The Cause of My Depression

Thank you for waiting for this.  I realise I had promised it for Sunday last (my fortieth birthday) but circumstances have caused me to postpone this post until now.  I can pin the cause of my depression down to a moment in time because I have reactionary depression.  That is my depression has been caused by an event that I have reacted to.  There is non-reactionary depression also where the minds chemistry is not balanced correctly (I believe that is the case) and people are just depressed and are not sure why.  So in that circumstance I actually feel lucky to have reactionary depression.  I can't think what it would be like to think that feeling like this is a natural thing.

My depression began on Monday the 21st of April 2003.  This was Easter Monday and I was at home playing Mario Party or something similar with my wife and my two kids, Shanise and Courtney.  The phone rang and I let it go as we were in the middle of a round and I decided to use the caller ID function to call them back after the session.  We were living in Emerald Queensland at the time, a long way away from my family in Tasmania.  I walked out to the kitchen and dialled the *10# number that allows you to retrieve the last number that called you.  It was my mother and I dialled it back.

I heard the receiver lift on the other end and as I was in a jovial mood at the time I made a joke that I knew would make my mother laugh and be shocked.  I said "What the f*&% do you want?".  Unfortunately the next voice I heard was not my mother but someone else.  They asked who this was.

That really knocked the wind out of me and I became worried.  My mother lived alone and would never let some random person pick up the phone.  I explained who I was and my mother came on the phone.  She was distraught and had obviously been in tears.  She asked me to sit down, but I couldn't.  I asked what it was and then she said to me;

"Michael has been killed in a mining accident."

Michael was my only sibling.  My big brother.  Growing up it had always just been my parents and him and I had always thought the world of him.  A lot of who I am is due to Michael and it really felt like I had been hit with a physical blow.

I doubled over.  I could not breathe.  I must have made some kind of wild/feral noise as Nikki came running in to find me.  I was inconsolable.  My mother told me that she had left some rather curt messages on my Father's answering machine (they were separated and he had married again) and I knew I could not let him find out in that way.  To hold myself together I just repeatedly dialled his number until I got him and gave him the news.

Michael is one of those people that everyone loved.  he was mischievous, fun, caring and charismatic.  People could not help but like him and he always was surrounded by a massive amount of friends.  He was always chased by the ladies as well as he was considered quite the catch wherever he went.  I always measured myself against him and I always fell well short in every department.  When he died I quietly repeated a mantra to myself for many months.

"It should have been me."

It is funny in a way as I have since heard a lot about my brother.  I had been away for some time and though we spoke infrequently we were never a family that spoke in depth or personally really about anything.  We would keep our emotional selves in check and talk about other things.  But talking to people that knew Michael it seems he was very much envious of me.  He was envious of my stable relationships and of my intelligence and I am sure if it had of been the other way around it may have been him that thought exactly the same things.

It is eleven years almost since Michael passed away.  He died instantly according to the coroners report and the Doctor that called his death advised that it could have gone the other way and made him a quadriplegic with no ability to communicate with the outside world, which he would have hated more.  You may think that it is ludicrous for myself to be still in depression like this, and I agree with you.  But I can't seem to let it go.  Doctors are happy to get you on medication and I have seen counsellors but none of them say "This is the way to stop feeling bad about this".  They tell me that the medication needs to level me out and then slowly come off it and I will be find.

The medication simply stops me being angry.  I struggle to find happiness in my life and when I do find a place to be happy I normally am disapproved of by one faction or another until the thing I find offers me no enjoyment any more.  I want to break the cycle of depression but I feel I am caught.  Each time I think of Michael it fills me with a deep loneliness and I can conjure up that initial pain of first hearing it as though it were seconds ago.

Michael's death was the trigger but there are other, weirder factors that have me in this depression to do with my family.  I hope to talk about those in my next post.  I think I have put myself through enough for one sitting!  I hope that this post will explain a bit about depression to some people and also reach others that have some similar circumstances and see that it is OK to feel this way and I hope that through my writing that can follow my journey of what I am doing to try and get out of this hole I find myself in.

Thankyou for reading.

Who Am I?

I get the irony a little in writing this post.  But before I go into more of what I want to achieve I want you to know who I am and what I have experienced in my life.  Of course doing that this early means that I run the risk of not many people reading it but it is an important to get this out there so you know why I want to share my point of view.  In fact why I need to share my point of view because at this point in my life (I am a week away from turning 40) I look at the world and it makes me sad.  There are parts of my life that are great, but I can no longer look and say nothing about what I find troubling in the world.  What I hope is that this blog will grow and like minded people will join with me and discuss the points that I make and see what we can do, if anything, to change it.

I was born in Hobart, Tasmania on Saturday the 26th of January almost forty years ago.  I had a Mother and a Father and an older Brother.  I was the last child and that is how my family looked for most of my life.  I was born with anaemia and was a very pale child.  My very first photo upset my extended family so much that my Mother could not show it on the mantle when they came around as they said it was hard to work out where I began and the sheets finished!  Soon after birth though the condition went away and I became normal so to speak.  But what is normal?

My mother, my brother and his daughter Indiannah

My family moved to Burnie, Tasmania before I turned one and for my entire childhood I lived in Burnie or near Burnie.  When I was 4 we moved to a 5 acre farm in Elliott which is 20 kilometres away from Burnie and we spent ten years at that farm.  It was a great place to grow up, and it instilled rural values into me.  So what do I think that means because everyone has a different idea?

1. Community is all about knowing each other and helping out each other
2. You get an understanding of the cycle of life and how things interact to create that cycle
3. You build up a "have a go" attitude where you just try to solve things yourself
4. You build an excellent imagination and a sense of exploration

I went to a small school that took us from Kindergarten right through to Grade 10.  I only went to Grade 6 though and moved on to Burnie High School after that as it offered a better curriculum for me. We stayed in Elliott for 10 years before we moved back into Burnie and I stayed there until I moved out of home to my first job, working for the Australian Government.  I met my wife and travelled about various parts of Australia with my work.  At this time my Mother and Father separated and then we returned to Tasmania after a tragedy. 

This caused me to quit my job and finally take a hard look at what I was doing and change direction.  I went to Uni for around ten years and then took on a new job by happenstance teaching (I did not get an education degree at University, it was a Bachelor of Computing) senior secondary students.  My mother then passed away and I have been 4 years in the job teaching.  And it is at this point in my life that has brought me to writing this blog.

So there you have it, the very brief auto-biography.  There are gaping holes there which I am sure you can plainly see but I will explore them in connection with other things in the future.  Next week, for example, I will explore the tragedy I mentioned which is also the point where I gained my depression.  I will talk about this in relation to my depression and how it has been living with it for now over a decade.

I hope you join me next week, on my 40th birthday to take a look at the next post!

The View From My Window

Hi all.  I hope that some of you are interested enough to start reading my new blog.  This is a much more personal view of my life than my other blog (www.thepathfinderchronicles.com) and I will be using it once a week to make personal comment on the things around me and maybe also giving you all a view of my personal history.  It will also cover details of my progress from  depression and hopefully back to a happy healthy self again.  It is a goal that I want to achieve by the end of this year and one that I have started to work on with some effort in the past weeks.

Me trying to be earnest...

Topics likely to be covered will be;

• My personal history
• The effects of loss and grieving
• Politics and religious views
• Depression
• Programming and technology

There will be no coverage of;

• Specific commentary of Role Playing Games
• Videos of games

I am going to post once a week on Sundays to this blog and I hope that some of my regular readers on the other blog join me and I also bring new readers into the fold in the near future.

Thanks

Mark.