Birthday to Me

Welp, my birthday knocked me for a six this year. I’ve never much minded the idea of growing old – the concept itself is a noble one, and preferable to the alternative.

My darling friend Melissa taught me that when she died some 15 years ago, in her mid-forties, leaving two little kids and a bunch of broken hearts behind. To complain about aging when she didn’t get the privilege would just be rude.

But the other day, as I entered my 60^th year, that lofty resolve abandoned me and my mood, which has been overcast and threatening for a while now, slid into an abyss I’ve only experienced a handful of times.

At 59, I am too old to start over, too young to quit. This is the age where I have to live with the life I’ve created, and accept that whatever changes I make at this point will be relatively minor. There will be no career pivot, no “let’s have a baby and turn this whole thing upside down”. I will never be a doctor, or a flight attendant, or a socialite.

The thing about depression is that it wants me to believe it’s reliable and permanent. It’s convincing in its pessimism, colouring the past a murky beige and the future a terrifying inky black. It pushes me to isolate and ruminate, becomes a weary old troll peering at the tapestry of a life, running twisted hands over the fabric and pulling at the snags. It sits behind my eyes, tugging at the lids, and spreads itself across my chest and belly. I sigh to shake it off but it lives under my skin and on top of my bones.

This is familiar territory. My supervisor reckons most psychotherapists tend toward the depressive, and lots of folks have walked their depression through my clinic door. They look at me with tired, challenging eyes, and it feels like their melancholy is seeking out my own. Maybe that’s how therapy works. A bit of “can you relate?” to complement “can you help me?”

Today, in this familiar abyss, I can hear a faint voice calling out to me. “What would you say to a client who said they were feeling this way? Come on, you can do this.” It’s a rookie intervention, simplistic and obvious, but I can feel it start to work. I sift through the rubble for my toolbox. It’s in here somewhere.

• This feeling is temporary. I haven’t always felt like this, and it will pass, like a weather pattern that has settled in but is never forever. Remembering that it has a beginning, middle, and end is a tether to hang on to while I ride it out.

• I have to create things to look forward to. A friend was telling me about her top picks for the Sydney Fringe Festival last night, and through the gloom I could feel the spark of interest. This weekend I’ll put a couple events in my calendar.

• Immersing myself in beauty helps. I’ve been swimming in Christos Tsiolkas’ novel The Inbetweens this week, and I could feel myself resonating with his intense, gorgeous melancholy, which then allowed me to be lifted by the triumph of love over hopelessness. I had to believe he understood pain before I could join him in hope.

• This is kind of how I feel about being in nature, too. The green doesn’t bring me happiness, exactly, but I can feel my body and psyche start to vibe with it. I remind myself that I’m not in nature, I am nature. And then I feel closer to whatever God is, which transcends the impermanence of mood disorder.

• I will exercise. I will eat better. (*Another sigh*) I noticed that I’ve been relying on nothing but lollies and Coke Zero to fuel me through my day, and confessed this, shame-faced, to Yihong, my sweet exercise physiotherapist. Rather than shaming me, he promised that if I increased my protein intake I would feel stronger and have bigger muscles in a fortnight. Deal.

• Meditation helps, even if it doesn’t lift my mood immediately. When I sit down, pop in my earphones, and fire up my trusty Insight Timer app, the Universe gifts me 20 minutes of peace, which allows me to be accepting of my low mood rather than ashamed or frustrated by it. I get this shrug energy – yeah, the depression is there right now. So what? It’s been here before, it’ll be here again, so suck it up, Princess. Plus, I feel all virtuous afterward because I am someone who meditates.

• Voicing or journaling my thoughts diminishes their power. Some of the thinking that fuels my depression is utter madness, but it’s hard to recognise that when it’s wafting about in my head. Externalising those thoughts, in spoken or written form, lifts the veil and exposes their inconsistency, cruelty, incoherence, or irrationality, and they become much easier to challenge. My higher consciousness knows better.

• I’ve been sober now for 143 days (who’s counting?) and while the absence of alcohol obviously hasn’t prevented depression, it certainly has meant that I haven’t been hungover and depressed at the same time. My sobriety has given me the gift of better sleep, better skin, better decisions, a little spiritual tingle, and a community of people with whom I feel utterly safe.

• I let people love me, and I let myself feel loved by them.

So that’s my toolkit. I’m sure there are a few more tips and hacks in the bag if I rummage around some more, but these are the trusty tried and true instruments I reach for time and time again.

I found this on Substack the other day.

Friends, wait. I almost forgot a really important tool: service. Part of why I love my job, even when it’s painful and difficult, is because it allows me to get out of my own self-obsession and be useful to someone else. Creating this blog post is another way of achieving that end. If this resonates with another soul out there, we could together do a little vibrational dance, and once again hope will transcend despair.