Change and chronic illness
The body, depression and my relationship with the guitar
Trigger warning: discussion of suicide
Change can be terrifying, disorientating, disconcerting, exhilarating.
It can click things into place, but it can also provoke a dangerous spiritual spiral to nowhere.
Recently there’s been a lot of temporary changes in my life, which I find harder to cope with than permanent change. At least with permanent change, you can move towards integrating the new elements of your life. With temporary change, you feel as if you are perched lightly on a wall somewhere, not knowing which way to go. You get muscle ache, or a sore bum.
For various reasons, my partner and I have temporarily left our home, Jerez de la Frontera, to stay with our families in the UK this summer. Him in London, and I in Scotland. I got a job working in a deli down the road from my dad and his partner’s house because, quite frankly, the word freelance has begun to fill me with dread. I developed an overwhelming phobia of opening emails and no matter how hard I tried, could not bring myself to reply to anyone.
When the pandemic started I was working as an English teacher in a job that left me barely any time for creativity. I was unwell and had developed agoraphobia. I embraced the pandemic, to be honest. It was a relief to be working from home. I had escaped from rooms of yelling children and the constant demands of the busy outside world. Two years later and I have to dangle carrots in front of my nose to get to the computer. The only thing that compels me to open my computer these days is writing for myself (the effort of contorting my brain into the expectations of others is enough to make me go back to bed) or re-editing films, making new mini-shorts and soundtracks with audios I’ve recorded and foraged over the years.
I have been frightened so often by physical and mental health breakdowns over the years I am quick to respond to what my body tells me. I stop doing activities that deep down feel wrong or forced. This both exhilarates and frightens me. Isn’t that everything that we’re taught not to do? Where will I be in a few years time? Will I find it harder and harder to relate to the people I grew up with?
As much as I struggle with change, I like it.
I need it. I change a lot. It seems to be the necessary ingredient for me to function well. But change, if you are not prepared for it, can be tricky. Particularly for the chronically ill person. Even small changes in diet, mealtimes, water, air, access to rest can be tremendous for the body to deal with. And occasionally we all have to deal with these changes. So it is prudent to acknowledge the impact of what these changes have on us, and how we can help our bodies to deal with it better.
I had a very scary mental health moment when I arrived in the UK a little over a month ago. My body was out of whack. I am no stranger to depression. The symptoms are both physiological and psychological and it’s often hard to know which comes first: the low mood or the malfunctioning body. It's commonly known that chronic illness is strongly linked to depression, and something that many people with chronic illness are accustomed to.
I’ve accepted, more so in recent years, that depression will come and go in waves and no matter how good my diet is, or how much yoga I do, it will return. I have to be prepared for it. Many long-term sufferers of depression have survival-packs for when it arrives. Big life changes in conjunction with a mental health crisis can be frightening, because your survival pack is harder to access in unfamiliar territory, whether it is spiritual or physical. All survival packs look different, and I dislike that many mental health websites and services proffer one-size-fits-all approaches.
Thankfully, a few weeks later, I couldn’t feel further from the way that I felt in the throes of the depression. When it's over, there’s a part of me that wants to forget I ever felt those feelings. Survival-wise, it’s logical that I would enjoy the respite, knowing that my depression will return. However, the universe is reminding me, with its superior intelligence, that it is judicious to bookmark the moment I’ve passed through. Not to hold onto the feelings of despair and worthlessness but to remember the real threat it temporarily poses and attend to that.
Last week, I found out that a friend took his own life. He was a few years older than me, in his late thirties. He was part of a group of friends I made in Jerez de la Frontera, some years ago. They were all living there and studying flamenco dance and guitar. They were part of the reason I continued going back to visit. I later moved to Jerez and I am the only person in that friendship group that remains living there. With the news of his tragic passing we’re all in contact again, expressing our affection for each other, reminding ourselves to look out for each other and planning a reunion. It’s provoking me to reach out to friends and remind them that they are important to me.
Deep down though, I know that it won’t really last. It never does. I don’t say this because I am the proverbial pessimist that believes we are all truly alone in this world. We are and we aren’t. We are often surprised by who shows up for us when we need them. In my experience it isn’t the people that you expect. Perhaps it never can be, because things don’t stay the same. Life and circumstances are always in flux. We cannot expect to be surrounded by a constant ring of love and support. Even if we are surrounded by people.
That’s my little mental health trick. Never expecting anything from anyone, but hoping that I can ask for help when I need it. I rarely do ask for help. I know I should, but I often don’t. When I’m in that dark place, reaching out seems impossible. I cannot voice the true nature of my thoughts. They are often quite strange and I struggle to translate them from Rebecca’s “head land” to the outside world. It's like a language you could speak but not write.
That’s why for me, the old mental health adage about “talking it out” is not always helpful.
It tends to work when I am mildly sad but rarely when I’m in the depths of melancholy. When I have tried to talk to someone during a deep depression I often leave the conversation feeling bitterly misunderstood because the other person couldn’t understand what I was saying in the way I needed them to. Or they tried to help, but couldn’t. That is always our tendency, to grasp to find a solution. I tend to think that if it was so simple to solve we wouldn’t be at that level of despair in the first place.
