Tag Archives: personal

Grief for the past, hope for the future

Rant, ,

Today is a bad day.

Lots of days are bad days. If I measured my moods by my grief and panic over political events—not to mention ecological ones—I don’t think I’d have a good day in my life. Constant sadness isn’t an option, but on the day the UK formally leaves the EU I think I can allow myself to feel it. I am what smug twitter commenters with the overall demeanour of Nelson from the Simpsons call a Remoaner. They tell us to face facts: we lost. The people voted. Men without compassion or integrity won—and now I have to see their glowing, victorious faces everywhere.

I’m not sure how I’d feel about Brexit if its proponents were less smug. If I felt this vote represented some true desire Brits had for a better, more unified country, maybe it would be easier to take—but I suspect it wouldn’t. It’s too personal. My childhood was a bona fide manifestation of the European dream. In this dream, my Scottish parents moved to the Netherlands, learned the language while having my brother and me, and I grew up with two home countries instead of one. It was an enormous privilege. The fact that my passport said ‘United Kingdom’ didn’t matter. UK meant EU. Maybe I was odd, not-quite-Dutch and not-quite-Scottish, but it’s an oddness that enriched my life rather than detracting from it. Sometimes I’m jealous of people with deep roots in one single place, who can answer “where’s home?” without stumbling through the answer, but that doesn’t mean I’d change anything. My odd upbringing, as well as the seven years in the USA after, mean no one can tell where I’m from by my accent—but I know where I’ve been. I’m grateful for the opportunities my family and I were given.

I want others to have them too.

Fast-forward through my years in America. I moved to Dundee in late 2014: not in time for Scotland’s vote on Independence, but in plenty of time to vote Remain in the EU referendum. Boris Johnson is selective in choosing when Scotland’s votes matter. They matter when Scottish people vote to stay in the UK—under threat that leaving the UK will force them out of the EU—but they don’t matter when Scottish people vote overwhelmingly to stay in the EU. It’s almost like he doesn’t give a shit about Scotland.

(Spoiler alert: he doesn’t give a shit about Scotland.)

In the interest of full disclosure—despite what my pro-Indie family might think of me for admitting this!—I wasn’t convinced on Independence when I moved to Scotland. Some part of me was glad I didn’t get a vote. I didn’t know the situation, and sentimental feelings inspired by folk songs and tragic stories of oppression don’t add up to a functioning government. Now I’ve lived here, and it’s a different story. I’ve seen clearly how the Scottish government shields us, at least in part, from England’s endless appetite for privatisation. The people in charge of England want their country to be just like America, where the environment and poor people’s lives come second to companies turning a profit. Makes sense for Tory politicians; they’re rich. They’ll never have to live in places like Grenfell Tower, and they don’t have to face the negative consequences of their policies. They don’t even have to face the consequences of lying to voters. It’s harrowing, and my heart hurts for all the people in England anticipating more of the same austerity that has already claimed too many lives—but I believe better is possible for Scotland. I see the work the people around me are doing, whether they were born here or simply adopted the country as their own. They’re working to get better pay for teachers, or to protect the environment, or to shine light on the horrific imprisonment of immigrants at Dungavel. I see them caring deeply about their communities and the public good. These are the people who deserve to inherit the Earth, not slogan-slinging hypocrites who confuse politeness with morality.

Regardless, I’m getting off track. This was meant to be about the EU, and it’s becoming about Scottish Independence. The thing is, I trust Brussels over Westminster when it comes to human rights. I even trust Brussels over Westminster when it comes to caring about Scotland. You’d have to walk around Scotland with blinders on not to see all the roads, parks, and organisations that have been supported by the EU. The fact that some EU rules don’t have their intended effect and ought to be reconsidered is par for the course; that’s how governments work. It’s an EU rule that stopped businesses from dumping their waste into our waterways. I’m sure that was extremely inconvenient at the time, but is anyone going to argue we’d be better off with polluted rivers?

Never mind—I’m sure someone would argue that. Letting businesses pollute your country is great for economic growth, after all.

I’m disappointed. I grieve for a thing I thought I couldn’t lose. Growing up I thought progress was inevitable, that society would always improve on itself until we built a world so great it was boring. I thought that when we saw injustice, we’d fix it—not capitalise on it. How ignorant was I?

Instead the reality is this, and I suspect many people born with less privilege knew it all along: movement towards a more equal society is driven by good people fighting for their rights and the rights of others. Women weren’t given the vote. African Americans weren’t given freedom. Not much is changing on this day—not in any physical sense—but something good is slipping further from our grasp. The EU’s founding values are human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. Things worth fighting for, and things worth holding the European Union accountable for when it falls short. I don’t want to leave. A majority of Scotland’s people don’t want to leave.

I don’t intend to go quietly. My friends and I will organise and whinge and protest. ‘Remoaner’ is right. Screw every disingenuous, rich prick who pushed us into this mess. They deserve to live the lives they consign others to.

