For the sake of the children. Chapter twenty eight. Life worth living.

All my life I had been treated with prescription drugs to deal with my long term depression but never felt any better. I believed that the drugs used to deal with my low mood had a negative impact on my mental health, and my ability to cope with my emotions and repressed memories of abuse. After taking anti depressants for almost twenty seven years, I still felt highly stressed, exhausted and depressed. I was in physical pain on a daily basis and life was hard. I functioned only to care for my children and struggled badly. When Martin came into my life, a little of that struggle was lifted. While he was in my life, giving me genuine love and support, I coped better. I sought education to enable me to understand my resistant depression and lived a relatively normal life. When Martin and my best friend Elaine died, I fell apart and lost the ability to cope and I no longer wanted to get better.

I had failed to understand what life was trying to teach me as most of my life experiences were painful, and usually left me feeling devastated. I had failed to find the answer questions like, What do I want from life? What would make me happy? I had tried educating myself, thinking education was going to be the magic cure of my inability to enjoy life. With my academic background and knowing what I knew about depression, I felt as depressed as ever. I felt like I had done everything possible to help myself and understand how to lift myself from the seriously low mood that I had experienced all my life. I read everything I could put my hands on and did all the courses in the hopes that by helping myself I could help others. Now I felt that I had failed myself and others by giving in to my depression. I felt like I was failing my children by not being able to pull myself together and saw less of them and my grandchildren.

After Martin had died, I lost my job and home because I could not function to carry on working and pay my mortgage. I just drifted along in a daze and my mental and physical health deteriorated even more and I was not getting better. Two of my children went off the rails as they dealt with grief in their own ways and I was constantly terrified that I would lose them too.

I started to believe that some people are not meant to be happy. I had not known many happy people, and those I have known, I could count them on one hand. Too many people, live their lives feeling desperately unhappy, and then they die. I never saw my parents happy and they died at a young age.. All around me were people that believed and accepted that being unhappy was a part of life. something to be accepted. When I argued with others, saying there had to be more to life than the monotonous life some of us live, I was accused of being a dreamer. On more than one occasion. I was told, "You need to get your head out of the clouds and get on with the reality of life". I accepted that no body can be happy all the time but I had never felt good about anything for longer than a moment and now I gave up the search for the cure to my depression and resigned myself to a life of pain and suffering.

For the next two years, I laid in bed. I lost the will to live and did not want to have to deal with life. I had no desire to do anything other than sleep. I rarely got out of bed, washed, dressed or left the house. If going out of the house could not be avoided, like when I had to take my dog out for her walk, I went out with my pyjamas on underneath my clothes. I could no longer put a smile on in the morning and pretend to the world that my life was good when in reality it was not.

Periodically, I would desperately seek help and ways of lifting my mood a little above rock bottom, more for the sake of my children than for myself. I knew my abusive past was affecting my ability to cope and I wanted to over come my inability so that I could be a good role model for my children and others, I could never find the right help. I had a counsellor and I talked and dealt with many parts of my past but felt no less depressed. Nothing I did made a difference to how I felt deep down inside and I could not see the point to life. I just drifted through each day and prayed for night time so that I had a reason for laying in my bed without feeling guilty. Even guilt that I was letting my children down by not being there for them was not reason enough to pull myself together.

At the age of 49, I was rushed into hospital with a suspected heart attack. My dad had a massive heart attack at the age of 49, and he had died, so I was very frightened. They could do nothing for him and now I feared the same was going to happen to me. After all the times I had wanted to die now it looked like I was going to get what I wanted. I took a coronary stress test and failed and was booked into receive a coronary angiogram. I was to be fifty in a couple of months and I did not think I was going to make it to see that birthday. I was terrified that I had wasted all my life worrying and just trying to survive. I spent lonely nights, afraid I would have an heart attack at any moment and die quickly, just like my dad had. I read somewhere during that time, 'What would you do if you had a short time to live?' I was not aware of the answer and I was desperate to know.

The situation got to the point where I could not face leaving my home at all. The thought of having to go outside left me feeling panicky and stressed. It got too difficult to leave my bed to visit my counsellor and I so I ended the sessions. I felt like a lost cause that no one could help. The day before my last counselling session, I had an experience that shook me to the core even though I had been in counselling for five years.

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Women and depression through the ages