Of course, this had been coming for a while. It had only been a matter of time before I went into a full-on meltdown.
Crazy Drama Dave had not fooled my parents all these years. I had been a different version of myself at home. I arrived at the end of every school day completely drained and exhausted, and retreated to my room for hours on end to watch meaningless television. I had little motivation to do or say anything when I was in this state of mind; I would usually only get up when I was called to dinner. I’d sit silent at the table, have a couple of mouthfuls, mumble that I wasn’t hungry and return to my room.
After the GP visit back in the Mary days, Mum repeatedly tried to get me to go and see someone. But I wasn’t budging.
‘I’m fine,’ I would insist, even fooling myself. I thought this was how I worked, normally. I certainly wouldn’t have said I was happy, but then I didn’t think happiness was even possible.
Besides, it wasn’t like I didn’t have experience with psychologists. In fact, I’d seen a handful of doctors before I’d gone anywhere near high school.
‘You know, it’s okay to be depressed,’ she says, gripping my knee and looking into my eye. The young psychologist is pretty. Her hair is tied back in a ponytail; her clothes are inoffensive and sensible. She exudes good intentions. The office is an altar to the idea of sound mental health: it’s all warm inviting reds, couches of brown academic leather, cartographic art on the walls. (I’ve been to a lot of psychologists in my time; I don’t know why they’re obsessed with hanging old maps on the walls. Are psychologists ye olde sailors in their leisure hours? Do they know there are new ones available? I imagine them lost in suburbia, yelling into an olde scroll: ‘Which way is north, Goddamit? North?!’)
I’m ten at this stage, by the way.
‘You shouldn’t feel bad about feeling sad,’ she continues.
It sounds like she’s about to break into song.
‘That rhymed,’ I say, smiling. She returns the smile, but I detect pity. It’s slight and small, with a gentle nod.
‘It’s okay to feel depressed,’ she repeats. ‘I mean, David, you’ve got a lot going on for a ten year old, don’t you? Two brothers with Aspergers, you’re picked on at school, you’ve got no friends, both your parents are on antidepressant meds so, you know. It’s okay to be depressed.’
‘Um…thanks?’ I reply, uncertain. I wait for her to add to the list: ‘You’re pretty shit at sport too, and soon you’ll have to go to high school, which will be a nightmare, and you don’t know if God exists and what the purpose of life is and—OH, GOD!!’ She bursts into tears and leaps out of the window, the glass shattering as she falls and kills herself on the bitumen below. I calmly exit the office and tell the receptionist that my psychologist has killed herself, and I look at my mum in the waiting room as if to say: ‘See? I told you something like this would happen.’
But that doesn’t happen. And I’m being unfair to this particularly nice woman. She’s just trying to let me know that I have permission to feel sad. Even at this age, I’ve somehow picked up that it’s less trouble if I just say ‘I’m fine’ when someone asks how I am. My stubborn denial of my real feelings has led me to this room. I’m not fine. There are lots of reasons I shouldn’t be fine.
Sadness is one thing. Depression is something else. I have clinical depression. I know this because another psychologist told me a couple of years ago, when I was seven.
I was in grade three. I was experiencing anxiety that normal seven year olds weren’t experiencing. I was outright paranoid.
Whenever Mum and Dad would leave me in a car even for just two minutes, I was certain something awful would happen to them. I’d imagine them being kidnapped or murdered, and even their safe return wouldn’t convince me that they were safe. I was certain that impostors had killed my real parents and were adopting their skin as a disguise. I can’t remember voicing these fears, as I was never sure that my parents were my real parents. I would occasionally accuse them of trying to poison me—a tantrum that my parents put down to exhaustion.
If I made the mistake of watching the news, I would instantly believe that my family was destined for whatever sorry fate the television exposed—nuclear disaster, fire, murder and robbery were the most common fears. I barely slept.
So Mum and Dad took me to a psychologist who talked to me about ‘stress’. ‘Stress’ was a new word in my vocabulary, and in my seven-year-old mind it was something that made me special. The following week at show and tell, I got up in front of the class, explained what stress was, and how I have it sometimes, and I even talked through some of the tools the psychologist had given me to relieve it. My seven-year-old peers seemed indifferent. I remember the smile on the teacher’s face. It was the same as the one the psychologist would give me a few years later, when I pointed out that she was accidentally rhyming. It was a smile that said: ‘I don’t know what to do with this information. Who the fuck is this kid? Is this inappropriate?’