Unfortunately I have lost other people I loved by suicide. The biggest difficulty in the aftermath is knowing how to grieve. You can’t say, “at least they didn’t suffer”, or “they were surrounded by their family”, or any of those things that people say to comfort each other in the wake of a death. The full horror of it hits you and there are no pretty bows to tie around it. In part this is related to the taboo surrounding suicide. Our language for grief after suicide is embryonic. We are not far from an era (that still pervades) where people who committed suicide were considered sinners, or denied decent burials.
Recently a friend of mine suffering from a particularly severe bout of depression began to have suicidal thoughts. Rather than keeping silent about them, as so many of us are wont to do, she made jokes about it. It was triggering for me, reminding me of a traumatic situation I had experienced in the past. I communicated this to her, but she explained to me that it was important to be able to speak about it with humour because she didn’t want to be alone in her repetitive thoughts. Despite feeling worried and disturbed I am glad that she opened up to me. So often we want to explain things away, or shut people down for having disturbing thoughts, as if shooing them away will make them disappear.
I was in a relationship with someone who committed suicide. Every time he made a comment such as, “I’ll never get old, because I’m going to kill myself before then”, I would shut him down, disregarding that it could ever be a possibility, as if it would make its eventuality any less probable. I regret doing that now, even though I know it wouldn’t have changed the course of events. I suspect I wasn’t the only one in his life to do that either.
Personally, there are many thoughts that I don't feel disposed to communicate about myself when I am in a dark place. I am not suggesting that the only way to get through these fraught periods is vocalising everything. However, my thoughts might be that bit less heavy if I knew that speaking out meant that I would be listened to without judgement. My recent depression arose because I wasn’t prepared for the true reality of what the change in my life entailed. I temporarily lost my sense of purpose and self. I could genuinely no longer see a function for myself in the world. I misinterpreted loving acts as contempt. This is what the depressed brain does.
Someone well-meaning said to me, “you know it’s just chemical?” And I did know that. That’s part of the frustration. I can physically feel my serotonin draining from me. It is as if there are weights attached to the top half of my body. There is a sensation that my muscles are straining against gravity. I feel as if, if I didn’t exert myself I would droop forward, head flopping over my legs. I know perfectly well it’s physiological. The rational brain remains beneath, but it has been hijacked by a flood of negative thoughts.
The guitar helped me through this depressive episode. It was a pleasant change, because when I am depressed I will often stop playing the guitar or doing anything creative. This time, I looked at it as a physical exercise, a way to preoccupy my body when I had nothing else to do. I didn’t need to be good or creative, only go through the motions, doing repetitive exercises. In light of this, I have been thinking about how and why an instrument like the guitar can help with depression. Of course, it’s different for everyone, but for me the repetitive, familiar sounds and movements helped me feel safe and in control again. Even if everything else seemed to spin out of control I knew it was a constant, though it frustrated me at times.
I came up with a guitar metaphor for depression—
how it’s like playing one guitar chord over and over again. I imagined a Dm chord being twanged monotonously without pause. No matter how many times you tell yourself to stop twanging the Dm chord, you just can't. Your strumming finger is jammed in place. Eventually, for the majority of us, we will manage to change the chord to C, and after that it gets easier to switch to other chords. But there is a point in time where the movement between the Dm and C chord feels impossible. That is depression. It tells you that the C chord is an impossibility, that you’ll never get there. You can’t even be sure it exists anymore!
Managing depression is also comparable to learning how to play the guitar. I have only been playing it for over two years, and before that I hadn’t played a musical instrument since I was a child. It has been a rocky road with the guitar. It is not an instrument that you can improve on quickly. There are no tricks. You have to stretch your finger muscles, develop calluses and break them in. You only get better at chord changes by playing them so repetitively you bore the shit out of yourself. It is years of constant practice and applied pressure.
Of course, you could apply this to almost any other art, but with guitar it is so wonderfully evident. There is a real pleasure in seeing the outcome of your hard work physically manifested through a cleaner sound and increased dexterity of movement. I am in that frustrating space between knowing the necessary basics for playing the guitar adequately, and being able to interpret songs in my own way, without someone telling me explicitly what to do. It will take me some time to get there and I accept that.
There is a part of me that worries I will never master how to deal with depression. Realistically, I probably won't, but I can get better at it. If I can improve on the guitar, could I not also improve on my management of depression? Could I not also upgrade my navigation of difficult changes? These difficulties appear more nebulous and harder to calculate, but perhaps they aren’t. When I am not playing, I am itching to get back to my guitar. I love this feeling. The obsessive compulsion. During a depression I long to feel that again. So for now, I treasure it, even if I gasp in frustration at my slow, clumsy hands.
Further Art Projects:
En Casa de Mercedes
I don’t have much to say this month except that I am returning to work on my En Casa de Mercedes series, which is about a special woman I met in Jerez de la Frontera who gave everything to study flamenco. I have published three of the four short films that we made in 2019, and the next one is pending…
Please follow to support us and keep updated.
Being
Here is the latest visual narrative poem I made, a collaboration with artist and therapeutic masseuse, Francis McMillan, who narrated it beautifully, and also heavenly guitar playing from my guitar teacher, Manuel Méijome:
Follow me on instagram @rebecca_maria_videos to see more of my media work.
Finally
Here is another great guitar tune I discovered by Israeli musician and cult figure Charlie Mengira:
P.s. Buy me a coffee to help support my work. I put those funds into a kitty which pays the fees for submitting my creative work. Muchísimas gracias.