From Jenny

Dear You,

What can I say about this thing that connects us? Everyone’s depression, anxiety, and gulf of darkness is unique but there are similarities that I’ve found helpful when trying to find my way out of it and remember that this feeling, what you’re feeling right now, doesn’t last forever.

The first time I was really impacted with depression, I was 24. I’d graduated university about eighteen months earlier, my parents were packing up to move to Spain, and I was working in a supermarket (still the best job I’ve ever had but, at the time, a reminder of where I wasn’t). I needed to find a place to live, find a better paying job, start living the life that I was “supposed” to. And then it came for me, bit by bit, seeping into my day.

Tightness in my chest, a decreasing appetite, awake late into the night but unable to sleep in the morning. It felt like I was shrouded in a dark caul that was invisible to everyone else. I was terrified that people would see I wasn’t feeling well and that mask that we all have, it became harder, binding itself to my flesh until removing felt like stripping naked at the Etihad on match day.

I didn’t realise it was depression at the time. I went to my GP though and filled in a form that had me rate how I was feeling on a scale of smiley faces and then I never went back. I spiralled, I lost weight, I dragged my feet, until it all got too much and I sat on the kitchen floor and told my dad I didn’t think I was going to see thirty.

That conversation helped me. It didn’t fix me but it gave me my dad in my corner. And I got back onto my feet and, day by day, things got slowly better.

When depression hit again in 2020, unrelated to the pandemic, this time I went to a therapist and started talking therapy, then I got a psychiatrist and I’m now on anti-depressants. That period lasted longer because it took me two years to reach out for professional help but I did and I’m glad. I’m most likely always going to be on anti-depressants but I’ve lived the alternative so I’m happy with that.

I now live in Spain, I own my apartment here, I work for myself, and while I do get lonely because I don’t have many friends near me, life is better than I thought it would be.

Now when I feel sick, I remind myself that I’ve lived through this before and I now I’ll live through it again, that’s just the nature of it, but I’m so much more mindful now of catching it before I go too deep. Of taking steps to make the fall softer and more gentle. I let my family know I’m feeling bad, I rearrange work so I don’t have to push through, and I give myself time.

It’s so hard to feel like everything is going to be okay one day. How can it be when the darkness bites into us with every breath? But that’s the thing, while good things eventually come to an end, so do bad.

Nothing lasts forever, including this, and you just need to be here to make sure that you get to see it.

All the love in the world,

Jenny