I’d learnt something new about myself and I wanted to share it. I didn’t understand that you weren’t supposed to get up in front of your class and talk about your mental-health difficulties. I got a sense of it that day though. No one said anything to me.
The psychologist who diagnosed me with stress was one of the very first psychologists my parents sent me to. His name was Lachlan. I was seven. I worshipped him. A person who would sit and listen to me…for a WHOLE hour?! He would sit and ask me questions and WANT to listen to my answers. Amazing.
The conversations with Lachlan quickly uncovered my incredibly low self-esteem. I was the victim of ongoing bullying at school, and I had begun to believe that the world was punishing me for being worthless.
Wisely, Lachlan and my parents were a little wary about giving a kid with anxiety and a case of the blues any mind-altering drugs. They sought different strategies. Lachlan gave me an exercise book. This was to be my ‘positive thinking’ book. Affirmations and lists of stuff I’d done successfully were to be written down in this book.
The only thing I really remember about the book was its cover. I’d wrapped it in bright red paper and stuck a picture of Genie from the Disney film Aladdin on the front alongside a picture of Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. I admired Williams’ artistry. He could play extroverted, joyful and silly, but also sombre, understated and lonely. I can’t remember what I wrote in the book, and I don’t know if it worked. But there must have been some kind of effect, because I didn’t need to go back to Lachlan for a while.
I was an easy target at school: I was crap at sport, and I was regularly mistaken for a foreigner. I had dark skin and a surprising abundance of hair for a prepubescent. A lot of the class insisted that I must be from England. My family had been Australian for a handful of generations.
‘But you talk like a Pom!’ they’d say with disdain. I was speaking English. They were speaking an exotic dialect known as ‘Bogan shithead’.
According to them (and, eventually, to myself), I was a girl. Gay. I wore the wrong things. I said the wrong things. I was just wrong.
My insomnia mutated into a significant problem. For about eighteen months I survived on very little sleep. As a nightly ritual, I’d go to the kitchen at around midnight, having attempted sleep for a few hours, cry for half an hour, and go back to bed. It went on for months. Mum and Dad tried every strategy under the sun. Some nights Mum would come out and make some toast, or give me special chocolates that she’d kept hidden. Other times she and Dad would ignore it, not speak of it, trying to deny my cry for attention. It may have been a cry for attention. I don’t know what it was. Mum and Dad tried everything.
Constantly distraught over the bullying, Mum, Dad and I decided on a motto: ‘What do I care what other people think?’ I recited this to myself, over and over, during class taunts and when I was shoved into the sand in the playground. It helped. I was proud of it. It was my own little ‘positive thinking’ lesson.
We went back to Lachlan. I explained my mantra.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Good. But is that a short-term or long-term strategy? Is that going to work for a long time?’
‘Oh,’ I said, instantly deflated. Mum was furious. Our little home-made exercise for sanity and self-esteem had been shot down. We didn’t go back to Lachlan after that.
To be honest, I lose track of the psychologists after Lachlan. Eventually I gave up, and adolescent stubbornness took over. I would not go to a doctor. After all, I was fine.
Mum nagged at me about it for years. Days would pass without me eating, hours without speaking, many nights without sleep. When Mum finally got me to go to our GP, who provided the diagnosis ‘he’s not depressed’ within two minutes of seeing me, I used it as a defence for years.
By the time I reached senior high school, I had come to see going to a psychologist or a doctor as a personal failure. Being an independent and accomplished man meant standing tall without help. Feeling anxious, stressed, or uncontrollably sad was an effeminate failing. There was little I could do about my gangly body, which was my inescapable evidence of physical weakness. My mind, however, was easier to disguise. Every day as I showered, brushed my teeth, and walked out the door without breakfast, I put on the mask of a confident young man. Inside, though, I was only making things worse by repressing my true feelings.
It’s easy to underestimate the power of personal denial, but I had convinced myself that I was absolutely fine. I believed that I was as happy as I could be.
Thinking otherwise was absolutely terrifying. Even entertaining the idea that I needed help meant also accepting the possibility that I was gay, a bad friend, a terrible boyfriend, incapable of leading or responsibility, a burden on my parents, a negative influence on my brothers, and, therefore, a fundamentally unworthy human being.
But it was a fight I was always going to lose. The negative thoughts festered and grew wild, manifesting in all kinds of ways that I didn’t expect. My immune system also suffered. It took me longer to bounce back from any minor illness. I was exhausted, sick and empty.
The result of years of denial was paralysing fear, and the inability to get out of bed. And it was just weeks before I was to finish high school.