Depression triggers – part 2

Tags

Back-story, Bali, Buffy, Bullied, Depression, Depression after surgery, Guru, Isolation, Lethargy, PTSD, Shiva nature, Surgery, Yoga, Yogini

In part 1, I talked about having a rather painful surgery in March ’06 and how that contributed to my depression.

So for a while, I had the convenient excuse of my toe to suppress what was really going on. It distracted other people too.

It was even a perfectly valid excuse to decline social invitations – as I didn’t want anyone to stand on my foot.

Two months later (May ’06) I was in Bali for that year’s yoga retreat, convinced I had the trauma and shock under control. [In case you’re wondering about all the overseas trips I seem to take, I save all year for them by putting money aside from each pay.]

I should say I was under the delusion I was in control. Not healed or recovered, mind you. Just in control.

That is, until I was in the presence of my Guru. He simply looked at me and said – I’m with you all the way. Something about the way he said it helped me see I wasn’t in control at all. I was disconnected, even from my fellow Aussie yogis. People I was close to – and I’d yet to tell them what was going on for me!

My Guru’s gift to me on this retreat – not that he gave me anything tangible – was revealing more of who he is as a channel for Shiva nature. Or God or the Universe, whatever you like to call it. (At some point I’m gonna explain more of what I mean by that.)

Basically I was able to see clearly for myself how little his external personality has to do with the essence nature he transmits to his students. Or maybe it’s just that I was finally ready to see him that way?

This retreat was seminal for me in a number of ways – but I’m not sure I want to talk about that. Not even here on my anonymous blog. But delicate energetic surgery was going on. Healing work. There just wasn’t enough of it to keep me going – I was only there for three weeks.

By the time I was in Bali, I’d stopped getting therapy. I wasn’t seeing my wonderful kinesiologist as she was so darn expensive. This wasn’t a good thing.

Post-retreat, it was back to the same old, same old. No social network, but working hard, yet having a tough time being productive. The sucking weight of depression was taking hold. Despite the energetic transformation I’d had in Bali. There was nothing else back home to sustain it.

I’ve mentioned this before, but as a yogini, I’d told myself I didn’t need any more external help. This is not my Guru’s view – it was entirely my own delusion. I had more meditation and philosophical tools than I would ever need, and numerous oral teachings of deep insights into human nature.

Surely with all that great training I should be able to work it out for myself?? Well, no. Not necessarily. Not if you’ve dug a deep groove in your karmic field. It isn’t so easy to suddenly ‘jump tracks’ from within one of those grooves. It requires a great deal of momentum. And depression is a momentum killer.

Something my Guru is fond of saying is – work right where you’re at. Not where you’d like to be. Yet I wasn’t. I was actively engaged in the fantasy that I was “almost better”.

Sometimes the drowning have no idea they’re about to go under.

I spent most weekends at home. Inside. I might venture up to the main street for food or DVDs, but ultimately I avoided people. Since I’d always been a little bit of a hermit I thought I wasn’t doing anything too different.

My time management skills deteriorated rapidly. My family couldn’t rely on me to turn up on time. Actually, they didn’t even expect me an hour later. I arrived when I arrived. When I could.

A friend of mine was leaving the country for a twelve month working holiday and I plain forgot when his party was after remembering an hour earlier.

Work sucked, because I had no desire to try. I couldn’t concentrate very well. My memory was shot. But the structure of being somewhere every day along with the mind numbing effects of having to think about other things… it kept me going for a while but ultimately it contributed to the repression of what was going on.

Also I had a new boss. The one that came in at the end of the previous year decided she needed another level of management and brought in a swag of “seniors” so she didn’t have to deal with the rest of us.

I dubbed my new boss “Scary Natasha”. My group manager and Scary Natasha both knew what I’d been through – I explained it to them because I’d mistakenly thought they’d take that into account.

How wrong I was.

There are some people in this world who view any weakness exhibited by others as an opportunity. These women were paid up members of the club.

They decided at my twelve month review (despite neither of them having been there for longer than six months) that my current work slump warranted my being put on ‘performance management’. Which means they would assess me closely and review whether I should be sacked.

