When darkness falls
Depression had followed Wendyl Nissen through her life, and in a bid to keep it at bay, she resolved to make a massive change. But living a simpler, less stressful life wasn’t going to be straightforward. In this deeply moving account, she talks about the loss of her baby daughter, battling perfectionism and finding her way out of the shadows.
Depression is such a strange thing to happen to you. People refer to it as a black dog sitting on your shoulder waiting to pounce, and that is a good description because once you’ve had depression there is always the fear it will leap on you and completely smother you in darkness. My first depressive episode happened when I was 19, working at The Auckland Star as a cadet reporter and living in a flat in Mt Eden. My boyfriend of two years and I had just broken up, he had moved out, I was living on my own and I wasn’t dealing with it very well.
I stopped eating, I got sick and my parents eventually picked me up and brought me home, where I would eat only yoghurt and lie in bed all day for two weeks.
They took me to the doctor, who could find nothing wrong with me and sent me home.
These days I’m fairly sure a diagnosis of depression would be made and a script for antidepressants written out. But this was 1981 and everyone just hoped I would come right.
Which I did. Got myself off the couch, fitted into some size eight jeans, went back to work and tried not to think much about it.
In years to come I would have some more bad times, which I called breakdowns, but they were never for too long, usually brought on by a life event – usually a relationship problem – and then I would come right.
But then in 1992 my third child, Virginia, died of cot death. I picked myself up and went back to work, but two years later I couldn’t get out of bed. This time a doctor diagnosed depression, sent me to a psychiatrist who gave me a prescription for antidepressants (in those days GPs could not write them) and within a week or so I felt a bit better and in a month I felt normal – well, my normal.
There’s a lot of controversy about treatment with antidepressants and their overuse, but I’m more than happy to take them when darkness is all around and I can barely get one foot out of the bed and on the floor because they fix that and help me live my life. I’m well aware that no one is really sure how they work and I learned a lot by reading a book called Lost Connections by Johann Hari, which disputes the fact that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. This is what my doctors told me and it was explained that there wasn’t enough serotonin, but that the antidepressant medication I was taking addressed this and rebalanced it.
For years depressed people have been made to feel that there is something not right about their brains. That we were different and just needed to be fixed.
As depression reaches epidemic levels, scientists are now finding that it has more to do with genes, environment and your social situation, which is similar for addiction. You have the gene but you may never show signs of depression or addiction. But if you have the gene and something happens in your environment, like a baby dying, then the two will often be enough to send you off down the path. Or even then you might be okay, but then you find yourself in a situation where you are unemployed or your partner leaves you and there you are with the trifecta of genes, environment and social situation… depressed. Or in the case of addiction, you hook up with a bunch of friends who are using a lot and there you are, addicted.
Hitting rock bottom
I know I have the depressive gene because my mother spent days locked in her bedroom, lying in bed, on numerous occasions during my childhood. I know that gene can be activated by what’s happening in my environment, such as a broken relationship or the death of my daughter. And I also know that for some people being alone and not being connected to people can cause depression.
At the end of 2018 I hit rock bottom again and scared the hell out of myself, my husband Paul and my family and friends. I’ll never forget two of my closest friends arriving at the house and sitting in my lounge to talk to me. Paul was there too and the three of them became my steering committee.
These were the people who were going to get me better, and I love them all for that, because in the dark there is no light until someone prises you open with kindness and love and lets it in.
There was no reason for it to happen that I could see. I had not lost a baby, my relationship hadn’t ended, but I was under a lot of work stress and that was making me unhappy. I had been in this situation before and coped well, but for some reason this situation sent me down.
I was working for RadioLIVE and thought that my daily radio show was going to be a lot of fun. The woman who hired me had told me she believed in it and had headhunted me for several years to do it. Unfortunately by the time I got there she had left, as had the only two other people who thought my show was a good idea.
I knew I was doing a good show, and the ratings had just proved it, but there was no one on the station who thought it was a great idea. I have to say my boss was very supportive, but I knew he was a talkback man and would have preferred me to do that. There were also several people who actively disliked having a woman doing a lifestyle show on a talkback radio station. Those first ratings had surprised everyone by proving the show was working. But no one really wanted it to.
“Why are you putting yourself through this?” my stepson Joel asked me as I sat on our verandah that January and told him how much I hated the situation I was in. In all my other jobs, when I did well, I felt appreciated. “I don’t know,” was all I could say. And I didn’t. Why didn’t I just leave that job, refuse to turn up, take the consequences of breaking my contract?
I’ll tell you why. Because that would be a failure and I don’t do failure. But what I didn’t realise was happening was that I was setting myself up to fail. There was nothing I could have done at that time to make anyone at the station believe in my show, or for that matter even listen to it.
I found myself working really hard at something but never getting the approval I needed to tick that one off the list. To add it to my success list I needed someone to clip the ticket and say I had done it. And no one was going to do that at RadioLIVE.
I realised that while some people are happy simply achieving something, I not only have to achieve but I also have to get an appreciation society going to tell me how good that
“In the dark there is no light until someone prises you open with kindness and love and lets it in.”
achievement was. So far I had been lucky enough in my career to be guided by several mentors who always patted me on the back and rewarded me for my hard work. At RadioLIVE the appreciation society had left before I even got there and was not coming back. But someone did tick it off for me in the end. I had a catch-up with Newstalk ZB, where I had worked for many years previously, and was told – by the competition – exactly how well my show had done. That was good enough for me. I could leave RadioLIVE now.
