“If you could go to sleep and wake up when all this is over, would you?”

I don’t remember the first time I heard that question. It could have been from a healthcare professional, it could have been in a self-harm support group, it could have been from a peer… It doesn’t really matter where I heard it first, the important thing is that I did hear it.

It’s a question that, for me, is the difference between wanting to die and being sick of whatever shit is happening to you.

We all have times we are sick of everything. That if we could wave a magic wand and make things disappear, we would. That makes us want to scream fuck off to the world and get some peace to allow us to focus on what matters to us.

The trouble is, some of us are already carrying so much that we don’t have the mental space to be able to take on anything else. So, when that crunch moment comes and we want to wave that wand, we instead want to go to sleep and never wake up.

Maintaining an equilibrium is something some of us only do consciously every so often. Depression is maintaining that equilibrium every day.

It’s every day wanting to wave a wand. It’s every day of trudging through treacle and trying to seem like you aren’t moving in slow motion. It’s every day trying to weigh up what is essential because you don’t have enough strength to do the essential as well as the desired and useful parts of your life. It’s knowing that something has to give for your life to be worthwhile and knowing that life doesn’t work like that because every decision has a consequence – but working that out is so mentally taxing that you can’t justify expending the energy, and so you carry on.

You carry on getting more and more drained. More and more heavy. Get slower. Get exhausted. Get closer to getting that Oscar award for acting the role of someone who doesn’t have a care in the world.

I’ve long since given up on acting, except in a few very limited circumstances. If I’m having a day when my depression is dragging me down, I let people see. It saves me some energy and avoids the part of me that hates lying above most things. However, it does bring in its own complications.

It means being open to people asking you what’s wrong and knowing that the answer is something like, “something happened four days ago and I’m not past it yet because it’s somewhere in the mess of crap I carry on my back and I don’t know when I’m going to be able to let it go”. And that sounds stupid. Because it’s hard to articulate that the small thing from several days ago now waiting to be processed is stuck to my back by glue made from trauma.  And that it doesn’t matter that the thing has nothing to do with the substance the trauma glue is made from, that glue makes everything adhere to it. Even harder still to explain is that sometimes, life is going easier and the crap on my back has a bit of Teflon coating , so things aren’t sticking – but it’s impossible to know how much Teflon there is until something happens and it either sticks or it doesn’t.

And sometimes the sum of all these stupid things, like being in a group of people and not feeling part of it, or not being acknowledged, or spelling something wrong in an email, or tripping on a pavement, or accidentally making someone jump, or forgetting something, or missing a text message, or overcooking some potatoes, or buying the wrong type of milk… it combines to a weight that feels unbearable.  It becomes a sleep and don’t wake up instead of a sleep and wake up when it’s dealt with.

The only thing that stops the lasting sleep is hope and knowledge that the weight hasn’t broken me yet.

Because I’m not broken. I have an illness. An illness which consists of glue and lots of bits of nothingness. An illness that feels greater than the sum of its parts.

I’d like to end with this from the poet Andrea Gibson, taken from their poetry collection Lord of the Butterflies: