Content Warning: This post contains extensive discussion about grief, depression, and contains mentions of suicide.
So, as has been mentioned on this blog before, my mother died when I was ten years old. It’s a bit of an abrupt gut-punch of a start to this blog post, but as I’ve found many times throughout life, there’s never really a painless way to bring it up. But bring it up I shall, because today I want to talk about my journey from that moment onward, throughout my teenage years, and how that affected me going forward.
Why? Because I’m a chronic oversharer? Maybe. But I’ve found myself thinking about my early teenage years a lot over the past few weeks, and applying what I know now to my mental state back then. And maybe in sharing my journey here, someone may find some use out of it. Plus, looking back on the completed post now, I realise that I’m not sure many people understand what I went through as a teenager. I’m not sure I truly did!
So, I’m ten years old, and my mum has just died. Life changing stuff. But it’s not really information that’s possible to absorb right now. It’s something I’m dreadfully aware of, but I feel guilty for taking time out of school because for the most part, I feel strangely normal. It may sound brutal, but at the time I’m telling myself that the only change to my life is that I never get to see my mum ever again, right? That’s sad, that sucks, I loved my mum to pieces. But I’ve turned a complex four dimensional traumatic loss into a 2D problem. My most immediate concerns are the bleak atmosphere which now surrounds us as a family. Oh, and for a good year I’m on standby to give anyone who badmouths my mother a black eye. Nobody did, of course, but that defensive aggression was there.
I don’t have a lot of memories from that period (I’d say due to time but I remember this part of my life being a little hazy in the years immediately after.) I have vague memories of mum’s funeral, where I was too numb to cry. This’ll be important later on. My throat got real tight and my mouth got real dry, but I felt a deep disconnect between these physical reactions and my numb emotional state. If I were to take a guess at psychology I’d say this was either the cause or beginning of a lifelong (so far) problem. I’m still surprised by the physical emotional reactions my body has to this day. But for the next ten years at least, I very rarely cry, that’s the point here.
Something I don’t really talk about too much is the misfortune we had with pets in the immediate years afterwards. I cried when our dog Tiffany died, and my dad told me that was probably everything coming out then, but I wasn’t convinced, and to be honest, I’m still not. If anything, this caused me more concern over my inability to cry for my mum. I’d cry over the dog but not her? What did that say about me? Anyway, we also adopted rabbits and guinea pigs which didn’t last long for various health reasons or other misfortunes. We treated them perfectly well, but it began to feel like death had cursed our family.
Again, I really don’t remember too much about the immediate two or so years after my mum died, but I should probably add that it wouldn’t have been all doom and gloom. My numbness came paired with the ability to compartmentalise the grieving part of myself with the usual ten year old kid part of myself, and only when looking back now can I understand that this duality of self contributed to a lot of my developing worldview and mindstate going forwards. Hell, one of my mum’s friends later told me that at her very wake, I spent a lot of it enthusiastically telling her all about the Nintendo Wii, which must have just been announced. I was a kid who was getting by convincing himself that the world was still normal, and acting accordingly.
I remember having a lot of anxiety about starting secondary school. Probably the normal stuff, but as I suffer so much with anxiety now I do wonder. Those thoughts patterns feel awfully familiar. Catastrophising about change, fearing the unknown. What if nobody likes me, what if I’m bullied, what if I get lost between lessons? But hey, I survived. I remember being sapient enough about time and change that I tried to commit much of my first day to memory, as I knew it’d be something I looked back on and reminisced on later in life. I’d become highly aware of how time could erode memory and transform normality.
Anyway, new school, new friends. I spent a lot of time feeling like I had some sort of other knowledge. That mostly manifested as me feeling “wiser” than the other kids, which would be absurd to anyone who knew me at the time because I was outwardly very immature and hyperactive, like many other twelve year olds. I didn’t spend school moping; not yet, anyway. I spent it forming a group of friends who’d mostly go on to leave by the end of the school year.
Inwardly, I’d dramatise my “duality”, though I wouldn’t think about it in quite that sense yet. I’d replay in my head ordinary conversations with a different tone. Phrases of happenstance could become moments of deep importance. And here’s the thing: I still have no idea how much of this behaviour was normal for a kid my age, and how much of it was influenced by my “unique” worldview. This is important, I realise now. I had no idea what normal was. I had no idea how much of me would have been me if my mum was still alive. I still don’t.
