When Functioning Became the Achievement

There is a part of the Bulleen story that is much harder to put on paper, but leaving it out would make everything that came later look too neat.

After the workplace incident, there were dark days. Very dark days.

I stopped sleeping properly. I stopped eating properly. I withdrew from people and became almost reclusive. Home stopped being simply where I lived and became the place I felt safest, so I avoided leaving it whenever I possibly could.

There were days when I simply could not get out of bed. Depression and anxiety could make the short walk to the bathroom or downstairs to the kitchen feel like a marathon.

That was difficult to reconcile with the person I had always been. I was a husband. I was a father. I believed I was supposed to function, provide, support and be dependable. For a period, I could barely function for myself.

I thought about suicide regularly.

The most dangerous part was that depression could make profoundly distorted thinking sound logical inside my own head. I convinced myself at times that my family might be better off without the miserable, angry and barely functioning person I believed I had become.

I understand now how wrong that thinking was. At the time, even medication intended to stabilise my thinking did not make every intrusive thought disappear.

My family had not been at work when the incident occurred, but they lived with what came home from it. They lived with the sleepless nights, the withdrawal, the anxiety and the days when Dad could not get out of bed.

Sometimes getting downstairs was the achievement.

Sometimes staying alive was the achievement.

That is uncomfortable to write, but it is true. Recovery was not simply about becoming employable again. It was about rebuilding a human being.