Chris

The thing is…depression is weird.

It’s a chemical imbalance and it’s not something you can ever just “snap yourself out of”. It can take anything from realising it’s still light out at 5pm after a particularly long winter, to revisiting an album which reminds you of a time when you were happy. It can even be just meeting somebody who makes a certain impression on you, essentially making you realise that you are capable of feeling something different.

I’m not sitting here and saying that one day things just magically seem better and then you go on your merry way forgetting this whole sorry episode ever happened. I’m talking from my experience. All of the above apply to me. It’s those sort of things that have snapped me out of a slump recently, a collection of bad days in which I can feel myself falling back into old habits. Those days suck, and sometimes it feels like it’ll never end, but with the benefit of hindsight, I look back at those days as important, because they tell me just how great the good days are.

I’ve been living with depression and anxiety problems for the last five and a bit years. I know why: I lost my mum almost six years ago. It wasn’t expected. It was as sudden as it gets. One minute I’m in Paris being told off for smoking in our hotel room, the next, I’m back in Cardiff with hospital visits and everything leading up to the funeral all blurring into one stupidly long day. I still remember the morning I was told. It’s hard to describe it without using a cliché but the term ‘world came crashing down’ is about as apt as it gets. It felt as if everything stopped and just went to black. There was no emotion, no initial reaction. For one absolute moment there was just nothing, until I was thrown back into reality – a situation I was never going to be ready to deal with. This is something I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever dealt with and it served as a catalyst for seemingly everything else going wrong in a short space of time. I let a relationship hit rock bottom and self-destruct; I lost any sort of financial stability I had by losing job after job; I lashed out at anybody who might’ve been able to help and I gained a bunch of weight. Any confidence I did have was just completely lost. I didn’t have the energy or determination or drive to try and change anything. I was just broken. The weeks started turning to months and daytime became virtually non existent. I lived almost exclusively at night because this way nobody would be around to bother me. I thought I preferred it that way.

There are so many different things that keep people going during their darkest times and the best I can do is tell you what helped me.

It was music that saw me through the majority of it. I threw myself into listening to anything I could and there were certain bands I related to. Fireworks, for example. Their album ‘Gospel’ dropped in 2011 when I was at my lowest, and it was an album that hit me in a huge way. I should also mention Promise of Redemption, the side project of Shane Henderson from Valencia. His album ’When The Flowers Bloom’ was one of the most emotionally raw things I’d ever heard, and it was an album that dealt with loss, so I related to it straight away. I’m useless with putting anything into words. It usually ends up as a long, scrambled mess, but this album said everything I wanted to say and more.

There had to be a turning point though, and that turning point for me was recognising that I needed to get help.

I’d always felt as if nobody cared because nobody was asking me if I was alright, but when I look back, I don’t think I ever told anybody that I was so low. I remember the day I took that first step. It was 7am, it was light out, and people in my house were getting ready to start their day and I was getting ready to go to bed. I was sat on my bathroom floor just asking myself what the f**k I was doing. It was a rare window of clarity, where it made sense to want to get better rather than just accept that this is how I felt. I’d never thought of it that way before. I booked an appointment with my Doctor, and once I walked into that room, around two years worth of issues came spilling out. I was being taken seriously and I can’t describe how relieved I felt. This turned out to be my initial turning point. I was still low, but I had finally told someone and had started to get the help I needed.

I ended up moving away from Cardiff to be able to get to a position where I was able to reassess and start again. During that time, I met people who I love and appreciate with everything I have. They gave me the confidence to start again and to be able to face coming back home. After a year and a half, I did come home. Yeah, the first few months were tough and I did question if I’d made the right decision, but once I found my feet things started to feel good. I started DJing regularly at a club night in Cardiff, and again I’ll always be thankful to the person who gave me that opportunity in the first place because through doing it, I’ve met some of the best people I know. People who I can hang out and laugh with and people who I care about more than I thought I was capable of doing so again. I still have my bad days and I think about my Mum daily. She was the best person I knew and she got through so much herself. She deserved the world and she inspires me to carry on when things start to get tough again.

What I’m trying to say is that things can and will get better for you, too. I’ll always maintain and never waver on the opinion that you can’t just snap yourself out of depression, but what I do believe is that the only person who can help you is you, because if you don’t make that first step of telling somebody how you’re feeling, what you’re going through and that you need help, then you run the risk of things carrying on. You might feel like nobody cares, or it might feel like if you do tell somebody then they won’t understand, or they won’t be able to help you anyway. I’m here to say that’s not the case, there is always somebody who will understand and give you the platform to express yourself. We understand. We do give a damn. HATW exists because of people like me and you, it exists FOR people like me and you.

Taking that first step is the most important thing you can do.

Take the first step and I promise you, you’ll get there.

– Chris