(I would eventually gain enough self awareness to realise that any other kid in school could be hiding just as much trauma as I was, but it took a bit.)
To add to my emotional plate, I’d developed quite a crush, one which would end up in us going out for two weeks before she moved away at the start of the summer holidays. We’re still friends, so there’s a chance she’s reading this, and if she is I’d like to say that whatever came next wasn’t your fault!
I mention it here because for the first time, I’m correlating these two very different types of loss under one word. My then-girlfriend moving away just as we finally got together did have a profound effect on my mental health. This type of loss was one I could digest, and so for the first time I fully felt the sting of missing someone. This wasn’t a pain I was too numb to recognise. It was a “normal” growing experience, perhaps twisted a little out of shape by my past experiences.
I fell into what I would now consider to be undiagnosed depression. I maintained that aforementioned “duality”, but for the first time my friends saw the cracks. Some days I’d be almost completely unresponsive, spending lessons with my head in my arms (when allowed), wandering off at lunch breaks. It wasn’t all about the girlfriend moving away, which I of course got over in time; I became obsessed with the intangibility of this generalised awful feeling I was having. I never became suicidal, thankfully, but I would dedicate many thoughts to what my funeral would look like, how I could die in an accident, what music would play at the service, that sort of thing.
I didn’t understand what was happening in my brain so as much as I dramatised my own life in my thoughts, I also beat myself up for being overly dramatic. I called myself an attention seeker for being hyperactive, and developed a very low opinion of myself. And, crucially, I didn’t tell anyone in my life how I was feeling at the time. I’d lose entire evenings to feeling depressed, not that I knew to even think of it that way at the time. And I spent the entire time thinking I was just being overly dramatic, punishing myself for feeling bad.
It’s not until I put those words down that I realise how bleak it sounds, so let me add this: Despite the pervasive depression in my life at the time, some pretty amazing stuff also happened. I met my step family, who I love dearly, and had many fantastic days even with this headspace I’d sink into. And I hid that shit, by the way. If anyone’s wondering, I was ashamed of it. If I was sulking sullenly in my room and somebody knocked, I’d perk up and pretend I was fine before they came in.
Importantly, it doesn’t make any of the joy or happiness I expressed false at all. The thing that confused me so much about how I was feeling is that the smiles weren’t fake, they were genuine. It was possible for me to have a really good day and a really bad night, and both halves of my day were as true as each other.
I hit another pretty rough patch when I was sixteen. An online friend of mine who I didn’t know too well chose to end his own life, and this cut through me in ways I didn’t understand. If I hadn’t known him so well, why did I feel so much grief over his passing? Compounding on this, some of my closest friends were going through their own mental health crises, and in my haste to help them I began obsessing over them following in my online friend’s footsteps. This was just about as much depression and anxiety as I’ve ever felt all at once; my grades slipped, my behaviour became extremely irrational, and after months of masking my pain I finally broke down in front of my parents.
I lay this all bare now because I finally start to see a pattern. Besides just understanding anxiety and depression a lot better now, I can also see how experiencing loss at such a young age formed my response to loss and pain going forwards.
This is all the distant past now. I’d like you to know that while I still deal with anxiety every day, I’m fairly confident in saying I haven’t felt depressed in a decent while. I’ve had amazing support from my family and friends, and I’m actually due for my first therapy session next week. I’m generally in a pretty good place for me! But I wanted to share my adolescent experiences, and how things which all felt so intangible and indefinable back then were actually always linked together and quantifiable.
And to give a clear shining message: I got better. In my darkest moments I convinced myself that I didn’t want to feel better because I didn’t know who I was without the pain. But it turns out that it wasn’t the pain that defined me. And as I learn how to deal with it now, I find that I’m still myself. I just spend less time paralysed by my own brain.
One last thing, although it’s a little personal. I mentioned my mum a lot and how I digested her passing by compartmentalising what it meant. But a few years ago I think I did finally confront the “4D version” of events by recontextualising things from an adult point of view. Instead of just considering my life without her in it, I considered her life and how it ended too early, and the world without her in it. And on the way home from work at 12am, I sat in a bus shelter and had a good cry.
If you made it this far, thanks so much for reading. I hope it helped you in some way, but if not, that’s fine too. This was mostly for me.
Perpetually Perturbed 