The nineteenth day of the fourth month of the year nineteen eighty nine

Last year I spent my birthday in Essex. I was mentally ill without really knowing it, thinking I'd got over the obvious mental illness because I wasn't self harming outwardly. 

Instead I was obsessing over food and exercise in a way that would come and take a total grip on me later in the year. I still enjoyed my birthday weekend, with people who I was incredibly close to. Despite irrevocably losing one of those people since then, I look upon that weekend with fond memories. 

This year, I am physically ill. I have a cold. I'm coughing and spluttering and the nausea from the catarrh is nasty.

But you only get one birthday a year. 

I'm nearer to 30 than 20. When was my life supposed to start? Can I take on the mantle of a millennial who still lives with her father because rent is too high, who is still trying to "find herself" and has already discovered the person she's meant to be cannot be found in Australia, New Zealand, Europe or America? Nor was she is Brazil, and she's unlikely to be in Vietnam, Dubai, Thailand, Mexico or any other country on the bucket list. 

Who has a bucket list at 27?

I like having a spring birthday because as I travel home from work (I was sent home because people don't want my germs) the green of the trees lining the tracks are bright, and radiating hope. Hope for a plentiful year. 

I've now lived 9 years 3 times. 

And every other day of my life I feel like I haven't done enough. I'm not doing enough. 

I'm not being enough. 

But that's the great thing about birthdays that I don't think I appreciated until now, until today:

On your birthday it's enough just being you. 

Magic Jumper

I wear my magic jumper when it's cold out, and I'm numb inside.

My magic jumper is a barrier.

It doesn't protect me from the pain in my head, but it provides comfort from the pressure in their words. 

I wear my magic jumper not to make me strong,

But to stop me feeling so weak. 

My magic jumper doesn't always work. 

But I have it just in case I need it. 

Like hope, better to have it than not. 

The best thing about the magic jumper though,

Is taking it off. 

Knowing that I got through another day. 

The Rio Summer

I’m woken by a woman knocking and ploughing into the room. I’ve just started dozing after having a bad case of stomach cramps and sickness, and she’s pulling my hostel windows shut. I moan and she says something in Portuguese and gives me a thumbs up. I have no idea what she said.

I’m just dozing off again when it hits. Straight away it’s a solid stream of rain, battering the windows and the roof. It’s loud. This is Rio summer, apparently. Good thing I wasn’t well enough for the beach this afternoon.

Later I’m woken again by my room mate coming in, who is drenched. More drenched than the word drenched could even describe. She make a puddle on the floor as her entire body drips. She points out to me the incessant wail of what could be a warning siren the following Portuguese tannoy that sounds like a dire warning even though I can’t understand it. It’s on repeat, and though we don’t speak any of the language, we’re pretty sure it’s telling people to watch out for the floods. My roomie tells of puddles the height of your calf. It’s rained nearly everyday so far, sometimes heavily. Never this torrential.

When the sun is out, or even when there’s light cloud cover, Rio is stunning. Up on Sugarloaf Mountain, the city below was drenched in the sun’s rays, not the sky’s tears, and Christo Redentor poked his head out of the clouds, misty and mysterious. In the Babilonia community the sun douses the local football pitch come basketball court as kids play football in flip flops, or even barefoot. Hardier than the best Premier League professionals.

As I lie in my bunk listening to the thunder, I recall greeting Teams GB and Egypt at 9pm at night in the pouring rain. My roommate was playing beach games in the rain because the young people here wanted to keep going. A little bit of rain doesn’t dampen the spirit of the Street Child Games.

Back in the void

When it comes back, it's like a burning in my throat. It spreads through my body from my chest like a fire. It's consuming everything. I recognise its work but I feel powerless to quench the flames. I know I'm not alone, but I don't know I'm not alone. 

I comfort eat. I cry. I enjoy the cold biting at my hands when I'm outside. 

I want to throw up. To get it out, to get it all out. To get out the bits I can't cry out. 

It's so visceral. As I push up from the ground a void opens up beneath me. My arms push me away, but my heart strains to leap inside. 

I want to wake up tomorrow and be ok. The light at the end of the tunnel seems so slight, so minuscule that I feel as though I'm imagining it. It's not hope, but a speck of dust in my eye. 

Everyone's own Dresden

I like to step on broken paving slabs 
They remind me I'm not the only unstable one. 

For me, depression is like the city of Dresden. 

