs and pointy things inside my head that hold the inner boundaries of who and what I am supposed to be. I’ve been aware of them for a long time, but unable to get them out and look at them. I have believed them to be facts and unassailable truths. Today I got them on paper, and it became apparent that, in their many layers and circuits, there is absolutely no space for me to win. This is not some kind of private madness, cooked up on my own, it’s been carefully nurtured, supported and encouraged by others, not least because even I can see how easy it makes me to control. There’s a narrow bandwidth of acceptable behaviour: I must always be quiet, cheerful and of good disposition, make no fuss about anything, ask for no help, make no mistakes, and always be ready to run in and do whatever is required of me, at a moment’s notice, with perfect grace and good humour. I must give utterly, and ask for nothing in return. On reflection I am conscious that one does not demand such behaviour of saints, much less regular mortals. I am not, and never have been an angelic being, a superhero, an enlightened entity from another dimension, or any other kind of being that might, possibly, have a shot at being like this. But it’s been asked of me, both explicitly and implicitly.

If I am to flourish, some culling is called for. If I am to flourish, I need to do that culling gently, working in small and careful ways so that I don’t destroy myself in the process. I know already there is no way I can do this alone, and asking for help is one of the things I find intimidatingly difficult, so that’s a place to make a start.

In doing this, I am considering the possibility that a person (not just me) can change in the most fundamental ways. I am considering the possibility that a whole sense of self can be gently unpicked and rewoven. I have a feeling that if I can walk through this, it’s going to be a bit like having to walk very slowly through a burning building, but on the other side there is something, some way of seeing that is not at all like what I have now. Hopefully something I can usefully share.

In search of a culture shift

I’m following on from a review I’ve posted today about a Book called Overcoming Depression. http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/390492284?fb_action_ids=394855587245705&fb_action_types=good_reads%3Awrite&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%22394855587245705%22%3A10151158810115638%7D&action_type_map=%7B%22394855587245705%22%3A%22good_reads%3Awrite%22%7D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D

When I was a kid, people thought it was no big deal to drink and drive. Awareness of the consequences has led to a culture shift and it’s now sufficiently shameful that people do it less, and are less likely to claim a right to do it. It used to be culturally fine for smokers to subject non-smokers to smoke, and not culturally ok to object to this. The police would not, until relatively recently, come out for a wife beating, much less seek to prosecute. We used to beat children, we used to bait bears. Cultures change when the people in them reject a behaviour, or a way of being.

Here’s the culture shift I want: That mental cruelty and abuse should be seen as just as damaging, unnecessary and despicable as physical abuse. If someone takes a hammer to me and breaks my bones, they will go to prison. If someone takes words to me and causes me to have a nervous breakdown, destroying my mind, there will be no consequences for them. The bones would heal. The mind often doesn’t. We need to treat psychological violence as a serious issue.

One of the things I noticed reading the Overcoming Depression book, is the number of case histories where the sufferer had been the victim of psychological abuse – often in childhood, but also in the workplace and at the hands of lovers. While we find destructive criticism socially acceptable, while it’s fine to put down, harass, demoralise, nit pick, devalue, publicly humiliate, patronise, and so forth, this is not going to change. Depression, it should be noted, is widespread and on the increase. Do we want a culture of people who are so miserable and messed up that all we do is wound each other, or do we want to fix it? We have the knowledge in our culture about how good relationship works, how to build self esteem, how to increase happiness. We just aren’t using it.

We have ideas like might is right. Survival of the fittest. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Keep em lean, keep em keen. Being nice or polite is just political correctness and worthless. Revenge is a good thing. Winning is everything. Law of the jungle. Do unto others before they do unto you. And many, many more. All of these thought forms are basically about justifying greed, aggression, and acting like a total shit. They are denials of social responsibility and they tell us that if we can get away with it, then it’s fine, and if we didn’t someone else would, or they’d do it to us. NONE OF THIS IS NECESSARY OR INEVITABLE.

And in that law of the jungle world view, you never get to relax, or draw breath. You’ve always got to watch out for the faster, smarter predator who is going to take you down. You can’t enjoy anything. You can’t trust anyone. You know it’s all conditional on what you earn, on status, power. When you lose, they’ll cut you to shreds. This is not conducive to happiness. It is about as far as you can get from being happy without having a painful and terminal disease, at a guess. With the game set up this way, nobody wins. Remind me about the intelligent ape bit again. This is intelligent?

