In which I share stories of dealing with my own depression/anxiety and helping loved ones deal with their mental health issues. Lessons about life skills that might even be helpful to the mentally well.
Decades ago, I had a neighbor with an RV - a big one. He would park it in a narrow corner of his back yard. It looked like an impossibly tight squeeze, and it very nearly was. I would watch him parking from my kitchen window, and learned his secret, a very simple one - patience. . . .
I think it’s impossible to live in Calgary and not love the Rocky Mountains. I see them, blue in the distance, whenever I look west. I’ve camped and hiked and cycled in them all my life. There is awe in the size and strength of rocky peaks, wonder in glimpses of wildlife on the meadows, comfort in the gurgling of mountain streams….
No one can walk the road for us. But they can walk beside us, and what a difference that makes!
This happened over thirty years ago, but it has stuck with me. One winter morning when I left my apartment to walk to the bus stop, I was surprised to see a line-up of idling cars on my normally quiet side street. Up at the intersection, I saw the reason for the unexpected traffic jam: there was a man trying to cross the street, and he was stuck. . . .
“I think of it as a little child that needs comforting.”
One of my teen-aged children taught me a valuable lesson about mental illness. We were together in a counselling session. As we often do when discussing all sorts of illnesses, the counsellor had been using metaphors of conflict. We “fight” a cold, we “battle” cancer; and similarly, the counsellor, in an effort to motivate my teen, was asking them to “confront” and “combat” the anxiety that was severely limiting their growth and enjoyment of life.
“I don’t like to think of my anxiety as an enemy,” my teen said.
What is depression? It is an illness, not an identity.
Looking back I know I’ve been dealing with depression since at least my thirteenth Christmas, a day when I cried myself to sleep in a haze of sadness that descended from nowhere. I loved Christmas; nothing had occurred to disappoint me; there was no reason at all for the despair that engulfed me. There were more days like that to come.
I remember a year and a half into my time at university (pertinently, just after Christmas vacation had ended), running upstairs . . . .
What an overflowing grocery cart and calendar taught me about limits.
I’m going to share two stories, a quarter century apart, very different experiences that both taught me to respect my limits.
Story #1: I was “seventeen going on eighteen”, reveling in the adventure of living away from home and starting university. At school, I was a keener, and proud of it. My roommates were keeners too, apparently. The stereotypical student fridge, overflowing with leftover fast food and multiple milk jugs marked with their owner’s initials, would not do for us. We agreed to pool our grocery money and our food. We charted out responsibilities for cooking dinners, shopping, cleaning. We even (I blush to admit it) baked our own bread.
“I change my wrong things.”
I used to teach English online to children in China. (I loved how cute and enthusiastic those kids were, but I don’t miss my 4:00 AM wakeup times!) The company I taught for had an elaborate curriculum for the students based on stories and games. One of the stories they presented was about an adventurous boy with a time machine, travelling back to the Stone Age. At the end of the lesson, I asked, “If you had a time machine, what time would you travel to?”