THE Black Dog

One, all and everyone in between, today we find ourselves in a new decade, well okay, I find myself in a new decade, you're wherever you are but still...new decades are for new beginnings. Now let's not go and get all dramatic about this, in reality a new decade means nothing more than a new day, week, month. So I woke on the second day of my new decade and found that all the things I'd been battling with were well and trully still there. One more morning of waking with a sense of dread was one morning too many and so I did what I should have done a long time ago and I took myself to my Doctor and broke down. She offered me tissues and drugs. I took both. The tissue was easier to accept, I grant you. 'If you had pneumonia would you take Anti-biotics?' I nodded. And then I cried some more. And more. And then a little more.

I felt like a total failure, which incidently is a common side effect of depression, whether you chose to tackle it or not you will feel like a failure for not being able to cope. After a pep talk from both my Mum and my sister I took the first tablet with shaking hands and cried A LOT more. That was yesterday, this is today and today I have been for a run, updated my acting profile and I'm writing here. Small achievements but last week writing here was unimaginable. Do not get me wrong, I am not crediting the tablets with this because they take a while to take effect and I am on a tiny dose but already I feel like I have taken a little control back in my life. I will not be defeated. If I can survive (mid break down I hasten to add) drama school, Paris and heartbreak then I can survive the fight I am engaging in. So the gloves are on.

This my strange World wide web friends is why I've been sporadic and inconsistent with the blog of late. I have been battling away for three years at the very least so this blog has been written under the shadow of my black dog but recently life has had very little direction, which is par for the course when you are an Actor/Writer but can make a disease like depression much harder to tackle. It's too easy to become listless, unmotivated and introverted. During my second year of Lecoq I felt ALL of those things but Monday to Friday I had to go to school and engage in activities, which can help take your mind off yourself. Although at drama school this tended to turn my mind more on myself because the very nature of the training is to look in at yourself as well as out at the World. However, I had a thing I HAD to do that happened to be creative and was a positive action towards my career. Since I've been back all I've HAD to do is pay the rent and as much as life necessitates this, I have to do that by doing work that has nothing to do with my career. The act of getting through work has been so great that all I've had the energy for outside of work is hibernating, drinking and watching box sets with the odd burst of writing or applying for jobs in between. It's been a spiral downwards to where I found myself last week when I looked in the mirror so hopeless and tired that I thought to myself 'Well I could just kill myself'. Now, don't panic. I know that is a scary sentence to read, it's a scarier sentence to think and to write but in fact it was simply a marker of how bad things had become. Because when you suffer depression, these thoughts occur and they are normal. It is simply your brain looking for an escape from how it's feeling and it sometimes thinks, well there is always death. But I have had those thoughts before and everytime the thought is followed by a big slap in the face. Well, not a literal one but I think that and then I think 'Don't be a fucking idiot you silly drama queen, nothing's worth that' and I move on. However, to find myself last week back to that little conversation came as a wake up call because I haven't found myself that exhausted by life since about this time last year. In fact this time last year I was starting to come out the other side of the very dark few months I'd been having. Home was on the horizon, the hope of new beginnings and maybe even restarts were all in front. So to find myself home and back at that point forced me to admit I need help in order to break out of this shadow.

So here I am. Taking small steps but they feel like giant leaps right now. And admitting how I am feeling here is part of it because the shame I felt yesterday was all consuming and that is the worst part of depression. The feeling you've let yourself and everyone else down. If it isn't spoken about that cycle will continue for the 1 in 4 people who suffer with it during their lifetime.

And now to go and attempt to bake a cake from the wonderful Marion Keyes 'Saved by Cake'...okay, that is a step too far for today. I'll just look at the pictures and salivate until I can take no more and am forced to go and get baking equipment.

Hannah 1 - Depression 0