How Depression Inspired Me To Join Medium

The mountain is daunting. Look down and choose your steps wisely.

I’ve been dealing with severe clinical depression since I was a teenager.

Note: I use ‘dealing’ not ‘suffering’ or ‘inflicted’. I’m not a victim. I’m doing what I can to manage this beast.

For those who aren’t up-to-speed with how depression works, I could bore you with medical details and statistics, how it effects 3% of the population, but let’s settle for the simple truth that it involves a chemical imbalance in the brain (Harvard).

It’s a real condition that medical practitioners can treat to an extent. It’s not something you can “just get over”.

Consider how you’d feel being told to “just get over” a broken leg. It won’t happen without assistance and adequate time to heal. Instead of being a broken bone within a limb, it’s a frazzled neural pathway in your brain.

Now we all understand what depression is, I’ll get to how it’s resulted in you and I being here.

Is there a point?

I’ve never thought I was any good at what I did. There was always someone better, so why should I take up the space that they could occupy?

In recent years some have tried to rationalise that I had a bad case of ‘imposter syndrome’, but as anyone who has experienced this self-doubt will tell you, it’s far deeper than that.

It’s one of the reasons people like me try to appease everyone else. We need to feel safe. We need to know we’re doing a good job, so we go above and beyond. It sounds great for the recipient, but it’s not healthy.

Combined with a self-loathing that can lead some to self-harm or even suicide (fortunately I haven’t experienced this), finding a way to deal with day-to-day life can sometimes be overwhelming.

I was entering a bad phase in 2007 and had been lucky to have found a psychologist who was giving some advice that was proving helpful. But when I was made redundant thanks to 2008's GFC, it ramped up into a new gear entirely.

At the time I deluded myself into believing I would find work easily. What I didn’t realise was that while the crisis didn’t create much havoc on the surface of Australian society, underneath it became much harder as cutbacks became the new normal.

It became apparent that copywriters weren’t needed to spruik businesses because people weren’t buying their products.

Rejection can be bad at any time and for any disposition. Adding pre-existing depression into the mix allowed the black dog to dig in its claws.

The voices in my head not only got louder, they became personified. And they were very loud.

This is where a psychologist helped me silence those voices, in what I felt was a great victory, and one that would cure me of my affliction.

Annoyingly, while the actual voices ceased, the feelings remained. Simmering.

Step by step by step

Over the past 12 years, I’ve managed to find piecemeal jobs, starting with data entry when nothing else appeared, then tutoring at university, even writing articles for in-house magazines. I even managed a full-time position doing marketing for a hi-fi store for a few years.

But nothing lasted as I fell apart trying to overcome the feeling that I was a joke and shouldn’t be there.

The past five years have been the worst. My confidence shot, I ended up removing myself from society and literally making my home a prison. I developed a phobia of the outdoors, and a fear of interacting with people, lest they see me for what I was. A failure.

I’m better than that

It sounds like I’m a pathetic fool begging for pity, but I can’t accept that I’m a failure. I’m better than that.

I’ve run incredibly successful in-house communication departments for multi-million dollar businesses. I’ve received awards for my writing and communication skills. I know I can do this.

Remember the clinical depression? It doesn’t matter how much you know something. The insidious nature of a mental condition is that it wears you down through doubt and fear.

Welcome to the base of the mountain

At the beginning of 2019 I finally succumbed to the persistent will of my doctor to see a new psychologist. I’d been fighting it because:

(a) after seeing so many, how could I actually learn anything new

(b) I didn’t want to take space away from someone who needed it, and

(c) what’s the point?

The mechanisms were set in place to find a new psychologist. But I was still crippled by my self-doubt and fear of the world.

I decided I needed a challenge. I would appear on a tv game show.

It took months to rustle up the courage to write the application, but after I finally had the guts to submit, I actually started to feel like I wanted to do it. For the first time in a long time I felt like I cared about something.

Over the next eight months, I learned that I’d successfully reached the audition stage, made the call-back, and then accepted to appear. I’ll tell the full story of what happened some other time, least to say it helped remind myself that I am capable of things that otherwise I may have considered impossible.

I’m not saying going on a game show requires superhuman skills, but when you consider I was finding it difficult to get out of bed only a scant few months earlier, I had become Superman.

Write on

During this process two other things happened: I decided to join a writers group, and I began therapy with a psychotherapist (not psychologist — something I wouldn’t have previously considered).

The journey I’ve been on with my mental health social worker has taken me me into the incredible world of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy — another subject I’ll discuss fully in a different article as it has proven extraordinarily helpful.

You’ll notice I skimmed over the writers' group.

I hadn’t decided to start writing again per se. This was more for the social connection.

I needed to talk to people on a regular basis who weren’t my family, and the fortnightly group at my local library proved just the tonic. A lovely group of supportive people who I feel incredibly comfortable with.

Although the writing I did with them was enjoyable, it wasn’t leading anywhere. Or so I thought.

Thanks to the therapy making me feel more confident, I decided to start sharing my work. I’d originally had a blog on Wordpress, but felt I needed something different.

Far from ordinary

I had a Medium account for years, but never really used it. On revisiting my account, I found it offered everything I was looking for. A community of like-minded creatives who were both creating new work and reading others.

The set-up was also beautiful in its simplicity: just write, paste links, or insert photos. That’s it. No bells and whistles.

It allowed me to focus on writing and reading (copious amounts of reading!).

Which I’ve now been doing for about a month.

It’s changed my life.

My confidence is growing daily.

I enjoy getting out of bed and even go outside for the hell of it. I’m connecting with others within the Medium world, and having wonderful banter.

Even better, I’m constantly thinking about what I’d like to write next. My current list is about 20 items long, and I really should start mining them before brainstorming more, but I don’t care. I’m writing again and enjoying it.

Was it the chicken or the egg?

This confluence of events is making me wonder about how the change occurred.

The EMDR work has been seismic in its change in me. We’ve really only just started the sessions, yet already I feel different. Properly different.

Did it give me the encouragement to start taking myself seriously again and press “publish” so readily?

Or was it the writing that brought my voice back and allowed me to enter the therapy and confront the issues that have been eating away at my core, holding me back from living?

To be honest, the old me would theorise over this for hours. Days. Weeks. Months. Years.

The me of 2020 doesn’t care.

I’ve started climbing the mountain. And the view is magnificent.

Postscript: I never thought I’d write an article like this, but having read so many personal stories on Medium, and deciding to challenge myself to step outside my comfort zone, it seemed like the logical step. I’m actually very surprised at how much I enjoyed this journey of self-discovery.

If you have tips on how I can improve writing in this style, please comment or send me a private note.

About The Author

Stephen Scott. Writer of Words. Yet Another Creative. Many names, some printable in decent company. He’s been plying his trade in copywriting and creative management since, well, before you were born (if you were born in the 90’s). Yes, he’s obviously a Star Wars fan. Connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.