098 – What Does My Depression Look Like?

Description

On December 8th I went public about my journey with depression. Some of you may have seen this on the Occupied Insta and some on my personal FB. If not here is the post:

“Story time about a little photo project I did. 

About 2 months ago I was depressed. My time management disappeared, I isolated, didn’t want to get out of bed, no motivation, tanked mood, drowning in work, barely left the house and all these things combined in a perfect storm of shitness.

This has happened in the past a few times even though only a hand full of people know it. Each time you come out of a depressive episode with new knowledge about triggers, coping mechanisms, your reactivity to situations and your levels of tolerance to even little tiny things. 

This time, or the first time, I was able to remain quite analytical about the situation. This time, I understood that despite my feelings, a lot of the stressors I was experiencing had a time limit. I knew that I had about 4 weeks till the weight would start to lift. So, theoretically, if I could get through the following 4 weeks that I would start to “feel better”. 

Now, it’s not uncommon for people with depression to try and hide it from others. The way I’ve described it is that it’s like wearing a mask. A mask put on for everyone else so they couldn’t see the real me. That’s what this picture project was about, what’s under my mask. 

So 2 months ago I decided to see if I look different when depressed as opposed to when I’m feeling great. The first image, most of you will know but may not have known the story behind it, surprise lol. The second pic I took this morning. I tried not to have an expression in either pic, just my resting face. Same edit on both, and tried to get the same lighting, angle etc. I can see a big difference and that’s really heartening and yet a little scary putting this out there. 

So, why did I post this right now? I don’t want your sympathy or anything like that. I was talking to a friend today who encouraged me to share. Reminded me that sharing my own experience you never know who might benefit from it. You never know who might hear something in your story that might help them along their own journey. 

I want to normalise the discussion. 

If you can relate to any of this, don’t be shy or embarrassed by it. Depression can happen to anyone. If you want to talk about it, I’m more than happy to engage with you. 

Look after yourself, look out for others, stay connected and prioritise your mental health.“

Some people asked for more, asked for an episode. So here it is. I hope someone out there finds it useful 

Keep Occupied

Brock
@brockcookOT
brock.cook@me.com

Episode Transcription

Hi, on The eighth of December 2020, I made a post, both on my personal Facebook page and the occupied Instagram page about my journey with depression. And a lot of people asked if I could turn that into an episode elaborate and share my story a bit. So that’s what I’m going to do today.

So in about September, I took a self portrait, it was black and white, it was just my face. The background was blacked out. It was dark, it was moody It was me in a depressive episode. Now I had this thought. While I was sitting with that, and trying to sort through some emotions and feelings that I was curious as to whether or not I actually looked any different, while depressed compared to normal. Depression is something that I am familiar with. I definitely wasn’t the first time this has happened. The first time, I recall very clearly Well, the first time I recognized it as depression, I recall very clearly it may have happened before that and I didn’t pick up on it. But the first time that it really well that it clicked for me was in about 2015 16 I was feeling just so low. And I had constantly put it down to the fact that I wasn’t enjoying my work, I didn’t want to go to work, I was feeling bullied at work, I put all of this negative emotion that I was experiencing down to that simple fact. I can’t precisely remember the what triggered it. But I remember the almost lightning bolt realization when I went, holy shit, this is depression. It was eye opening to me for a number of reasons. Because it was like an instant shift in all of the emotions that were in my body. So it went from all of these emotions of flatness and sadness and low mood and that kind of stuff. And all of that was like instantly evacuated and replaced by guilt and shame. I was at the time working clinically as an occupational therapist in the mental health community rehab team. And I remember thinking, How am I? How am I helping other people if I can’t even recognize at the time what I was expressing to myself as like very basic, very, very simple depressive symptoms that I would recognize in an instant if it was with anyone else. But in myself, I didn’t see it for months.

That instant like no I’m talking it would have been 10 second moment was both freeing and terrifying at exactly the same time and unless you You’ve been there, it’s so hard to explain what that’s like. I all of a sudden had an answer to everything that had been going on for me for a number of months. I all of a sudden knew that there were things that I could actually do to assist to manage what had been going on with me. But at that same time, I had, like I said, that intense guilt and shame like how did I not see this coming? Like, this is what I do for a living? How did I have all people? How did I not see this? So in the lead up to that, and I described this in the post, and I’ll share the post in the show notes if you want to have a read and I’ll share the the photos that I’ll talk about in a bit. But I describe the fact that I got to a point where I wasn’t feeling anything i was i was numb. And I was essentially self aware enough to know that okay, say for example, that person said something funny. I need to laugh at that. That’s the social convention is to laugh when someone says something funny, so I would laugh. But I wasn’t actually feeling the the funny, so to speak. I describe it as wearing a mask. I’m essentially putting on a show to hide my own feelings, my own depression from everyone else. I didn’t want people to know that I was having a hard time I didn’t want the the pity the Oh my god, are you okay? I there is. And this may be one of my own shortcomings. But there is very little that drive me up the wall more than that. I know that it always is coming from a good place and that people do it because they care or they don’t realize the stuffs going on, I get that. But for me, and I can’t speak for everyone for me that that’s not what I need. That’s not what I want, when I’m talking about this kind of stuff. So please don’t message me saying oh my god, are you okay? I’m fine. It’s okay, I promise. So I the very first thing I did once I had that 10 second sort of realization lightning bolt was I was speaking to a friend, I was actually due to meet that friend for a coffee. And I spilled to her my realization built up the the guts to get over the guilt and shame to actually tell someone and she opened up that she understood she had been through similar. And she gave me probably some of the best advice to this day that I’ve ever been given. And that advice was that at times, that point in time being one of them, it’s okay to be selfish. And I know that is hard for some people because it goes against a lot of things that we’re taught and what we believe and how we should behave towards other people, etc. But the, what she was meaning was that there are times when you need to prioritize yourself, and you need to say no to other people’s stuff. We’re in a helping profession. That’s one of the main reasons I was in occupational therapy. And in occupational therapy. We’re in a profession that we give so much of ourselves and sometimes it’s hard to switch that off.

It tends to be the types of personalities that are attracted to that profession, this profession. So it’s not just at work, that this happens, you know, we generally fail in giving of our time of our resources, etc. But that can have a toll on us, especially when we need our energy. to focus on us and helping ourselves. So the way I interpret that, that advice is, it’s okay to take back some of that energy of your own and use it on yourself, it’s okay to go No, sorry, I can’t help you. Yeah, move house or whatever I need to look after myself for a bit, I need to you don’t even need that’s the that was one of the big freeing things, or you don’t even need to provide an explanation. You are an independent person that needs to look after themselves. So that was some of the best advice. And it’s To this day, I’ve talked to many people from this post, I had a number of people messaged me with their stories of either being currently in the same situation, or having been through it before. And I did have a number of people asked me for advice. And that was the exact advice I gave to them as well, because even though it happened, you know, sort of within half an hour of me working it out, it’s still to this day, some of the best advice that I’ve ever got, with regards to managing this, this, this demon of sorts. One of the other things, I guess I kind of turned it on myself to a degree. Even though that sounds really cheesy and corny, and, and whatnot, I, at the time, sort of had a look at my occupations. And I had the time, there was really only one that was making me feel anything that was a big thing for me, once I realized, like,