The Voices In My Head

When I hit the Publish button on my last post (My Depression is Not an Illness), I knew I was in for a rough ride, it was a humbling thing to have to admit, difficult to bare. A “bold” thing to admit so publicly.

Behind the flowery language and breathless earnestness, my piece is really the signed confession of a scoundrel caught in a con. A scoundrel who's only hope lies in coming clean and throwing himself at the mercy of the court.

I'd been careening into a breakdown for weeks, it seemed like things were just slipping out of my control, I was living in a constant state of anxiety. A whole lot of unpleasant “stuff” was going in my life and I felt like it was going to bury me.

Totally trapped and out of options, when I reflected on my situation what really stung was the realisation that the root cause of all my various unfortunate circumstances was my attitude.

I was lazy and completely unmotivated, I wasn't depressed because I was unlucky or disadvantaged or the victim of great trauma, I was ashamed because I'd been letting myself down. I had everything going for me and yet I just couldn't find in myself a reason WHY I was here or WHAT I was supposed to do.

All the literature told me that the key to happiness was to do what I loved, do what came naturally, that what I wanted in life would come to me if I listened to my heart.

It was a nice sentiment but seemed impossible for me, when I reflected on my thoughts all I heard was this cacophony of accusative abusive voices. My thoughts weren't worth listening to, I seemed to be completely comprised of anger, guilt and shame. I couldn't ever recall feeling a calling to either a cause or a profession or even just a moment without those voices.

I'd be conscious of this for almost a year now, in a cognitive behavioural therapy session in the aftermath of a previous breakdown I'd been asked to reflect on my thoughts and monitor them. When I paid attention to what I was thinking I was shocked, I was, in my private thoughts, a really nasty person, particularly to myself and my family. At the time and for most of the time since I'd put this down to trauma in my childhood, I'd been bullied, laughed at, picked on, picked last, left out, obviously these “injustices” were to blame, they destroyed my confidence and left me empty.

For months I monitored my thoughts when I caught myself thinking abusive or degrading thoughts, I considered two questions:

Would I accept someone else saying this to me?

Is this emotion appropriate for what is actually happening right now?

And the answers were always “no”, nothing that was happening around me was ever as serious or hopeless or hostile as the voices in my head were telling me it was. But when I suppressed those voices there didn't seem to be anyone else inside me.

If only I could get a moment's peace from this constant panic and fear I might be able to find some motivation or a reason to live.

If only I could stop worrying about what people thought about me I might be able to figure out what I was good at.

Confused, suicidal and hopeless I started to write. It was the first day of my sick leave, I was conscious of the fact that I might very soon be unemployed, that I might very soon lose everything I had, I was conscious of the fact that I was 40 years old and didn't have a trade, or a qualification.

I was conscious of a lot of things, so many things I couldn't think straight, I thought that by writing it all down I might be able to glean some insight.

I wrote and wrote for days, I missed meals, I barely slept, I was constantly deleting and retyping, spending hours on those few paragraphs getting it straight.

Eventually, when I had finished writing several things became clear;

That in trying to order my thoughts and quite without realising it, I'd written a story; and

That I was a 40 year old child who had been running away from pain his whole life.

Coasting on the back of extraordinary privilege and good fortune, born into a stable middle class family, white, male, Australian and passably dashing when I put my mind to it, I'd leveraged these advantages and squandered it, devoting my existence to the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

Worse, by treating discomfort as something to be avoided at all cost I only did ANYTHING that required effort when I absolutely had no other choice, driving myself into each obligation like a calf herded into the slaughterhouse stockade, kicking and screaming, terrified and desperate to escape.

No wonder I hated my job.

No wonder I was snappy and irritable whenever I HAD to do anything at all.

My automatic response to all discomfort was panic and attempts to flee and I'd surrounded myself with lots of ways to flee.

I needed to grow up, I was out of options and hiding places. I needed to reinvent myself and I didn't have months or even weeks to do it, I had a week of sick leave to sort something out. Every way out I could think of was going to require some serious effort and discomfort, and I had no confidence that I could tolerate that discomfort.