Scary Natasha made a list of things she expected me to do daily, weekly, monthly and so on. And we’d meet each week, her large eyes bulging out of her pale skinned face with her severely blunt fringe an inch or so above.

In terms of my work performance, I probably deserved a stern word or two. But not this. Not being terrified and bullied on a daily basis by a cold and angry woman who’d clearly decided she didn’t like me. But I was in no state to stand up for myself.

So I spent my work days scared shitless I’d lose my job – the only thing that was keeping me afloat in my sea of sadness. And my weekends and evenings watching Buffy episodes, doing yoga and praying hard this would all come to an end some time soon.

Read part 3…

Depression triggers – part 1

Tags

Back-story, Bone graft surgery, Broken toe, Catatonia, Depression after surgery, Isolation, Lethargy, PTSD, Surgery, Triathlon

So let me back up a little bit here, and provide some back-story to the months before and after Andre left his indelible mark on my life.

Before

After 12 years of living in Sydney I moved back to my home town in October ‘04. I was sort of having a long distance relationship with someone I’d met whilst living in Sydney – he lived in Melbourne. K was originally from Sydney, which is kinda how we got together.

I didn’t move back to Melbourne because of K (I was planning that before we met) but later found out he told others I did just that. Delusional? Oh definitely! Things were sort of okay for the first few months, but it didn’t take long to see it wasn’t gonna work out in the cold harsh light of day-to-day reality.

Around Easter ‘05, I competed in my first ever triathlon and promptly broke my toe (second toe, left foot). I haven’t done a triathlon since!

A couple of weeks after that, K and I broke up. I suppose with all the pain and the limping, I just couldn’t support a broken relationship too. But along with the relationship, out went the group of friends (his) I’d been associating with.

Socially I was back to square one.

Middle of ‘05, I headed to Sydney for that year’s yoga retreat. Warm, sunny Sydney. Warmer than Melbourne at any rate! And surrounded by friends.

The toe still hadn’t healed very well.

Early August ‘05 I met Andre – the rest of that story is on this blog, starting with “Once Upon a Time“.

After

Slowly my internal catatonia dissipated as January ’06 ticked over, and I was faced with some tough decisions. Damn toe was still broken. I was still limping and getting around in sneakers every day.

Already I’d put it off once, and I knew what had to be done. I’d tried all sorts of alternative healing therapies to avoid it.

I hadn’t wanted to face it.

Bone. Graft. Surgery.

Where an orthopaedic surgeon removes bone from one part of your body and grafts it to another. So the messed up bit has a fighting chance of healing up.

That poor little toe had had complications – some kind of benign cyst within the bone itself. Eeeew…

Actually, I’d known about the cyst for around ten years – as a result of an x-ray I’d had when I broke my left little toe (by accidentally kicking a tool box whilst stoned). But the cyst had been problem free til now.

So. Around the time of the ‘06 Commonwealth Games I was in hospital getting a bone graft. With myself as the donor.

Over the years I’ve managed to break many bones, tear soft tissue frequently and sprain joints almost as often… but I’m not sure anything compares to the excruciating pain of having a cyst scooped out of your toe, bone being taken from your hip and packed into the empty hollow of said toe.

My hip felt like it’d been replaced with concrete. When the morphine wore off, my toe announced itself with screaming pointy jabs of agony. For weeks I’d wake up in tears because I’d unconsciously twitched in my sleep, sending shards of lightning roaring through my nervous system.

But here’s something I didn’t know til later – surgery has a very common side effect: Depression.

Ofcourse I was already trying to cope with undiagnosed depression and PTSD. Most of my closest friends were 1,000kms away in Sydney, and I further isolated myself from those around me because it seemed like the best thing to do.

Or rather, I isolated the pain so no one would know.

Soft and gentle was my fall backwards into the fluffy feather bed of depression. Any progress I’d made – lost.

It coated my vision with lethargy which I initially put down to the pain. And the hobbling, which made it hard to walk and meant I took twice as long to get anywhere. So the exhaustion too, I assigned to the post-operative surgery healing process.

Depression took the guise of recovery, stretching out interminably with no end in sight. Physically things moved along at the right pace. Mentally they did not.

To be continued…

~Svasti