Where I've been (part one)

This has been the longest break from blogging that I've had since I started here so many months ago. I didn't mean to take a break at all, but I've had a very busy couple of weeks, probably the busiest I've had in months. I missed signing into this space, but I've also had a lot of time to think, for better and worse. Not writing down my every thought and feeling for almost two weeks has shown me how transient those thoughts and feelings often are. I've had moments of despair during this time, but also moments of thorough enjoyment. Each has passed as quickly as the other, and, as the practice of mindfulness teaches us, this is how it should always be when we simply let things be - when we feel what we feel, and think what we think, without attaching layers of extra 'stuff' to those thoughts and feelings - past experiences, patterns of self-doubt, a running interior commentary on what every thought and feeling must 'mean' or 'represent'.

1) My natural brain - 2) The 'mindful' brain!

Not documenting the constant flow of those thoughts and feelings is much less confronting than doing so - the feelings come and go without any evidence they ever existed. For example, I'm having a good day today. On such a day it is easy for me to forget that a couple of days ago I was really low. For many people this would be the ideal situation, for who wants to remember and reflect on the days where they felt that maybe life wasn't worth living? Well, I guess, I do. Not because I'm morbid, although I guess I probably am right now. But because I know how much I learn from seeing my own internal processes cascade past me on this blog. I write about a horrible feeling, convinced this is the worst feeling I've ever had and that I can't possibly have ever felt this bad before in the whole history of forever. This spirals. I go downhill fast, thinking that there is no point to anything as I am always going to feel like this, and that I always have felt like this. Looking at it objectively, of course that's not true. But depression takes away your ability to look outside of yourself. It tells you things that are not true, but that have just enough of the truth in them to make you truly doubt yourself.

My brain, though sometimes of extraordinary things, often uses its powers of imagination and creativity against me. When I have a low day, as you do when you have depression, and as you do even more so when you have a dead baby as the icing on that cake, my brain tells me a lot of really bogus things. Firstly, it tells me that something is terribly, terribly wrong if I feel sad or despondent or anxious or sad. 'Something bad is about to happen!' it shouts at me. 'React! React!' And so, my body, obeying commands from Captain Neutron in charge, reacts. I feel sick, my heart races, I cry, I run to my bed and decree that I simply cannot leave the house today for I have been told that Something Bad is about to happen over which I have absolutely no control. It's not safe out there. I must retreat. And so, as the obedient servant I am, I do.

As the booming voice of Captain Neutron starts to quieten (he's done his job, he's kept me from the danger zone, so he lets down his guard), I tell him that I think he's maybe overreacted, and that perhaps there was no threat after all. He doesn't like that. He gets hysterical again. 'But remember all the times you were wrong!' he says. Then he shows me a slideshow. A 3D, digital quality slideshow of everything bad that has ever happened to me; of everything bad I could ever imagine having in the future. The soundtrack to this slideshow is the voice of everyone who has ever hurt me; who has ever made me feel unsafe, with a refrain sampling the best bits of my own self-criticism. It's on constant replay. All of this happens in a split second, and despite years spent in a chair opposite the best therapists, all of this can still happen in a split second and take me down before I have a chance to employ the weapons I have been taught, and that I have practiced.

I'm not saying that writing in this blog the last few months have cured my depression. But being able to read over my posts and see documented this carousel of moods - to notice them, write them out, and then let them float away, has been a really powerful thing to me, far apart from anything specific I have expressed about Max or grief. I can call up one post and see for myself a desolate space I was in. I can call up another that I wrote immediately after that and see that this particular feeling passed. It comes up, it goes away. It comes up a million times, in a million different ways, and maybe it will forever, but I always come out the other side. I have some physical evidence of that progress in the 200 entries I've thrown onto these pages. There is always some reprieve, no matter how short, no matter how imperfect.

And so, this blog has become more than a blog about my son, though it will always, always be a place where I find him, and talk to him, and honour him. It's just that it is now also my record. Every one of these posts is my proof that everything is going to be OK. That even when everything is not OK, that I will be OK. Maybe I won't be OK in that particular moment. But I will be OK in the one that comes next, or the one that comes after that. And that's something. Despite everything I'm enduring, that's hope.