Depression

I want to cover this topic first, because it's been a part of my life for so many years, and yet I still don't fully understand my disease. It's time to organise my thoughts about my mental illness.

January is a hard time of year for me. The weather is miserable, it gets dark early, and I end up getting all nostalgic, which in my case is usually a bad thing - it means I torture myself by going over and over past mistakes, parts of my life I wish I could just blot out with Tippex. Unfortunately, Tippex isn't magic.

At the moment my mind keeps returning to my mid-to-late teens. That was a bad time in my life, for me and the people around me. At that time, my mental illness was undiagnosed and unmedicated, and it was horrible. I was horrible. A lot of people got hurt - people who meant the world to me, people who will probably never understand how truly sorry I am for how I treated them back then. My mind was a scary place, and I wasn't myself, but I should have sought help much sooner. It's only in the last few years that I've come to realise the true value of love and friendship, and the significance of my actions when I was a monstrous teen. It's in the past, but it will always be with me.

Moving on to my early twenties, my depression was medicated, but it still affected my life, if in a different way. The meds made me tired and lethargic all the time, and that was 90% of the reason why I flunked out of uni (the other 10% of the blame lies at the feet of one Mr Murray, a slacker who dragged me down with him). No matter how long I live, or how many degrees I manage to rack up during my life, I will always be ashamed of dropping out of that Japanese course. It's not what my parents wanted for me, and it's not what I wanted for myself. But my brain at that time was stuck in a kind of pattern whereby I couldn't get the energy, physical or emotional, to do what I needed to do. Some people glide through life - at that point, I was like a stalled car. For a number of years, I felt completely pointless. The medication was supposed to calm my depressive feelings - which it did - but I'm pretty sure it wasn't supposed to shut me down altogether.

Then, in 2007, I met a wonderful man, K, and fell in love. To say that he changed my life for the better would not be to give him enough credit. He brought something out of me that had been lying dormant for years - he actually made me feel like I was a good person. I started to like myself again. My relationship with my parents improved dramatically, I started to make more friends, and I went back to my studies - I qualified as a TEFL teacher, and now I'm doing a degree through the Open University with a view to becoming a secondary school teacher one day. Four years ago, I wouldn't have believed that any of this was possible. The thing that changed was my mindset. Thanks to K, I stopped thinking of myself as a horrible person, and started to rise above the mental illness. I started to get better.

That's not to say that the depression has gone away. Far from it. My life is a long way from perfect right now. I think I'm in another 'stalled car' phase - having trouble getting out of bed before midday, struggling with job applications, barely even having the energy to get dressed some days. Some people don't understand that depression can be clinical, thinking that it must be linked to past tragedies - and for a lot of people, it is. I empathise with them. But in my case, the depression is almost entirely chemical, and when my brain isn't working right, there's very little I can do about it. At times like this, when I struggle to leave the house (even to do things I really want to do, like meeting friends), I have to remind myself that I've managed to overcome it in the past, and I can do it again.

But I really need the people who love me.

Welcome

I set up this blog ages ago, but I haven't written in it yet. No time like the present!

Anyway, this blog will mostly consist of my thoughts concerning depression, anxiety, bisexuality, writing, feminism, and anything else that comes into my mind. I'll also be posting some of my creative writing pieces, and occasionally recipes.


Why 'Purple Thoughts'?

A few reasons:

1. Purple is my favourite colour, and it's the colour of the blog (duh).

2. Depressed people are often described as 'feeling blue', but I think depression is more complex than that. Purple is a better colour for it.

3. This is the bisexual pride flag:

I hope you enjoy my blog. Call me Sashimi.