THE BLACK PIT
It
seems like the end. It isn’t. It’s a halt, a severe halt.
The world is muffled, it’s in cotton wool, and its becoming distant. People are remote, seemingly hollow and even if they do phone, or talk, we can’t really hear, and they cannot get in.
Time is an endless blur…it races and yet it stands still.
The medical world seems detached, and robotic. Memories are hazy and meaningless.
When people talk , we feel they are speaking into a void; we are not there.
We swallow pills and wait. Our minds shut down out bodies, we taste no food, we become
Motionless, we feel no love. Our advisors trot out the same old observations and advice, their voices empty and hollow, their motivation suspect.
Somehow, we have to escape the black pit. We have to move from the problem into the solution. For us, this is infinitely more difficult than even well-meaning carers and medical staff can understand. It is a hundred miles to our kitchen, and thousand to our door. Two feet away, a book may be far out of reach…and the phone is a meaningless dead thing.
If we are hospital, we become as whitewashed as the endless corridors, as sterile as the floor. Its one huge clatter. We have a weird and partly convincing feeling we are in the right place, sometimes replaced by a sinking drowning sensation that we are in entirely the wrong place.
Our body in hospital, our souls fragmented and dispersed, our minds ragged and lost, or simply unavailable. People come with clipboards and write things down. We sometimes act grateful; it seems to pay off. We have to court the system sometimes, we found that out. We nod.
We know, we may be released into care into the community. We’ve had some of that before, enough said. Sometimes we freeze ourselves into a block of ice, sometimes we melt into drained jelly. We learn how to walk the hospital way, sit the hospital way, and stare at the TV like good consumers. We vainly glance at people we think might be sicker than us. They look at us the same way. A stalemate of unsaid judgement.
The black pit is not in the hospital. It’s in us.
It’s going to be hard for us. Our coping skills are limited, it appears. Well people expect us to somehow have the same recovery tools they have. Probably their belief is founded on the fact that we breathe the same air, and respond the same stimuli. And are comforted by the thought that it can’t happen to them, they are too together, worldly-wise, and the order of their lives unshakeable. Unlike us, they are not instantly categorised, assessed and labelled.
In the end, we begin to find our recovery in front of our eyes. People in the same lifeboat, people hanging by the same slender thread. People like us, both blessed and cursed with the same sensitivities. When
we meet these people, we feel it immediately, we know and they know, they talk the same language.
We have to learn to keep each other afloat. We are our only true resource. We meet in corners, and hopefully, become known and available to others. Our bond, once made, may strengthen into a real and unshakeable lifeline. Sure, we can walk away, but it just might be a good idea if we don’t.
Some of us have spent a few minutes with a stranger, and felt more than we have felt for a long time.
There are no clipboards or charts, just the survival instinct reaching a little deeper. Kindred minds with the same hopes, rediscovering our right to be us, sick or well, our right to be understood and nourished by real simple human care, the acknowledgement, that after all, we are OK. Maybe two or three of us share a coffee….then someone else comes along. Then maybe, the quietest voice in the world, the voice of the depressed or mentally ill person, begins to be heard. We take back our right to a real community, we become more than a diagnosis on some computer, we may even become a force. And what is more, a benign force.
Im a sick person. It’s official. Most of the negative labels can be stuck on me. I am easy to dismiss or write off.
I have an illnesss, maybe several. But I also have something that those in the Illusory Well World perhaps have not. I have some real friends. One friend of that quality would be enough, but a handful have become something close to a fortress. My old theory is gone. I am not alone, I’m not
unreachable, and I count.
It doesn’t come in bottles, packets and prescriptions, it can’t be scrawled on a bed-end clipboard.
One day, I might be alone, helpless, and lost. It isn’t going to be today. One day I may simply give up,
but it will not be this day. And if I can reach out, touch, or even smile, it won’t be tomorrow.
Something is at work in me today. And if you can read and feel these words, that something… Is probably you.
Mike…..December 2006 Basildon Self-Help-Depression group.