Happy Friday. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Writing with and without depression

Rant, Update, Writing, ,

Today my husband told me he was tired of seeing the otter on my front page. Putting aside the fact that people should never be tired of seeing cute otters, he did have a point: this blog has been gathering dust for a while. Well, let’s change that.

Lee Pace gifs: a fresh new feature of my blog.

2018 was an incredibly uncomfortable year for me—and also a plain incredible one. It started, as all calendar years do, in winter. I had a good, consistent exercise routine, I endeavoured to eat healthy and write a lot, I was surrounded by people I loved and talked to them regularly… and I was miserable. At the time I put this down to Seasonal Affective Disorder, which didn’t make a huge deal of sense as I’d just spent almost three weeks in Florida celebrating Christmas and New Year with my family, but it turns out that feeling miserable all the time doesn’t leave you a lot of energy for accurate self-reflection.

Is this a pigeon?

Thankfully, it wasn’t just me seeing me. My misery was closely tied to my writing, and 2017 had seen me try something entirely new: co-writing a book. My co-author was Ash, a friend I’d met in fandom, and we had no idea what we were doing—but we did it anyway. We raced our way through NaNoWriMo, and then Ash kept going and I stalled out.

It wasn’t writing I hated—I still loved writing fanfiction—but I hated producing original content. It made me feel vulnerable, unqualified, forced to make decisions I didn’t want to make. (This post from July 10 2017 seems, in hindsight, a fairly obvious attempt to conquer those feelings; it didn’t work.) Ash and I had poured ourselves into this book we both loved, with characters we both loved, and I couldn’t stand to work on it. Needless to say, Ash had a few questions… and a few theories.

Eventually, I accepted the idea that I might need help. This became another problem, as my denial turned out to be the only thing keeping me afloat. Once I stopped denying how I felt—and how I’d been feeling for a long time—I became terrified that I’d visit my GP and he’d tell me I was fine. Worse: that this was just how I was going to feel for the rest of my life.

I went to my GP, and he didn’t tell me I was fine. He told me that, given my lifestyle (ie: doing ‘everything right’ yet still depressed), I was a good candidate for antidepressants. An uncomfortable adjustment period followed. The nausea was no joke, but over the course of about a month I started feeling different. It was REALLY odd. Music brought on a storm of emotions. I got angry sometimes, instead of feeling resigned. Colours seemed more vibrant.

Me after a month of meds.

Anyway, the ins and outs are too many and too legion to properly discuss in a blogpost that’s meant to be about writing. Suffice to say that, once I had Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors on my side, I had the energy and the capacity to make changes. It’s amazing what a brain can do when it’s not waging war with itself; knots years in the making began to untangle, and my relationship with myself improved. Finally I could relax—and once I could relax I could have fun.

It took time, but original writing became something I loved again, the way I loved it as a teenager before it ever occurred to me to doubt myself. I’ve had more joy in original writing the past year than I did in the five years previous. Being a ‘tortured artist’ helped me about as much in my writing career as repeatedly stubbing my toe would have.

Antidepressants aren’t the solution for every depressed person, but my experiences have given me some insight. I have no patience for people who see antidepressants as a quick fix or a band-aid. For one thing, it wasn’t quick. Every week I stumbled over a new stupid thing I had to change about myself to be happier. For another, so what if people need chemical help to feel happy? Sadness is not inherently more authentic than happiness. It’s just sadness. It feels bad and it drains your energy. It stops you from being able to fix the things that make you unhappy, then calls you lazy to boot.

I’m calling it: you can’t “mind over matter” when your mind doesn’t have the right matter. I’ve spent the past year unlearning all the unhealthy coping mechanisms I picked up in half a decade of struggling to overcome depression without medication; I ought to know. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe The Good Place actress Kristen Bell. She speaks openly about her mental health struggles, and hearing this from people like her—who seem bubbly and successful and like they couldn’t possibly struggle with anything more laborious than picking out cute outfits—should help people realise this isn’t about trying, or weakness, or a person’s community being unsupportive. The worst thing about going on meds for me was the sense that I had all the tools to be happy and yet somehow failed. I’d failed my family and my friends and myself. I’d taken all the love people around me gave, and I’d squandered it by letting myself fall into this pit.

Screw that outlook. Sometimes love isn’t enough. It doesn’t cure Alzheimer’s, and it doesn’t cure cancer, and it doesn’t cure depression. How lucky we are, then, that we live in a world where people are learning to treat these diseases.

I love writing again. I love coming up with characters and pelting them with problems. I love messaging Ash about what would happen if we stuck our characters in a supernatural novel instead of a science fiction one. At the most basic level, I love forming sentences in aesthetically pleasing ways, and letting an image take shape. I love this skill I have that, by my fifth year post-university, I’d learned to resent.

Some things don’t change with the right amount of serotonin. Rejection still sucks. Putting myself out there is still hard—but I’m lucky. I am so, so lucky. And thanks to modern medicine, the NHS, and the people around me, I can finally feel the truth of that statement.

It feels good.