Criticism is good. Pointing out the flaws is good. You can’t learn if you cannot make mistakes and recognise them. Success is not much of a teacher. However ‘you are rubbish’ is not teaching anyone. “You will never get anything right” is of no use. Broad, negative statements designed to denigrate, are just forms of attack. They need treating as such, and the people who dish them out need treating as aggressive and antisocial. In terms of jungle law, abusive people need identifying as social dinosaurs. And we know what happened to dinosaurs. Time to consider some evolution.

People did not get to current civilized status by trying to dominate each other. Most real progress owes more to co-operation than competition. We do most, and best, and happiest when we play as a team. We need to stop socially reinforcing the people who trade on insults and criticism. We need to stop seeing anything clever or macho about aggression and tyrannical behaviour. Culture shifts all start somewhere. Or probably, they all start a lot of places in small ways and gradually converge. Racism used to be a fact of life. Sexism used to be entirely institutionalised and on the statute books. Mistreating LGBT folk used to be considered normal, if not a legal requirement. We’ve come a long way. We’ve still got a lot of work to do. We need to recognise that psychological violence destroys lives, and we need to stop pretending that this is somehow less of an issue than hitting people about the head with blunt objects.

Of Depression and Druidry

I know a startling number of Druids who suffer from depression. Actually, I also know a just as alarming number of non-Druids with the same problems. It’s increasingly common. In fact, at this rate it’s going to become normal to be emotionally ill. One of the implications is that the nature of depression will need far more understanding. What non-sufferers imagine depression to be all about is painfully wide of the mark. But, if you’re not enduing it, the odds are increasingly that someone close to you, will, or that you will. Understanding how it goes makes it easier to deal with. Both for yourself and other people.

I think many of us assume that depression is a form of melancholy. People who feel sad may describe themselves (often inaccurately) as ‘a bit depressed’. There’s often a sense that what depressed people need to do is pull themselves together, stop being whinging emos, and get on with it. I probably don’t just speak for myself when I say, I find myself wishing it was that easy. Faced with someone who is pale, wilting, claiming they can’t do things, it can be easy to assume you’re seeing a freeloader, someone playing up, being melodramatic, attention seeking. Now, anyone who tells you they are depressed and then starts telling you what you have to do as a consequence of this is, frankly, a bit suspect. Controlling behaviour, regardless of the excuse, is not a thing to support or facilitate. Most of the depression sufferers I know find it very hard to ask for help. Telling people that they have to do things, is hard to imagine. Depression is not something we seek or enjoy, it’s life sapping and a bloody nuisance. Some days I feel like the whole time I’m walking round in lead boots wrestling with an octopus wrapped around me, that no one else can see. Normal things take ridiculous amounts of effort.

Depression is not ‘feeling a bit blue’ or ‘being a bit down’ or ‘needing to pull yourself together’. Depression is a defence mechanism. It’s a way of coping with things that the individual cannot otherwise handle. From the outside it may look like melancholy, from the inside it’s a process of shutting down, climbing into a shell, putting up the walls to keep out whatever it is that the body can no longer endure feeling. Stress, anxiety, and physical pain can all contribute to this process. The person who is weeping over something can often be in a better sort of place than the person who is still and silent because they’ve gone numb. Depression can be all about watching the colours drain out of your world. All the hope, all the reasons to keep going, fade away, and it feels like dying on the inside. Which sometimes results in people thinking that actually dying might not be such a terrible thing.

Why are so many of us falling soul-sick in this way? I think the more interesting question is, why everyone else has not done so yet. We have unprecedented access to the horrors of an entire planet. Every really attention grabbing murder and act of abuse makes it to the media. There’s a daily diet of war crime, tragedy, political idiocy. Every day we see the triumphs of money and power over common sense and decency. We’re driving species to extinction. When did you last see an image of a sick or dying child? Recently, at a guess. When was the last time a news item made you despair for humanity? Probably in the last week, at a guess.