My mind, my life, who I am, has been destroyed. It is an innocent party, and depression has rained down on it, burning it to the ground. I feel frequently lost and confused and I don't know where to go next because all of a sudden I don't know what I want. How can you know what you want if you don't know who you are? 

My mind is my own Dresden because from the rubble and the ash I can rebuild myself. It will never be exactly like it was before and indeed, I wouldn't want it to be. But I've spent 26 years crafting myself, can I ever be really different? 

I realised very recently I've been having anxiety for 18 years.
The fear of moving home and my reaction to it.
All through my uni days when I would describe my mind racing and the neon blocks playing Tetris in my head, trying to organise my thoughts. I hadn't had that in years until last month. 

When you rebuild yourself after a  breakdown or just particularly bad depressive episode, you actually build a San Fran Dresden. You pick yourself up from the ashes and you work to make the pillars of your mind more secure in the face of depression. To protect and fight against the shakes of anxiety. 

In my San Fran Dresden I'm relearning to love the things that make me who I am, and I build it around all the things I want to do. There are unmapped territories I am yet to discover. There's a need to have something 'to look forward to'.

It takes a while to realise, but life with and after depression is just life. The only difference is that, against the odds, you are still here, still standing. 

You are San Fran. 
You are Dresden. 

Confessions

In last night's Doctor Who, the Doctor escaped from a prison. His escape, by punching against a wall (4x stronger than diamond) for literally millions of years, is an almost perfect metaphor for how to climb out of the pit of depression.

It take millions of punches, painful and sometimes traumatic punches, to get yourself out. There is no quick fix, not even pills. I am not fixed from being on more of a plateau. The plateau, the numbness, allows me to access a smidgen more of the person I should be, the person I normally am. But sometimes, that connection fails. 

Sometimes, you have to step outside and cry because your mask of happiness and competence is at risk of crumbling. You phone your mum because you're having vivid and violent imaginations of falling from rooftops. 

Your legs feel like lead. And then they feel like jelly.

And your heart turns to stone. Then it disintegrates like ash. 

All the while your mind just spins.

It makes everything possible and uncertain at the same time. 

It makes recovery possible and uncertain at the same time.

It makes life amazing and soul-destroying at the same time.

It makes you want to live, and makes you want to die, at the same time.

It makes no sense. It makes it impossible to go forward, and impossible to go back.

It works very hard to eradicate your future.

It works very hard to eradicate the very essence of who you are.

The only thing you can do, in the face of something that painfully makes no sense working very hard to destroy you, is to painfully work very hard to destroy it back. 

But this is not a war. You cannot destroy depression with hate.

You can only destroy it with love. 

Yearning to stop yawning

There are good days and bad days. Good hours and bad hours. 

I'm learning what it's like to live with this.

It's relying on caffeine to stem the yawning that comes from being depressed, being on anti depressants and just not sleeping well. Yawns that come unbidden and to accommodate them you try to unhinge your jaw. An exhaustion you can almost feel in your blood. 

Half zombie, half fidget.

It's forcing a smile on your face and a spring in your step that you can only manage for short periods of time - and afterwards, you're left exhausted. Nearly tearful. As if you weren't already on the edge anyway.

It's a physiological change in who you are, fundamentally, as a person. It's going from a morning person to dragging yourself out of bed after snoozing your alarm for 45 minutes.
It's changing from enjoying the gym to struggling through a personal training session like you're being forced to do algebra 10 years after you left school.

Your tastebuds change. Things taste bitter, or of nothing at all. There's never anything you really want to eat; you eat because you have to. Like the way you're living because you have to.

You're sensitive to hot and cold and loud noises. It's a sudden and brutal change to your world when the phone rings; you begin to dread the noise. You hold things gingerly. 

You don't want to be dead necessarily; you just want to close your eyes and not exist.  

This is horrible. There's no other way to describe it. I'm always uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable not just in my own skin, but in my own brain. I want to get out. I pound on the walls as if someone outside could rescue me from this. 

That same brain that I feel trapped in, it doesn't work the way it used to, the way it's supposed to. It takes minutes, even hours to process things. It feels steeped in fog, and I have to work overtime to push through it. 

I don't recognise myself. I don't like myself - no, it's more than that: I don't even care about myself. But I still worry about others. I'm worried that my problems will hurt other people. I don't want to let people down. 

It's having a good day, then a really bad day, then a pretty ok day but at the end of the pretty ok you realise just how hard you had to work to be ok and being left totally exhausted.

So excuse me while I yawn until I gag.