Depression is one of those weird things that not only affects everyone differently, but changes in how it affects you from day to day. I’ve been struggling with it since my mid to late teens. And I’m fifty now. So well over half my life I have been fighting something that I call soul cancer. I’ve never had cancer, so I cannot really compare the two, and my reason for doing so is that once you have had cancer you are – or so I am told – always in remission from something that can come back at any time. Depression is just like that.
I’d like to be able to tell you when it started, but I think it crept up on me. I had a number of difficulties as a teenager. My autism made it hard for me to deal with social situations (I didn’t know I had ASD at the time, I just knew I struggled to mesh with other people, read the room wrong, told inappropriate jokes at the wrong time… etc), so I tended to have one or two good friends quite a number of people I knew but no real group of friends. Consequently, I was lonely, it was especially hard when I moved away from my friends in Leeds to go away to school. And then once I was kicked out of school, losing the friends I had made at school and being too detached to reconnect with the friends I’d had before going to the school.
Another issue I had was my still unresolved gender identity. In my mid-teens I hadn’t been able to talk to anyone about it, didn’t know that there was any treatment (of any kind). Just believed what my parents had told me – that I was a sick pervert. On top of that though I had begun to conflate the feelings of being me when dressing in girls’ clothing with the feelings generated from masturbating. It also doesn’t help that in there during my two years at secondary school in Leeds a (much older) guy groomed and abused me, something that even now nearly 40 years later I have amazingly complex feelings about. A lot of anger, resentment and hate – not all of it aimed at the abuser some aimed at myself.
He prayed upon my loneliness and need to fit in, gave me a space where I could be – to an extent – the person I needed to be, the person I couldn’t talk to anyone about. At a time when I should have been learning about myself in a safe environment I was being taken advantage of by a guy who told me he loved me, who made me feel good, who gave me money… and who had zero interest in me once I got further into puberty and started to get hairy. As far as I can find out he’s dead now, which is a relief.
And lastly and something I have fought for so long as being an entirely separate cause, I was always skint. While I was brought up by middle class parents in a middle class area/house/etc. There wasn’t a lot of money going around, and my perception that the other people around me had more money. Basically just jealousy, I have no doubt looking back in hindsight that they probably weren’t as well off as they looked. But even now when I have no money I feel much sadder than when I do.
So that trifecta of misery was loneliness, gender insecurity and being poor. And then as I got older and learned more about the way the world worked and what the probable prognosis of my own future was, added to that a degree of hopelessness. And that went up and down depending on how depressed I was.
Eventually I grew up and moved out of the house, I didn’t attain any scholarly success so didn’t go off to university. But I eventually found a job I liked (mostly) and found a flat to rent. But I was still struggling with the depression. And I think that while loneliness is bad when you are in groups, it can be worse if it is compounded by forced isolation. The worst thing a lonely person can do is go and live on their own… I did and it made even the loneliness I felt when in a group even worse.
I have suffered from migraines since I was around eleven years old, if you can think of a classic trigger (other than chocolate) I have suffered a migraine triggered by that. Being depressed gives me a migraine that I generally need a day in bed to control. So I did miss quite a bit of work with migraines, and once or twice had bad days at work which led to melt downs at work. I don’t think that my colleagues really knew how to deal with that sort of thing.
I was also beginning to drown in debt. When I went to Chile I got my daily maximum out at the bank, and then I repeated the withdrawal from a cash point. Allowing me to get more money than I had to withdraw. After I got back from Chile I eventually got that sorted out, but it started a trend where I’d borrow money now, pay it back later (when I got paid). So every month I’d get closer and closer to the point where I couldn’t pay for everything this month because I spent it last month.
Eventually I took out a loan to cover these issues, I think my first loan was for £800, it gave me £400 to pay off my overdraft and £400 to spend… probably on computer bits. Needless to say I failed to pay off the loan, then I got another loan to pay off the first… and so on…
At it’s worst my debt reached about £17,000. Not very much in comparison to some debts you hear about today – I’ve heard of people who owe that much just on credit cards. But for me a near insurmountable iceberg of debt. I didn’t dare use my personal phone because every incoming call was a debt collector looking for their money.
The pressures built up and then due in part to witnessing bad behaviour at work I got sacked for me own bad behaviour. I broke the rules, doing something I knew was wrong – illegal even, I’m pretty lucky I was only sacked. But it dealt a blow to my already fragile psyche. Actually I got a new job about three days after I left Computer Exchange, hated that new job, completely soulless. I think I lasted three months (if that). Then I got a job at one of the places I had wanted to work at since I was a kid.
I think I lasted there about the same amount of time, eventually they had to ring my parents to find out what had happened to me as I had a mental breakdown and retreated to my bed. Lets put it this way, a job building computers was what I wanted, a job selling computers – often cold calling or trying to get previous customers interested in the latest stuff was not something I will ever be good at.
~@~
So I moved back in with my parents, and I have been here ever since. I left Computer Exchange in ~2003-4 (I think), so 21-22 years ago. I then fell into the black pit of deep depression, I was medicated for much of that and honestly given the depth of my feelings now, I don’t know how I survived.
Took my 18 years to throw off the worst of it and I still have bad days (or weeks, or months). Getting Stanley in 2021/22 was a massive change, suddenly I have to take him out every day. I did an immense amount of walking in ’22. But 2023 was back to not feeling comfortable going out, I stopped doing 10+ mile walks at least every week and only managed to do that a couple of times over the year.
Then in 2024 I started cycling again and while that was much better than walking and I did get out more and do a greater distance I still struggled. Today nearing the end of 2025, I find that having the bike – especially the eBike – has improved my mental health a large amount. And yet today all I want to do is go back to bed and cry.
But none of the things that led me to the depression in the first place have changed. I am still struggling with social situations and loneliness. I still feel very uncomfortable in myself – feeling that the body I have is not right. And while I have made efforts to change it at some level and certainly getting rid of my libido has made a massive difference. I still don’t fit. And while I am far better at managing my money these days, when I run out of cash at the end of the month I am definitely less happy then when I know I can spend some.
At this point I don’t think any of this is fixable and I’m scared that I will just have to live the rest of my life knowing that none of it will change. That exit clause is sadly still looking pretty good.