What It Feels Like To Have Depression

When I tell people I took a year off uni,
00:03
I always say it’s because I was unwell.
00:05
But I never say I was mentally unwell.
00:07
I know people will react differently,
00:10
but it shouldn’t be that way.
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Those two statements should be treated the same.
00:14
I think the first time I told someone I was depressed I was 11.
00:20
And they were like, “You’re 11.
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“Do you even possess the complexity to be depressed?”
00:25
When I was younger, I’d let my thoughts just run away from me,
00:29
and they’d usually end up like a very dark Shakespeare tragedy,
00:32
but with more people of colour in it.
00:34
Very gloomy, very sad.
00:36
Later, as a teenager, I’d put on this black coat
00:39
and sneak out of school to walk around town.
00:41
My friends were quite literal about it.
00:43
They called it my depression coat.
00:46
When I arrived at uni, I…
00:49
I sort of lost it.
00:52
It was this crazy explosion of trying to figure out
00:55
my own personality, make friends, adjust,
01:00
and balance all my mental illness yet to be discovered.
01:05
I felt paralysed by the stress of school.
01:09
It was like someone had cranked up the pressure in my body.
01:12
And I spent a year fumbling for the valve to turn it back down.
01:16
The night before an exam, I was in my room,
01:19
the pressure had really cranked up, then something snapped inside me.
01:23
I remember thinking,
01:25
“OK, I’m going to die.”
01:29
I had to call my mum to tell her, “OK, I’m not doing my exams,”
01:32
and she wasn’t getting it at all.
01:34
Like someone being confused about why penguins can’t fly.
01:37
“They’ve got two wings, like all of the other birds,
01:40
“so why don’t we just throw one out of a plane?”
01:42
And then I had to be like,
01:44
“I tried to kill myself.”
01:46
Um…
01:49
Yeah.
01:52
I got on medication for a while –
01:54
daily intakes of sertraline every morning with my breakfast.
01:56
I used to joke to my friends,
01:58
“Apparently happiness tastes like orange juice.”
02:01
I didn’t like that it sort of made me feel a bit of a lie,
02:05
like someone had just turned up some sort of button in my psychology,
02:10
or some sort of dial.
02:11
So I went off it, and the relapse was awful.
02:15
It felt like someone had taken 1,000 rubber bands
02:19
and just tightened them round my skull,
02:21
and I felt very dizzy and very nauseous.
02:24
Until eventually it went away and I was like,
02:26
“Great, that’s done now. Not doing that again.”
02:29
So I didn’t decide to do a year out, it was deemed on me.
02:32
But I realised I could use it as an opportunity
02:37
and I made time to explore my mind.
02:40
What worked for me in the end is not something I could have planned for.
02:43
The thing that was probably the biggest impact for me
02:46
in sort of changing my psychology
02:48
and changing sort of my outlook is being more open with everybody.
02:52
What’s kind of interesting is
02:54
when you have like an open conversation with people,
02:56
have a cup of tea with someone and say, “Oh, yeah, here’s what
02:58
“I did in my year out, blah blah blah, and here’s why I was unwell,”
03:01
you realise that other people have gone through that,
03:04
and it’s hilariously normal.
03:05
I did a big Facebook post saying, “Hello, everybody, it’s me.
03:09
“I’ve been very depressed and suicidal. How are you?”
03:13
And then sort of ran away from my laptop like I’d just released
03:16
some sort of naked photos on the internet.
03:18
But, you know, not only was there lots of loving feedback coming back,
03:21
but it was this sort of liberation that I had taken control
03:25
of the thing that I’m hiding from and it’s now mine.

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