I needed to find something I could do in life that was useful as well as enjoyable, that had a meaning to me.

I needed to make a record of my awakening, so I couldn't just “forget” and then fake it all over again.

And in order to do all that I needed to learn how to face pain, I had to find some way to experience pain and really understand that I could tolerate it, that I wasn't going to just break at the first sting.

I needed a crash course in discomfort, right now.

Publishing under my own name, was an act of penance, and a statement of intent.

I knew I was going to be mortified, hideously embarrassed, exposed and vulnerable. But I deserved that, I had to come clean.

So, late at night, I copied the text into LinkedIn and hit Publish. I let the discomfort wash over me and accepted that it wasn't going to kill me, the sky wasn't falling, it wasn't the end of the world. I barely slept, I tossed and turned and stewed, but I resisted the urge to jump up and delete the post... all night. I spent a long dark night with shame and anguish.

I deserved this, I needed to suffer.

And then things seemed to fall into place.

Throughout the night and the next day people had started to “like” my story. My work was resonating, people I really respected, people I KNEW had far better reasons to be depressed than I, people who done REAL things liked what I wrote. Old soldiers, mothers, ex-bosses, business owners, scientists, people who had actually done things in their lives I would have dared to were seeing something in my words worth reading. I was humbled and a little embarrassed really...

The root of all my problems was fear. Everything I wanted in life was happening right now, it had been happening for quite some time, I just hadn't been present to realise it.

Nothing was as complicated as I'd made it.

I could survive pain. I had done it before when I really had to. Sure there were lots of times when I dropped the ball, times when I let other people pick up the pieces. But when driven into a corner or left with no option I'd fought, and I'd always come through. I wasn't really weak, I was just afraid that I wasn't adult enough to face it, and in avoiding challenge had convinced myself again and again that that was true.

But I was facing it right now. In admitting my weakness I was facing pain, the knowledge that I had squandered a huge portion of my life and let a lot of people down was really really painful, and I was owning it, not just owning it but letting people I knew it.

I was shy around people because I was scared they'd be able to somehow “see” what I thought of myself, that they might discover my secret. But when I wasn't worrying about it people DID like me, lots of amazing people. The colleagues and managers who knew I was suffering at work, who'd reassured me and been understanding and wished me well, the friends who had read my writing and encouraged me to continue, men and women I admired, my wife, my children, my parents.

I had people all around me telling me I was worthwhile, ALL the time. Lost in my own world, hearing only my own echo chamber of doubt and regret I hadn't really stopped worrying long enough to hear them

People liked what I wrote too. I could tell stories, it was rough and a tortuously slow process, but I got there, and if I practised it would come easier.

And I felt calm, for the first time since I could remember. In the afterglow of my efforts I was genuinely at peace, the voices were silent. I was learning a lesson, a class I'd managed to skip out on my entire life.

I wanted my mind to be clear of fear and doubt – when I was doing what I needed to do I was calm, when I had finished I was calm, as long as I was comfortable that there wasn't something I should have been doing I was calm. I was in the moment, experiencing what was happening right now, not regretting what had happened before, not scared about what would happen next, just calm in the now.

I didn't want to find peace so that I could learn the thing I wanted, peace IS the thing I wanted.

Somewhere a long the way I'd mistaken idleness with peace, and in doing so I'd made peace impossible for myself.

By avoiding anything uncomfortable, I'd turned my aversion of pain into a neurosis, I was constantly on edge, afraid I'd be discovered, guilty because I should have been doing something else, ashamed because I was a shirking when people needed me and terrified because at the back of my mind I was just wasting my time.

Peace came when I was doing what I needed to do. Peace was the quiet satisfaction that came with the absence of doubt, accepting the here and now without resistance without resentment, not wishing I was somewhere else, not wishing I'd been better prepared, not wishing it was over already. Everything was better when I was present and accepting, even discomfort.

And in that quiet stillness and the warm validation of the people who read my work I understood for the first time in my life what it was that I really wanted.

I wanted to tell stories, and I want to know peace.