Admitting defeat.

“Bereavement and low mood.”

That’s what Dr B wrote on my doctor’s note after signing me off work. He said he didn’t want to put depression, despite prescribing me anti-depressants, because he didn’t think I was clinically depressed and also because of the stigma attached to the word. In his words, I’m just in a “shit situation” – bored, stifled and scared at work, hating my houseshare but unable to afford my own place, struggling to cope with the loss of a longtime friend, reeling from the sudden death of my grandma, and recovering from the recent breakdown of a relationship that, at the second time of asking, I can’t seem to get over. He said any one of those things would be good reason to lose it. To have them all occur in the space of a month is more than anyone should be expected to deal with.

So, I’ve become a what I think is a cliché. Signed off work and prescribed anti-depressants and sleeping tablets, at the age of 26, when I’m in the prime of my life, when I should be enjoying every opportunity afforded to me, embracing the future and not wallowing needlessly in the past. What on earth is wrong with me?

Stupidly I now feel guilty for any kind of happiness I feel; I went to a football match today, which was fun, yet I felt like I somehow had to act like I wasn’t enjoying myself as otherwise I didn’t deserve to be signed off. Bullshit. When you’re contemplating driving off the motorway into the embankment (whilst your little sister is in the car) then you have a problem, and you shouldn’t have to justify any kind of pleasure you take from life when generally it all seems overwhelmingly hopeless.

Dr B said I needed two months off. I refused, because of what my boss would say, because of how it would affect my future job prospects, none of which are things I would give a damn about if I had broken my leg or was undergoing treatment for a physical disease. I agreed to a week initially, and said I would see how it went. So far it feels like weakness, it feels like defeat, it feels like scamming a week off work for no good reason. But I’m at home, and I’m eating, and I’ve got my parents with me and I’m no longer sobbing in my car in case my housemates hear me in my bedroom. Things are far from perfect and I’m still agonising over whether to take the anti-depressants or not (the sleeping tablets seemed less scary and have sort of helped). But I can try and think here. I can try and visualise the future. I can try and make a plan and see where it takes me.

When it turns out things can always get worse.

Grandma died today.

It wasn’t unexpected – well, not totally. She had been poorly for a while. But she’d always come back fighting and I didn’t think this time would be any different, even at the age of 87, even with pneumonia, even with dementia. When my phone rang at 7.25am I assumed it was my alarm and sleepily hit the cancel button. It wasn’t my alarm. It was my dad.

It’s strange to think that she’s gone. She was always so tiny yet so formidable, a no-nonsense Yorkshirewoman with no time for fuss, who kept a small hatchet well into her eighties to keep her garden in check, who didn’t trust her microwave, who described any weather over 18 degrees as “mafting”, who taught me how to wrap presents properly one Christmas years ago. She always heated milk on the hob and made a fantastic fruit salad and could knit seemingly any animal of any shape; the octopus hanging from my childhood bedroom ceiling a bright blue testament to that. She was a crack shot with a gun and never watched her television and embraced her memory loss by remarking that at least now she could re-read old books and be surprised at the ending.

I’m going to miss her.

When the only way must be up.

Today I walked out of my doctor’s surgery with two prescriptions: one for sleeping tablets, one for anti-depressants. If you’d asked me ten years ago to describe the kind of person such drugs would generally be prescribed to, I’d never in a million years have described myself. And I’m scared because the kind of person I would have described is not a person I want to be.

Things have not been great lately; family illnesses, friendship drama, work difficulties and a relationship break-down all combined to make Christmas rather less festive and fun than it should have been. It seems almost like juggling, in that I was keeping so many balls in the air that when one inevitably fell to the floor all of the rest came crashing down too. The consequences of that (no sleep, no appetite, no desire to do anything except sit in my bedroom staring at the wall) were immediate, unwelcome and all too familiar. Cue the call to my doctor, the two weeks of waiting for an appointment, the worry that in the interim I would totally break down.

I didn’t break down. I kept going. But now I’m at a crossroads and I don’t know what to do. I’ve always believed that my mind and thoughts can’t be treated with drugs; it’s more about unlearning patterns of thinking, and no tablet can help with that. So to be told today by my doctor that he doesn’t think talking therapies are helping me wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

I don’t want to take the tablets. I want to believe I can get better on my own. I’m scared of them, what they represent and the possible side effects they might have; I don’t want to become dependent, or feel even worse than I do now. But at the moment I’m existing rather than living. Shouldn’t I try anything to change that, to get back to my old self? Dr B wouldn’t have given them to me if he didn’t think they would help, surely. But then what else could he do? Send me away with nothing?

I’m tired, and confused, and when you’ve no idea what’s the best course of action all directions seem impossible. I just want to be better.