In making a dedication to the land, in relinquishing ignorance and trying to live ethically, Druids take a course that eradicates any real hope of burying the head in the sand, and ignoring what’s out there. And of course we aren’t alone. People of heart and integrity are bound to feel what is constantly presented to them. Of course the violence, cruelty and tragedy are nothing new. It’s just that most of our ancestors only had to deal with what happened directly in their own lives, without simultaneously being burdened with the griefs of the world. One of the big problems with the griefs of the world is that most of the time, individually, there’s nothing we can do. A sense of powerlessness will eat away at your capacity for hope like nothing else. And that, in time, will put you on your knees.

As a Druid I have to stay open and aware. I cannot look away, ignore my responsibilities and pretend that all is well in the world. As some ambling ape-descended biology, I can’t always sustain that and keep moving. I have good days, and bad days. My body has a finite capacity for coping with distress. I try and generate hope. I do not always manage this.

I saw a facebook thing the other day, the gist went like this. The media tells you what to think and what to do. You run round on the treadmill making money for someone else, to buy stuff you don’t need that is killing the planet. Your air, food and water are being poisoned. And still you shuffle along. You are the zombie apocalypse. Wake the hell up.

I think there’s an argument for saying that a lot of depressed people are that way because they are awake. Perhaps if everyone woke up, we wouldn’t have to feel like this anymore. None of us. We could just fix things. And we really could just fix things, if enough of us wanted to and we could agree on how to do it. Let’s not go there. Hold the positive thought.

Wrestling with demons

5 am. I’m awake and my heart is thundering against my ribs. I’m fighting for breath and it feels as though a demon is sitting on my chest. Or maybe an elephant. I’ve gone from deeply asleep to conscious and panic stricken in a space of seconds. Frightened, disorientated, I try to figure out what’s woken me. Where am I? Why am I so afraid?

Next to me, my man sleeps, mercifully untroubled. The canal is quiet, although I can hear a few birds. If I concentrate I’ll hear the occasional, small sounds my child makes in his sleep. The boat is not on fire. There is no marching band going by. It’s all calm, and quiet. Except my heart is still racing, I’m still fighting for breath and my guts are churning. All the things I have to worry about crowd into my head. There are lots of them, and at 5 am there’s not much to blot them out with. All the things I need to be doing. All the things that could go wrong today. All the ghosts of years past, hungry, predatory. The things I want to forget come back in the quiet of the early morning.

I have learned, from cognitive behavioural therapy that it is important not to allow negative thought patterns to continue. I know from experience that if I let this get its teeth into me, my problems will get bigger. Depression will come in the wake of anxiety and I will struggle. Already I know that I cannot face getting up. The idea of trying to put some clothes on and face the world, is overwhelming, terrifying. I can’t do it. I can’t do anything. All the fears about being useless and everything being futile are creeping into my mind.

This is the moment where I choose whether to fight, or to sink. Fighting takes a lot of energy, sinking is easy, but no kind of good. I start by trying to get my breathing under control. Concentrating on the slow, deep breaths I force calm into my distraught body. I sit up, close my eyes, breathe. My man surfaces, realising something is awry. He asks what’s up and I say ‘everything’. He reminds me that we are no longer divided by an ocean, and all I want to do is cry. I cry. I keep breathing. He holds me, and I consciously, deliberately go through the process of pushing back the darkest thoughts and keeping control of myself. I’ve learned to put a fence up inside my head and to refuse to allow certain ideas passed it.

I also step into the sensation of fear. I let myself be aware of what’s happening inside my body. The sharp edges of anxiety, the physical pain of it, the hollowness. I keep breathing, slowly, slowly. The most basic forms of meditation, the most essential kinds of hanging on to the edges of life. My heart slows to something bearable. By this point it’s nearly 7 am. I have been fighting for two hours, I am very tired, and it’s time to get up. Depression makes it hard to do things, and pushing through it is difficult, but I know I have to push. And so the day begins. Thanks to the techniques I have at my disposal, I’m moving, and doing, the teeth have slackened their grip a bit, the panic has receded. I still feel rough. I’m exhausted, and bruised.

This time a year ago, pretty much all of my days started this way. It says a lot that it’s become less frequent. It’s not unusual for me to start the day this way, but it’s not every morning, and it’s not always this bad. I’m looking for things to believe in. I’m questing after hope and inspiration, and reasons not to give up. So long as I refuse to be beaten, I am not beaten.

I could not do this on my own. It is also true that I have not come to this on my own. I’ve had a lot of ‘help’ over the years. Days like this, I question my Druidry, and I depend on it and somehow, I am still here, and still breathing. Slowly.