5 years on from my last major anxiety/depression episode
It is now 5 years since my last major episode of anxiety and depression began. It was one of my worst ever episodes and it took me almost 10 months to get over it completely! I have had a few blips along the way, but in general I'm in a much better place than I was this time 5 years ago.
I had therapy and I think that helped me a lot - I still use the techniques most days.
It's weird how things have turned out over the last 5 years - at the beginning of that episode, one of my main fears was that the world was going to become dystopian. And now here we are, in the middle of a global pandemic!
On a personal level, the last 5 years (apart from the anxiety and depression episode itself) haven't been too bad. At the beginning of that episode, I feared that I was going to die or maybe someone close to me would die. But I have made it through, and so have all my relatives and friends! :) In those 5 years, for example, I met one of my career goals (to move from junior to mid-level, even though I had to move company in order to achieve that, and I was sad at first to leave behind my old colleagues, but now I'm settled and I'm glad I made the move), and I also met a weight-loss goal and feel much fitter than I used to..
On a national and global level, though, I feel like the last 5 years have been very difficult and chaotic. I haven't liked all the political instability and I feel like people are now more polarised than they've ever been in my lifetime, which I feel is unhealthy. I've been quite shocked at some of the decisions that have been made, both here and abroad. It makes me sad that the UK death toll from coronavirus has been so high so far, and sometimes I can't help but wonder if the death toll could have been lower if different decisions had been made in the past. But I have to remind myself that I have no control over that.
On a personal level, whenever I'm going through an episode, I have a lot of "if only" type thoughts. For example "if only such-and-such hadn't happened, maybe I wouldn't be going through this anxiety/depression episode right now." However, years later when I look back at my old episodes, I often get the feeling that I needed to endure that episode for the purposes of personal growth and the lessons I've learnt from it. So, when I'm actually living through an episode, I often wish I could go back in time and undo the event which led to me suffering the episode (which is obviously impossible). But, years later, once the episode is long-gone, I often feel like I wouldn't want to go back in time and undo the event which led to the episode, even if that were possible (which it isn't). It's hard to explain, but as an example, if the events leading up to my last episode had never happened, I probably wouldn't have "met" certain online friends that I found as a result of those events. (I put "met" in quotation marks because I never meet my online friends in real life). My friendship with one of those online friends gave me more confidence in my technical abilities, so if I hadn't "met" him, maybe I wouldn't have applied for my mid-level job 3 years ago, and maybe I'd still be stuck at junior level in my previous company, which is currently struggling financially? I also feel like I learnt a lot about the sorts of people that can and can't be trusted (something I have always found difficult as an autistic person).
A lot of people probably wish they could travel back in time and undo certain events that caused them suffering, or erase mistakes they made in the past. But by doing that, they could end up inadvertently changing the whole course of their life in a way they never expected. Maybe by undoing a past unpleasant event, it would set in train an even worse sequence of events for you in the future?
So basically what I'm trying to say is that I don't believe any experience in life is wasted, even if it was a bad experience. It still would have taught you many things. Therefore, if I was given a time machine and the opportunity to go back and erase certain events from my life so far, I probably wouldn't take it, because then I wouldn't have had those learning experiences, and I wouldn't know the potential consequences of erasing those events on the future.
If you are going through a tough time now, I hope that in years to come you'll be able to look back on it in a similar way to me. I remember one day in June 2015, I felt the lowest I'd ever felt in my life. Even though I was walking around a lovely rose garden, I felt like all the goodness of life had gone forever and that things would never be the same again. Truth be told, things never were quite the same again, but on a personal level, the "new normal" wasn't so bad after all. So, even if it doesn't feel like it at the time, it will be possible to find happiness again.
I feel like I'm coping with the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown much better than I probably would have done if it had happened years ago. I have more tools and coping mechanisms to deal with anxious feelings than I did 5 years ago. In many ways, the world is actually a scarier place now than it was this time 5 years ago, but because of the treatment and therapy I've had, I feel much less anxious than I did 5 years ago. Every day I remind myself that everything is impermanent (including this pandemic) and that this too shall pass, and that brings me comfort.
