Depression and writing

A personal sharing

Today I share something very personal. I am lost in depression or dissociation, I don’t know which because I don’t bother the medical profession much with my mental health woes. I’ve tried in the past, many, many times, but never with even the glimmer of success, and more frequently, found that intervention left me in a worse position than before.

I suffered abuse from my parents, and had a rough time for one reason or another in early adulthood, too, knowing hatred and abandonment. The scars remain, in the form of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD). Childhood parental abuse is a nasty one because it is in childhood that the brain creates a model of the external world which it then uses throughout the rest of life to navigate that world. How to behave, expectations about how other people should behave and interpretation of their behaviour are a large part of that modelling. Trust, confidence and self-esteem all depend on these models. In childhood abuse, those models are disrupted because the authority figures who should love you don’t, or act unpredictably. This leads to issues in trusting, in holding self-esteem and in forming relationships with others, whether for love, friendship or business.

With disrupted models, the brain attempts a process of repair or recalibration, effectively trying to update the models to allow them to function well in life. To a certain extent, progress can be made, but the new rules don’t get written deeply in the model. They seem to never penetrate the surface, and in moments of stress or distress, get washed away. The result is fragility. A lack of robustness and resilience compared with unabused people. A tendency to have or to frequently revisit low self-esteem. A tendency to depression when the models are overwhelmed, and a tendency to dissociation when the entire being is overwhelmed.

I have been describing in writerly terms my journey to become a writer, but today, I will talk about the dark side.

My mental health issues have created in me a need for perfection. It’s a survival strategy. Criticised and punished too often by an exigent father, my models created a rule. Don’t make mistakes so you won’t get into trouble. It doesn’t hold very well. I can easily be blamed for things which either I am not responsible for, or my inner self doesn’t believe I’m responsible for. When this happens, there is a whiplash reaction because the world had defied my models. The rest of the time, perfectionism creates a brittle and driven personality. Good for being a professional, especially in a responsible position, not much good for making and keeping friends or having any kind of life beyond work. My models also tell me to trust no-one, and that everyone will let me down. They tell me danger is always around the corner, and that I need to be on high alert, every moment of every day.

This all combines to make me a self-sufficient (or should that be self-insufficient?) person, a survivalist and driven like the devil is on my tail. Nothing to do means time for introspection, which is never good, so keeping busy doing something I am good at is my best long-term strategy.

Which is where writing comes in. During the pandemic, I found myself looking at spare time, horror of horrors. Time with nothing to fill it. But I felt strongly that I had something to say. The effects of childhood abuse, the stigma of mental health issues and the inadequacy of therapy were things I wanted to talk about, shout about, shove down people’s throats. I wanted to raise awareness because much parental child abuse is unknowing or at least, unthinking. Because the solutions are not neatly bundled into a dozen therapy sessions, a format designed for practicality. Because society is harsh and divisive, because kindness is too rare. As a welfare society, we could do better.

Many of the extreme moments of my life and my distress were caught in the cameos I have discussed earlier. I wanted to collect them together and create a hard-hitting whole, a scream. I did do that work, too, paying the price of depressions and angers working through it. When it was done, I realised that no-one wants to be shouted at, or lectured, or told they’re doing it all wrong. If I wanted to get a message across, if I wanted to change, in some small way, people’s lot, I had to make the agent of change desirable, accessible, entertaining and interesting. At this point, my perfectionist saw a challenge and my soul saw a project, and I became a writer.

But first, I needed to cut my teeth on a book which was not so emotionally charged. My historical romance came into being. And where this account differs from any other descriptions of mine about the how and the why of choosing to write, this is the impolite truth, the unacceptable truth, the one normally kept hidden. Today, I’m sharing it with you.