The last few years have been a struggle. The years before have been difficult too, only in the last couple of years it became steadily more obvious that something was disturbing me very deeply, making me very anxious, sad and angry, but what was it? I could identify things that were making me unhappy, and there was plenty going on in our lives that had gone on for years and that would make anyone miserable, not stuff that I’ve blogged about much.
There were things like my deep worry about and anger at family members. There was the fact that I had trained to be a lawyer but hated practice. I hated myself and my sense of failure.
There were many other things, mostly related to this sense of deep and abiding failure: I felt I wasn’t any good and could not perform my duties of looking after those near and dear to me (solution: get angry with them). Above all, there was my inability to show and tell A how much I loved him, because I was just so caught up in my own sadness and sense of failure. And that hurt the most.
No one thing alone could add up to that indefinable greyness that was steadily overtaking me. Bad things happen to many people, yet they manage to pull through, without making a big deal of it. I couldn’t cope with the fact that I was struggling to even face the morning. Something was the matter with me, not just the people around me, and the way I was reacting to situations.
I told quite a few people last year I was depressed because I wanted friends to know that I wasn’t quite “all there,” not because I wanted to ignore them, but because I had some issues of my own and needed time to deal with them. Now, in some ways, I regret this, because many people view the fact that you express you are depressed as a)selfishness b)a complaint/whine for attention when you have nothing to complain about c)tell you to get on with it as if you’d just had a minor bruise or something d)something you should have kept secret and not talked about. Exposing a vulnerability like this is looked down upon.
In other ways, I don’t regret telling people that I was feeling a little more than sad, because it’s at times like these you realise who considers you a friend and who considers you an acquaintance. Thus, while you may regret sharing something so deeply personal, at least you learn something about the people around you. Also, some of the secretive people I know (as opposed to those who are discrete) are also the most suspicious of other human beings, as well as being the most friendless, bitter, nasty and alone. While they may have reason to be suspicious, having been hurt in the past, as I was when I made my disclosure, I don’t want to live a life being distrustful of those I consider friends or to stop making friends. If I didn’t tell some friends and relatives I wanted to share my sadness with that I was feeling really low, it was because I wanted to protect them and not burden them at a time I knew they were struggling with their own problems.
One might say (and some did, with good intentions) that I should have counted my blessings and that I lead a fairly privileged life and in the grander scheme of things I had nothing to be miserable about. I already knew that, and was beating myself up with guilt over the fact that I was feeling even a twinge of sadness. But that doesn’t help.
Suppose you hurt your arm and it’s in sling, someone telling you to feel happy your illness isn’t terminal, or that you should be happy that at least you live in a big house, isn’t going to take the pain in the arm away. So telling myself I shouldn’t feel sad, because I had so much compared to others or others telling me the same did not help. Rather than feeling guilty about being unhappy, I had to acknowledge that I was unhappy, try to find out why, and do something about it. Then I could begin to enjoy my blessings leave alone counting them.
When we first moved into this house, I had little experience of gardening. We have a small front garden and a bigger back garden. The front garden is south facing, which means it should get a lot of sun and lots of brightly coloured plants should be able to grow there. But they don’t, because the front garden also has three big trees that shade the beds underneath. The garden at the back is north facing, and has a densely wooded part. The walls were covered in ivy, as ivy grows in shade and covers bare surfaces rapidly. I began digging with a vengeance, spraining the thighs and the lower back. It felt like all my anger and anxiety and sadness could disappear down those muddy holes. I planted sun-loving plants in the shade, in the hope that I could reproduce the vibrant reds and oranges of India in my garden, even if I did not have the courage to wear these colours in England. I planted perennials because I thought annuals were a waste.
Gardening websites and books describe the amount of sunlight a plant needs to grow as “shade,” “partial shade” and “full sun.” Most beautiful things grow in full sun. I tried to fool myself that the front was in partial shade, when at the height of summer it is actually in full shade. I stubbornly planted things like lavendar and colourful flowers that are supposed to cope with partial shade. Some plants grew and others did not. Most of those that did grow, grew violently sideways, trying to catch the sunlight from the neighbour’s garden (he nurtures rubbish dumps).
I began taking out the ivy and other such overwhelming plants, and patches of the garden began to look bare. Young replacements took a while to grow as tall as the ivy. Every winter, when some of the plants died back, A complained that the front garden looked exactly the same as when we had moved in, if not worse, and asked why I did not plant this or that brightly coloured plant he had seen somewhere else.
I began to notice that the whites, blues and pinks do better in the shade. And that, in their own British way, they could be quite beautiful. Some come out in the spring when the trees don’t have all their leaves yet, and allow more sunlight to filter through. I still love the reds and oranges more, but blues lighten the shade. And one can have colour in the form of annuals. It’s not the end of the world if things have to be planted again and again. It gives you a chance to arrange things differently. Some nondescript plants that do really well in shade may just look like dark hedging, but smell beautiful.
When one is depressed, anxious and angry, one can come across as very self-involved, and in a way, one is. The thing is, you can recognise this about yourself and feel worse. The way out of this self-defeating spiral is, strangely, to become even more self-involved, in that you begin examining yourself and your thoughts closely, and deliberately set out to do things that make you happy, to spend more time with your negative thoughts and to challenge them.
With help, and A’s unstinting support, I began to observe my thoughts and actions. Began to realise I had to stop fighting and loathing myself, and that I deserved some happiness without feeling guilty about it. I am learning to stop being so angry with other people and to change my reaction to them. I have wasted years waiting for other people to change, and not getting on with my own life as a result. Certainly I had an over-inflated sense of responsibility and what I could achieve vis-a-vis others.
I’m learning to cut myself some slack, like myself a little better and not be in self-attack mode all the time. And while I haven’t got rid of those debilitating moments of sadness and self-loathing entirely, I can see them coming and I know how to get out of them. It may take a little bit of time but it’s nice to know that I can be in control, and I can be happy, even if the colours aren’t quite always what I want them to be.
updated to add in response to some comments and emails I received: Thanks all very much for your concern. Am MUCH better now-last year was the worst. I realise it may have sounded like I am still very low but am much happier than I’ve been in a long while 
This short book, of less than 200 pages, is Arun Krishnan’s debut novel, told through the eyes of Siddharth, a boy who loves cricket and whose father directs films. This is a book that is aimed both at young adults and the older reader.
