MIND GAMES
Mental health involves everyone, Liv Young believes, which is why she set up ourmentalstory.com – an online space where New Zealanders can voice their personal experiences of mental health issues, and share their realities. Here are four of those stories.
LIV’S STORY
Imet “Mildred” at 16 years of age. It was April 2005. Mildred made a home in my mind for the best part of six years. Like all chameleons, Mildred occupied various states and spaces within my physical vessel, “the body”.
From a mechanical heart, beating me up at social occasions; to the suffocating “contraction-like” sensations somewhere between the oesophagus and the nostrils; to the full blown monkey-mind rave at all hours; and occasionally, she would commandeer the tiny hairs on my skin. Mildred was otherwise known as my anxiety.
In 2005, anxiety was a hushed, unknown landscape. Forget mental health ambassadors or community events, blogging and social media, or even a simple conversation among an understanding and supportive group. I am grateful for my family and counsellor “Fairy Godmother Helen” for supporting me through that time.
I have since divorced Mildred.
The idea to produce a collection of stories of mental health experiences stemmed from my own experience with anxiety and that of the many others I’ve heard in my social groups, work environments, and further afield. MENTAL is a growing collection of human voices sharing stories on their experiences with mental health. My hope is that MENTAL strengthens and builds connections, as mental health involves all New Zealanders. We should be existing in a place without attitudes, labels, perceptions, and judgement. I want to demonstrate that everyone’s story does matter and there is a community out there for everyone to be part of.
Depression is the pits. But talk to me on another day and I’ll probably tell you about how life changing it has been for me, in a positive way. Right now I’ve been dealing with a lot of life changes and stressors, so I can feel myself sinking lower again.
At 21, I was doing a lot and loving all of it. I was endlessly energetic, a bright, bubbly, morning person who was always positive, motivated, and enthusiastic. I could just go, and go. I was studying full-time, working part-time, training to represent New Zealand in underwater hockey, coaching school and regional level underwater hockey teams, as well as maintaining a social life in between it all. I could go out with friends and dance all night, meet new people, get up to some shenanigans, and still pick up and carry on the following day. The whole world was my playground, and then suddenly it became a big, dark, lonely, sink-hole.
My friends were still going out and I felt like I was missing out by going home early, or not going at all; but I also couldn’t handle putting on my “happy face” all the time. I felt like my friends thought I had become boring – I never used to be like that, I was always up for adventures. Yet I just couldn’t handle being out and awake for so long any more. I thought I was just “growing up” before the rest of my friends were, which felt really unfair because I still wanted to be there with them. I didn’t want to be home in my room sobbing in to a pillow by myself.
I felt like I had no control over how crap life seemed. It felt like that was just how the rest of my life was going to be, that I would just have to get used to it. Maybe everyone went through this, a phase in life where everything changed and things weren’t as fun as they used to be, and that others must have just been dealing with it better. Maybe I was being too sensitive and I just had to learn to live with it, toughen up and carry on. There was no cure – this was just life.
But this version of my life was crap. It felt like I had woken up one day and just suddenly hated everything. My love of sport, coaching, hanging with friends, food, going to the beach, the gym, reading, making jewellery… everything I loved just became lacklustre and life felt flat. I didn’t care about anything, I didn’t want to get up in the morning, I didn’t want to go to sleep at night; work was a distraction that kept me busy, but I hardly ever wanted to be there.
It took a while for me to accept that it was depression. I felt that I couldn’t just go around claiming that I thought I had something as “big” as depression when a) I didn’t know, as I hadn’t been diagnosed and b) there wasn’t anything I could pinpoint that could have triggered my depression – it felt as if I wasn’t allowed to have depression because nothing “major” had happened in my life.
I now realise it was an accumulation of things. There doesn’t have to be one thing. There doesn’t even have to be any “thing”. Life just wears some people down. I was doing a lot and expecting my body to just put up with it. Everybody has limits, and everyone’s limits are different. I had reached maximum capacity for just carrying on and it came in the form of depression. I had depleted my source of naturally occurring serotonin (and probably other things too) and I now had to put a lot of effort in to building myself up again. I was getting migraines every Monday from about 2pm onwards for months on end; I was tired and exhausted all the time. My temper was super short, and everything upset me, or frustrated me, and I cried – a lot! Over the silliest things. Depressions stops you from doing what you enjoy, so as I stopped attending sport as regularly, I watched my benchmarks drop, I watched my performance sink below my team mates. I couldn’t handle the disappointment so I just stopped altogether. I had lost my zest for life, I didn’t know who I was any more, and I had no idea how to get the “real” me back. I felt so lost and alone. I just wanted to close my eyes and disappear.
The only real way out of it for me was self-care. Sure I could just take medication, but I also needed to figure out what put me in that place, and make changes so that it didn’t happen again when I came off my meds. I had to make sure I was doing these four things, over and over again: get more quality sleep, eat a diet high in good fats and nutrientdense vegetables, get a decent amount of exercise in every week, and spend some time on mindfulness or meditation. Those things sound so simple, but in the throes of depression they can feel supremely overwhelming. I felt like the world was against me. There were so many thoughts constantly coursing through my brain, so many reasons and excuses as to why I wasn’t getting enough sleep, why I wasn’t eating better food, why I wasn’t doing enough exercise. Depression puts high-beam lights on every potential obstacle and pushes any rational solutions in to the shadows. Depression is loud in your head.