April Showers Bring May Flowers?

Photo by Eugenia Shustikova / Unsplash

The Vicious Grey Cycle

April was a tough month-but then again, so was March and February. Winter just sucked, okay?

I’ve been on anti-depressants since the Fall, and they worked wonders for a while. As someone who’s been depressed since his early-20s, it was nice to feel more like myself for once. It was as though a grey lens had been lifted, and I could actually see colour.

I welcomed the sadness, anger, and frustration-alongside the happiness and excitement, of course. It certainly beat the constant irritability, reticence, and feeling of monotony that had characterized my life up until that point.

I’m not sure when that upward momentum stopped, but I grew increasingly withdrawn entering the winter months. Maybe all of the life changes that I had gone through up until that point had finally caught up to me: buying my first home, moving away from my friends and family, settling into a new job, preparing for my first child, supporting a pregnant partner, and all of the usual financial and personal stressors one deals with on a day-to-day basis.

My therapist has since helped me acknowledge how much that truly is, but at the time I chose to repress and avoid processing anything. Looking back on it now, when has repression ever worked for anyone?

To bring this tragedy to its fateful climax, things got progressively worse until they reached a head in April, when I was forced to confront how miserable, spiteful, and hurtful I had become.

Doing the Work

In the past when I’ve hit my lowest lows, I would be overwhelmed by a sense of self-loathing. I would assume that nobody wanted to be around me, so I would withdraw and not seek support. This would often manifest as shutting myself in my room alone, distracting myself with a hobby, sleeping as long as I could, or being generally sulky.

As unpleasant as this all sounds, it’s easy to do. My body wants to do these things because it means that I don’t have to put any actual work in. It means that I can just wait until my serotonin levels increase to the point that I can will myself to “move on” without addressing anything.