Gardening and getting the D

I’m not great at the whole gardening lark. My brother’s balcony is a lush, urban jungle, brimming and bursting with blooms and fruit and bees. Mine has a lonely foxglove that grows horizontally (rather than vertically) and a stumpy little shrub that is being slowly devoured by a mystery caterpillar I cannot find no matter how hard I search; not exactly then, the hidden Camden oasis I envisioned.

Gardening, it turns out, is a lifetime project. You can’t plant your bulbs and then wander off, hoping for a Kew worthy display without any further effort. You need to check for weeds and slugs and greenfly. See if there’s enough light and enough water, but not too much of either. A garden, even if it is just a few plant pots, overfilled with optimism and buy-one-get-one-free bulbs from that dodgy road-side nursery, needs love and care and attention, ALL THE TIME.

It’s taken me nearly 32 years to realise what this really means.

Last month I had my final session of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. It’s not the first time I’ve had my final session, but I’m hopeful it’s the last.

I was first diagnosed with depression when I was 25. Eight long years after when I can now recognise that it set in. At first, I thought everyone felt that way, that it was just another of adolescent’s little gifts, along with exam stress, braces and crushes on boys with bad hair and worse dress sense. I was fully convinced that, despite the long hours of being unable to get out of bed and the relentless conviction that I was worthless and unloved, everyone more or less had similar feelings of inferiority and irrelevance.

It manifested itself in different ways. Some days I couldn’t leave my house, other days it was my bed. Sometimes I would go out and drink myself into oblivion, become life and soul of the party, only to dissolve into tears near the end the night, crying all the way home on my drunk and confused friends. One summer, sure that if I could just be thinner I’d be happier, I stopped eating altogether (spoiler alert - this didn’t work). Sometimes I’d be just fine, and think to myself that actually there wasn’t anything wrong with me at all. Other times I’d sit at my desk, 23 floors up in Canary Wharf and chant in my head over and over again “don’t scream, don’t cry, don’t scream, don’t cry”.

It was an exhausting, miserable way to live and my brain would constantly offer me ways out. Here comes the tube just jump, jump, jump. Grab that bottle of bleach and glug, glug, glug.

If things were really bad, I’d fantasise about a noose tightening around my neck, like an itch that needed to be scratched, desperate to feel the life choked out of me, just as painful leaving as it had been to endure.

I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t want to feel like shit anymore. Now, in 2018, going to the doctor seems the obvious solution. Mental health is far and away taken much more seriously than it was back in 2011. In 2011 it felt radical, ridiculous even to talk about it, let alone go to the doctor. I made 7 different appointments that I cancelled in a panic before I finally had the courage to show up and talk.

I thought I might be sick, waiting for him to tell me that everyone felt like this; everyone felt like this and I was just terrible at dealing with it. That I was being melodramatic and attention seeking and pathetic…

“I can help.” He said.

And then suddenly, after eight years of being alone in an ocean, desperate to stay afloat and keep my head above the waves, suddenly someone else was in the water with me. Someone who wasn’t exhausted and close to drowning, but someone who could get me back to shore.

I was referred for CBT therapy through the NHS, despite my private healthcare at work. Nobody at the office knew, and I was too scared to book meeting rooms for my sessions over the phone. Convinced I’d be sacked, I’d wander out onto the Wharf, and try to find a private place away from the wind and the workers and the lost tourists, where I could cry down the phone and try to understand why my brain didn’t work like everybody else's.

It was brutal. For weeks I felt like it was making me worse, not better. And getting better terrified me. Depression was all I knew. It came everywhere with me, impacted every decision I made. Who would I be without it?

But then one day I woke up and everything was in colour. The radio was properly tuned and there was a fluttering in my chest that wasn’t misery, or hunger or anxiety. It was excitement and giddiness and hundreds of other feelings I could only just remember from before. For the first time in a long time, I thought maybe I’ll make an old lady yet, and I wondered why I’d waited so long to get help.

In 2011 I was sure I’d be sacked for my illness. In 2018 my current employer, BNP Paribas, are dedicating an entire week to mental health at work, as part of Diversity and Inclusion week and their ongoing internal efforts to change attitudes around mental illness. I’ve had two more bouts of depression in the last six years, and two more rounds of CBT. But things have changed since I was 25.

The second time around my colleagues knew where I was going, and more importantly, knew what I was going through. When you sit in a small room with the same four people every day, it’s hard to hide how sick you are. It’s hard to hide anything, frankly. Which is why I know how genuine their support for me was; that the allowances made for my irregular working patterns and performance were legitimate. Which is why if some days all I could do was cry quietly at my desk, that was okay, because they knew having to come into work was the only thing that was keeping me going.

The third time around, when in April just gone, sat on a conference call at my desk, a panic started rising in me like lava out of nowhere, ready to erupt and destroy everything I had rebuilt, they were the first people I went to, and kept going to, updating them with my progress and how I was feeling.

I can’t say everyone around me was supportive. Some friends told me I should keep my illness to myself, it wasn’t something to be admitted to or talked about. Some friends stopped being my friends all together. To some I was attention seeking or selfish or lying. It seems an odd thing to lie about to be honest. But I pity these people; this illness has taught me more about myself, people and life than they might ever have.

Depression will tell you that the sky is green. The sky is green and everyone around you thinks you’re an idiot for believing it’s blue. It will make you doubt everything that makes you who you are, and it will isolate you from everything that can prove otherwise. 

Depression will seal your mouth shut, stop any of the words escaping, and let them grow into a hurricane in your head, until there’s nothing else you can hear. But the second you start saying those thoughts out loud they lose their power. Whether you’re talking to a friend, a colleague, a stranger, a therapist, a doctor. When you say the words out loud, your head gets a little quieter, you can think a little clearer. CBT is a talking therapy. It helps you understand why you respond to things negatively, and helps you challenge the core beliefs that dictate those responses. CBT, and talking, have literally saved my life.

So what does all this have to do with gardening?

My third round of CBT was the shortest yet and whilst I’ll probably be on medication for the rest of my life, I am confident that I might finally be done with depression.

Talking has given me the tools to grow the most beautiful garden I can. It might have taken me nearly 32 years, but being open about my mental health, when it’s good and when it’s bad, is the only way to prune and weed and tend to my thoughts and my health. It has taught me to be kind to myself, to make sure I get enough sunlight and enough water and to talk and talk and talk.

The summer garden didn’t quite turn out the way I wanted, but it’s a lifetime project, and I’m ready for it.