I’m not sure when I became this high-achiever determined to be the best I could be but also get the high-fives for doing it. My mother was a teacher and was never really happy with my performance at school and would never tell me I did well. If I got 84 per cent on a test she would ask me why I didn’t get 100 per cent. With some children this could have set up a determination to get that 100 per cent but it had the opposite effect on me. I didn’t have a lot of respect for my mother at the time so it made me determined to piss her off. I got through school happy to get a B or C and knowing it annoyed her.
I had become competitive and determined when I started work at The Auckland Star. I was lucky enough to have found a job I loved doing, and all around me I saw women doing well at it. I would be a really good journalist, I decided, and that’s when I began pushing myself hard – right through to being the youngest-ever editor of the bestselling women’s magazine, Woman’s Day, at the age of 30.
As I slowly recovered from the depression, I realised that my inability to accept anything but the best in myself and my need to be rewarded for it could be a major consideration for why I get depressed and perhaps I should deal with that going forward.
I also realised that it all went back to my childhood. (What doesn’t?) I never had any approval for my achievements from my parents because they were very big on the “not getting a big head” school of parenting. But my mother also actively reduced my achievements through teasing and shaming in front of people. She seemed to get a lot of satisfaction out of ridiculing anything I did and it was even better if she could do it in front of an audience. No wonder I had grown into an adult craving appreciation and acknowledgement when I did something well.
I also realised that a few times in my career I had come across bosses who didn’t do that for me and so I simply resigned rather than keep working for them. In my mid-50s I had found my weakness, and know now that I will never have a boss again because I don’t want to risk having one who doesn’t give me high-fives and pats on the back.
I also know why I found such happiness with Paul. He was the first person in my life who absolutely adored me and thought everything
I did was wonderful (even when it wasn’t really) and told me so several times a day.
I called the depressive incidents breakdowns because that is exactly what was happening to me, even though I was once told that using the term “breakdown” was not helpful. But you literally do break down; like a car that has run out of petrol, you just can’t keep going. The pressure of being a high-performing woman was too much. I had to break. Down.
I had a good long look at how I had conducted my life and looked at my list of so-called achievements.
And then I asked myself what if I hadn’t done all that and had just, well, been happy to just be me, whatever that is?
My inspiration
Around that time I was sitting in a food hall in Auckland with Paul before we went to a concert. Next to me was a woman about my age who was single, had a job with a council that involved a lot of paperwork but wasn’t stressful. She was talking about her Easter weekend plans. I know all of this because I’m a very nosy person who eavesdrops constantly.
Her weekend plans involved reading the books she had just got out of the library that afternoon and visiting her dad and uncle, who were both in separate care homes. “The rest of the time is mine!” she said, with a delicious exclamation full of joy.
She was wearing what I call sensible clothes. Plain black pants with boots and a sort of tunic top in a cotton-Lycra mix. She looked very comfortable. Her hair was short and in an easy-care style. Her make-up was minimal but did include lipstick, which was pink.
Why can’t I be more like her? I asked myself. And then I decided to remember this woman eating dumplings with her friend in the food hall and use her as my inspiration.
I remembered my various visits to my counsellor, who I have been seeing ever since Virginia died 28 years ago, usually about once a year for what I refer to as a mental check-up. She would start by getting me to list what was going on in my life and then show me the list.
“I think it would be reasonable to say that most people would be struggling to cope with everything that you have going on,” she’d say.
I talked to Paul and said I wanted to slow down. I wanted to enjoy my 50s
“Adjusting to me suddenly turning off the highachiever switch… was going to cause some issues.”
and finally learn how to be a person who doesn’t need to constantly be challenged to achieve, then need to be applauded for it.
To be fair, this was a bit of a tough concept for him to get to grips with. I was telling him that the racehorse he had invested 25 years in was now turning into a donkey. The woman who woke up every morning with a job to do wanted to wake up every morning and just enjoy the day.
He was probably also wondering how he fitted into this plan, because it would be fair to assume that he would never have fallen in love with the woman eating dumplings in the food hall with the sensible haircut and the pink lipstick.
Paul is a high-achiever like me, a hard worker who never does anything that hasn’t had 100 per cent effort put into it. Adjusting to me suddenly turning off the high-achiever switch, plus her income-earning ability, was going to cause some issues.
We ended up seeing our marriage counsellor about it; we’ve seen her a couple of times during our marriage – who doesn’t?
We went in quite confident that we had worked things out and were ready for me to leave work and become less high-achieving, but once I got into that room we both realised that we had different expectations about what that would look like. To me it involved my overwhelming desire to lie on a couch and read books for six months.
For Paul it was the very practical reality that we still had to earn money to pay the mortgage and my earning power needed to stay alive.
Finally we worked out that I just wanted permission for the couch lying; I didn’t actually want to do it. And so we sold an investment property, sorted out some other things and made it possible for me to earn less and do a bit of couch lying.
I also rang a friend who had come to me with a great business idea that would suit my “brand”. I had been considering it for a few months, but I realised it would be yet another job that would require me to achieve the best possible result. I told them I couldn’t do it because I was planning to “live my truth”. I hate that phrase, because it is usually uttered by a celebrity who needs to address some really bad behaviour. They do something deplorable then look for their truth, find it and then supposedly live it. But it was and still is the best way to describe what I planned to do.
I’m not quite sure who this person will be by the end of the year, but I know this much.
She is happy. She is content.
She is hopeful. She is just a little bit bored…