The evening started innocently enough. My husband was then a junior banker and still in the office. I was cocooned at home, on maternity leave from my job as a news reporter for The Times, with our young sons. The previous few months had been that mix of wonderful, gruelling chaos particular to young children.
Tentatively, anxiously, though, I had begun to think about returning to work. Surely it was time to get back to normal as the tsunami of sleepless nights seemed to be passing. Wasn’t it?
First, though, the task at hand. I took the boys upstairs for bath time. After a good splash, I lay them on their towels kissing their round tummies, and smiled as I watched them coo back at me.
Then it dawned on me that something wasn’t right.
My heart started racing.
Somehow, I put the boys to bed. Later that night I couldn’t fall asleep. I even thought I might be having a heart attack. I paced the house, checking and re-checking the children. Each time I returned to bed, my anxiety sent new worries spinning around my head, like a skater carving ever-deeper patterns into a frozen lake.
Morning did not bring relief. Often a little nervous, now my worries expanded, terrifying me.
They were no longer the more quotidian fears of juggling work and home that I had entertained in what now seemed a gentle introduction to the madness. Now I didn’t worry about getting to sleep or being a good wife or mother. Now I imagined that my children would die.
I felt as if there were two of me and my thoughts had been diverted to someone else’s head. Soon, it was as if she were strapped in a plummeting plane. ‘I’m going to crash!’ she screamed, over and over. Every bit of me was in acute, dynamic agony. It felt as if a swarm of wasps were stinging the inside of my skull.
A doctor was called. My mother and husband held me down so I could be sedated. I lost a stone in weight in just a few days. And within three days I had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital and diagnosed with clinical depression, an illness I had hitherto known very little about, let alone thought I might be susceptible to.
I recovered, only to have a second breakdown in 2003, a few months after the birth of our twins and began in the middle of a Christmas party I was holding at our west London home. After a few hours of playing the perfect hostess, I walked out, barefoot, to my parents’ home just around the corner, let myself in, and sobbed.
This time, my depression lasted for over a year. The pattern with depression is rather like a watercolour. Each successive episode, like each successive brushstroke, is deeper and darker.
And this was dark. Days merged into nights. There was no getting up and no going to bed, no mealtimes, no dawn or dusk. All signposts of daily life had gone. The only respite was to knock myself out with sedatives.
That was then. Now, a decade later, I dare to describe myself as calm, steady and well. I feel I live a simpler, more grounded life. I have had therapy, and am no longer driven by anxiety and trying to please. Some days I even feel as if I’m walking on sunshine. I feel I have my ‘Black Dog’, as Churchill famously described depression, on a tight leash.
For I finally got the message. I needed to make radical changes in my life and deploy every weapon in my arsenal to manage my tendency to this kind of anxiety-driven depression. I had to stop trying to be everything to everyone.
I have embraced exercise – breaking a sweat is the best antidote to my anxiety -- I use mindfulness, find poetry helpful, am careful to eat ‘happy foods’ like green leafy vegetables and dark chocolate, and use a toolbox of different small, doable, every day strategies.
My work life has changed too: now I run workshops for mental health charities including MIND and Depression Alliance, and like the brilliant itaffectsme campaign, I try and do what I can to reduce the terrible stigma which still surrounds those are mentally unwell.
Next year will mark nearly twenty years since I was first unwell. It seems almost impossible that I am the same woman who stayed up all night. I find myself generally calm and well thanks to my strategies. The story is not over, but my strength has been made a little bit more perfect in weakness – and sometimes I even walk on sunshine.
Walking on Sunshine: 52 Small Steps to Happiness is published by Short Books £9.99 and is available to order on Amazon here. Follow Rachel on Twitter @RachelKellyNet or visit www.rachel-kelly.net.
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