My Depression History – PART 3 – Fake ID

 

A random pic of a random fairy girl

This is a follow on from this post. 

So far I’ve talked about my relatively happy life during my time at Primary School (ages 4-11) and how I experienced a massive shock of displacement when I was transplanted from the safety of that first school into the hoards of High School.

Secondary School/High School is all about groups, we all know this.  Identities are not yet fully realised and groupings make it easier to deal with the fact you are still coming to terms with who the hell you’re going to be in the world.  At my school there was a popularity hierarchy and you could be near the top if you ticked one of these boxes: you are sporty; you are a pretty girl or a good-looking guy; you are funny/vivacious or charismatic.  If you had an imposing personality or were just an averagely nice person, you hovered somewhere in the middle.  I felt myself to be at the bottom of the hierarchy.  The only thing I counted in my favour was my ability to score high on tests.  I didn’t rate my looks and thought I was fat.

I began to be attracted to the dark, Gothic alternative style.  There wasn’t a ‘goth’ group at my school but privately I looked into it.  I wanted power where I had none.  I wanted to be sumptuously dressed in rich, dark fabrics that drape.  I wanted to be one of The Undead.  Or a witch.  I loved films like Heathers, Pump up the Volume, Craft, anything with high-school age kids who didn’t fit in but had some way of seizing power back.  It’s not surprising really.

I never gothed-up my look because I was too invisible for that.  I was too scared of being noticed and ridiculed.  But in my mind I would dress myself in red velvet and in my mind I would be a woman with black hair, red lips and power coursing from her painted nails.

I had a penchant for the darker things in life.  I was drawn to the idea of Gothic beauty and immersed myself in it.  I read books on the obsessions certain writers had with skeletal, hollow eyed women.  There were often sketches of such archetypes in books, women standing at open windows with swathes of chiffon blowing in the breeze of the night sky.  They were sad and close to death.  They seemed glorified in the imagination for their ability to kiss death wanly.

Edgar Allan Poe, the American poet and short story writer famed for his leaning to the macabre, was one such writer I investigated.  He had tragedy in his life and died aged 40, an alcoholic.  His young wife died in 1847 from tuberculosis, popularly known as consumption at the time.

Consumption/TB is a ‘wasting’ disease and affected close relatives of many major writers.  The sufferer typically has a cough, sometimes coughing up blood, and loses a great deal of weight as they waste away to the disease.

Writers who depicted women weakened and hollow from this disease weren’t obsessed with skeletal women in the way our society reveres ‘the thin woman’; theirs was an obsession with the form that the women who’d wasted away in front of them had taken. 

I just wanted to feel safe again.  My non-speaking persona resulted in a not-surprising lack of popularity.  I wasn’t often actively bullied by other kids.  I was invisible to them.  I’d made myself so.  But at some point this initial ‘coping strategy’ became my downfall.  Not being popular is hard.

This penchant for darkness has stayed with me.  I still love vampire movies; I still think Anne Rice’s books are decadent and luscious (Interview with The Vampire); I still like movies where the protagonist has a hidden power that makes them special; I was a Buffy fan (the film and the series).

But when I got clinically depressed things were different.  Clinical Depression isn’t an image of melancholic disinterest; it’s not the sumptuous gothic image of a corseted, pale-skinned singer looking miserable for the camera; nor is it engorged with vampiric sensuality.  Clinical depression is the worst thing I’ve ever been through and the closest I’ve ever come to dying.  It’s also currently the number one contender for what I imagine could possibly kill me.  Obviously the older I get the chances of other stuff killing me gets higher.  But currently, the depression is the leader.

Before I got depressed (I was 20 when I had my first massive suicidal bout) I sought refuge in the perceived glamour of the occult, of a lifestyle based on not fitting in with the norm.  I read books that were black and depressing, I was interested in learning about any weird societal offshoots: psychopaths, self-harmers, masochists etc.  I read books on suicide and almost wanted to feel the extremes that I had only read about.  I read a lot of books on anorexia and in a twisted way wanted to become anorexic.  I think I knew something was going wrong with my mental development but didn’t know how to give it an outlet.  It wasn’t manifesting physically, so no-one could step in and go “hang on a minute, there’s something wrong with that girl, she needs some help”.  In the end it was the depression that got me.

Assuaging Depression

Originally, this set of posts on my personal history with depression came about because I was thinking about how we sometimes give up parts of ourselves to placate depression and regain mental health.  I eventually gave up a fascination with the darker elements of life – murder, death, vampires, horror novels and films. 

My Fake Identity, my coping strategy, had been to seek out dark themes in films and books and to allow this darkness to seep into me and give me an internal identity that I could recognize. 

Once the full horror of a proper depressive episode hit me I started on a long and continuing journey of ‘getting better’.  This meant finding a new identity for myself and shrugging off the dead skin of my old self-image.  Like a snake I had to leave my skin on the floor and look at the new, tender skin I was left with.

It’s not that I have completely left my old self behind, but I have cultivated a new self alongside it to add light to the shade.  I am more feminine now, I embrace pastel colours and pretty things and I do not baulk at self-help books, even those written in a new-age fashion.  I have forced myself to consider everything as a possibility – meditation, affirmations, spiritually-oriented books.  I did this with more vigour when I was first coming out of my first major depression, as I wasn’t sure how much of myself I needed to change to get rid of this vile thing. 

As the years have gone by I have realised that I can still occasionally indulge my darker leanings: watch a programme on suicide, watch a macabre film etc.  The thing I can’t do is have the darker stuff be my only point of reference.  It changes also with the state my mood is in, so when I’m suffering a proper depressive patch I kinda need to purposefully immerse myself in positive influences.  My mind needs constant positive influence in that state to counteract its would-be darkness.  Nick Cave has to wait for my better days.