The above image of me was taken on the East Coast Trail in Newfoundland, Canada, by my partner in sweaty hiking crime, Max.

Have you seen The Truman Show? If you haven’t. If you have, this is world’s end. I found that clip through reddit recently, and it was part of what inspired me to write this post.

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It’s been 7 months since I’ve posted. I’ve thought about it a lot… made drafts… gave up on them. Pulling together a comprehensive, thought-out piece of writing out of my brain (or maybe my ass) often feels as touch-and-go as I imagine it would feel to try to lure a street cat out from behind a garbage bin using a maraca (in this metaphor I’m the maraca and the street cat is the blog post in my ass… Illustrations to come). You gotta figure out just the right shaking strategy that will entice it without scaring it further inside yourself. Ya know??

It felt like my brain was constipated. And the more I push to untangle and straighten out the thoughts in my head onto paper, the worse it gets, solidifying into their messy shape and becoming harder and harder to penetrate… It’s also kinda similar to when you try to give a home to a pill bug (ie; rolie polie, potato bug, and the lesser-known by me doodle bug) and it rolls on up, or when you try to feel the magic of the cornstarch and water mixture that you make in Gr.2 science class but you’re an excited 7-year-old moving at hyperspeed and sCiEnce RuLes… It’s touch-and-go. That’s how it’s been recently. Shout out to you if you feel me on this one.

So when I can’t write and I’m hitting a wall, it’s generally a reflection of my mental/emotional health. And sure enough, 6 months ago, arriving from Mexico, I was depressed:

• I hadn’t had time to process the stress and negative feelings I’d felt for months in a previous job (but shout out to the people I met because of it, it wasn’t all bad).
• I had recently ended things with a guy I was seeing.
• I had no goals and was just getting by, not excited anymore about what I was doing, and not knowing where to go from there.
• I was worried about returning home, and to my life in Canada. Mostly about being moulded back into the person I used to be because the person I now was wasn’t strong enough to make a place for herself in my old life.
• I was sick. Like weak and feverish, and no appetite. And when I did eat it was all whistle belly thumps, and then straight into the green apple quick-step on my way to splat-town. I spent just over a month there in splat-town, wouldn’t reccomend it.

I had to change something, and I needed to prove to myself that I had changed, I wasn’t making a mistake coming back, and I wasn’t just stepping back into the place/person I’d been before I left, especially since I’d spent a lot of time in that place/person being unhappy.

So within a week of being home, I found a therapist, I scheduled an appointment with my doctor to get referred to a psychiatrist, I started spending time a spiritual community that congregates on Sundays in Kelowna rather like a church (Kelowna Centre for Spiritual Living), I started seeing a piano teacher, and I joined tinder… Some of these tactics proved more beneficial than others. And I’d have to say there were three above all that helped me the most.

3. Trying antidepressants

The debate about antidepressants is a touchy one. I’m choosing to not take any black-or-white stance on them cuz I don’t like to do that and above anything I value keeping an open mind— open to all sides of an issue, always. I know both someone personally who is benefiting from taking them, as well as someone impersonally— a person I admire, Anna Akana. See her videos here, before antidepressants, and here, after.

…Now, two cases does not a study make, but nor should we ever consider another person’s experience invalid. That’s how I feel at least… So here’s the other side—

Irving Kirsch, in a study he titled Antidepressants and the Placebo Effect, was able to gain access to a large amount of FDA data sets on modern day antidepressants, the majority of which were unpublished. The attention-grabbing findings:

Only 43% of trials showed any statistically significant benefit of the drug to the placebo… Less than half.

This is a pretty famous article from what I can see in internetland. I found it really interesting, it’s worth the full read. Here it is, if that tickles your interest.

So the findings should shock you. 1 because that means the other 57% of trials were failed or actually showed negative results, and 2 because I underlined the word “statistically“.

Statistical significance in this case will tell you that a trial showed a significant percentage of participants (I don’t know what percentage they call significant, maybe 65% or 80%?, couldn’t say) felt an improvement from the drug over the placebo. But statistical significance doesn’t account from how much change the participants felt. That’s clinical significance, and for that Kirsch found that

Patients at the very extreme end of depression severity, those scoring at least 28 on the HAM-D, showed an average drug-placebo difference of 4.36 points.

4.36 points in this case, is a clinically significant change.

To find out how many patients fell within this extremely depressed group, I asked Mark Zimmerman from the Brown University School of Medicine to send me the raw data from a study in which he and his colleagues assessed HAM-D scores of patients who had been diagnosed with unipolar major depressive disorder (MDD) after presenting for an intake at a psychiatric outpatient practice (Zimmerman, Chelminski, & Posternak, 2005). Patients with HAM-D scores of 28 or above represented 11% of these patients. This suggests that 89% of depressed patients are not receiving a clinically significant benefit from the antidepressants that are prescribed for them.

Excerpts above taken from Kirsch’s article, Antidepressants and the Placebo Effect section title “Severity of Depression and Antidepressant Effectiveness”

So yeah. That last sentence though.

What I will say about my experience taking antidepressants (fluoxetine was the one I took, aka Prozac) is that it made me see myself and my sadness differently. I’ve experienced bouts of depression and general low mood pretty consistently since I was 13 or 14. Since then my family and I have tried many things from meditation (which is great) to school counselors to artificial sunshine lamps. What I’d settled on for the last little while was a daily 5-HTP vitamin and mindfulness meditation. And I’ve improved a lot, but everytime I hit another spell of depression, I’d often wonder “What if this version of the world I see really is like this because I’m sick? and antidepressants are just modern medicine’s treatment.”…

So finally, when I became depressed this time around, after 5 years of pondering the legitimacy of my reality, I decided to get prescribed… I was on them for two months, so I’m obviously not on them anymore. Doctors sometimes say you have to try to find the right one for you but now having had a bad experience with them, and then knowing the controversy surrounding them, my faith in them has become broken. Which has been good for me in the end, because it did empower me slightly (as empowered as you can feel when depressed) to start to believe that the power to be happy was all in my own hands, and I could finally get my mind past the idea of chemical treatment.

2. Piano

I’m a big fan of reddit. I read this there the other day on the front page from the subreddit r/protips.

Before going to Mexico, living in hostels, living on my own for the first time, and staying in other people’s houses, I had never in my life, since I had the physical capability to, consistently made my bed. And that was just a reflection of my life I think, you know? like that thing that went around twitter a couple years ago— “my room is a mess just like my life.”

What a little thing is is to make your bed, and that’s what makes people sway in either direction like—

“Why don’t you just make your bed. It takes less than 5 minutes. It’s such a little thing.”

“Exactly. That’s 5 minutes of my life I can’t get back lol, and for something so little that doesn’t even matter.”

I used to take the latter stance, but now I subscribe to the idea in that life pro tip. Making my bed, keeping my space tidy, and having that little splash of accomplishment, changes everything. And in the same line of thinking, that’s part of what piano is for me (I’m saving going into depth about piano for a different post). When you’re uninspired, feeling hopeless, and scraping through your days confused and without motivation, then big, long-term goals aren’t easy. So I started small.

Make my bed, set up a time with a piano teacher, go to the lesson √

Get up, make my bed, eat breakfast, play piano √*

*I know that’s the square root symbol but rn it’s a checkmark.

For the past 6 months before I started travelling again I’ve made my bed and played piano nearly every single day, and for it I’ve been able to come out of depression with more focus, clarity, and self-confidence than perhaps I’ve ever felt.

1.Therapy

I developed problems with eating when I was about 13 years old. It’s probably what you would call an eating disorder and I have called it that in the past but those words never really felt so comfortable in my mouth— hard to swallow, you could say. But yeah so. I’ve done it all. I’ve lost weight slow, I’ve lost weight fast. I’ve gained it back, I’ve gained it back and then some. I’ve gone long periods without eating, and without stopping eating. I’ve “eaten my feelings” more times than there are calories in exactly 1 piece of low-calorie bread with exactly 1/2 tablespoon of peanut butter and an apple just larger than my fist, when cut up is almost exactly 250ml of apple. I’ve felt proud to go to bed hungry, and I’ve exercised for 3 1/2 hours straight, alone in front of a TV because I was bloated. I’ve eaten so much that the pain in my stomach brought me to tears, and I’ve eaten so little for so long that feeling perpetually weak was just what I accepted as normal. I’ve felt resentment towards people for saying things like “I could eat” and “I’m so full” nonchalantly. I’ve attached my perception of my body to my value as a person and I’ve been caught in one of life’s many vicious cycles— addiction… And I’ve lived on a slow and steady incline out of that cycle for the past 6 years, with ups and downs to varying degrees.

Under the stress-pression I was feeling in and out of Mexico, the disorder resurfaced many times, often bringing more stress-pression with it.

So I knew, as I had decided to ride a wave of change in my life, that therapy would be necessary, and I started within 2 weeks of being home, seeing a professional based out of Kelowna specializing in eating disorders. One hour. We talked about everything going in my life. It often changed, each session, to whatever I was dealing with at the time. Not just talking about eating, but other things, too. Many times going in I would feel like I had nothing to say only to start talking (and often subsequently crying) and hit the end of the session without having stopped. Like most people I’ve tended to bury things deep. Now because of that time and my therapist Kim, I’ve come a long way. Just an hour, every two weeks. It’s not been the whole key to happiness but it’s been one of the steps up to the door.

Wake up, make my bed, go to therapy √

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So this has been how I un-depressed myself this time around. I tried something different, I made goals, and I asked for help. I’m sure your experience in un-depression will be different, interesting, beautiful, and equally important.

Join me next time when I talk not just about living un-depressed, but actually living happily 😀 at least my view on it at 19 years old.

If you’re dealing with any of the feelings I’ve talked about in this post, feeling depressed, unhappy, or dealing with what you might think is an eating disorder, please talk about it. Tell someone. Preferably a therapist or counselor because although sometimes our family and friends often really care about us and can also sometimes help, I find that getting out of that bubble of your life and speaking to a professional on the outside can be extremely refreshing and beneficial.

We all have at least one song we like to listen to to try and boost our spirits when we’re sad, this is mine (I actually like it so much I learned how to play it)—

Ed Sheeran – “Even My Dad Does Sometimes”

Live compassionately and love generously,

❤ Anika