Connections: tropical, dent, crater and crippling!

Written by Christopher Pentecost on February 17, 2024

Okay, let’s play a game of connections. I’ll give you four words, and you come up with the underlying theme that connects all of them. Here are your four words: tropical, dent, crater, and crippling. I’ll give you a few moments… It’s alright if you cheat and keep reading, because the answer is depression. Something I know a little bit about, so let’s talk about it. Funny enough, that’s how I deal with mine.

I know we like to talk about ADHD when we’re here, or other things, but I wanted to talk about depression mainly because I’m not feeling it at this moment. So, this would be a great time to talk about it.

I have gone through multiple bouts of depression, most of which always align with some sort of change in my life. I can remember the first time I ever felt depressed was dealing with the death of my grandfather, who we’ve talked about, and the loss of a connection, which left a pretty sizable hole in my life. I didn’t really know how to deal with those feelings. I always sort of repressed them and just tried to keep people at a distance. Most heroes in the movies tend not to show a lot of emotion until they’re broken down because they can’t bear the weight of whatever they’re dealing with. I think of Tom Hanks’ character in ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ where he’s always the stoic leader. Even though he sees a lot of his men dying around him, he doesn’t falter in his job as a leader to be that rock for other people. There was a part of me that thought that that’s what a man’s job was: to hold it together for the good of the family and for the good of other people around you.

I’m also reminded of The Cure song ‘Boys Don’t Cry.’ Well, sometimes they do. If you get bullied enough, technically tears will come out, and I’ve had my fair share of that. I don’t think there was a grade from kindergarten to Grade 9 where I wasn’t bullied by someone, usually the same group of people. But throughout those times, I had outlets. I kept to myself, didn’t have a lot of friends, played a lot in the basement by myself, hung out with my grandfather whenever he was in town or was willing to take me someplace in Montreal when I went to visit. And I would just put myself into situations where I could let my imagination run free. Which, as I’m saying this, is kind of interesting because I am standing in the basement talking to myself while trying to think up things to be creative about. Funny how things are circular in that context.

But going back, the first time I truly felt depressed was with the death of my grandfather. It was the first time that I actually felt lost at something, as if there was a full bookshelf (to sort of paint a picture), and him dying left a book missing – which, for a side note, the man did owe me a hundred bucks because he told me he’d give me 10 bucks for every book I read, and one summer I read 10. One a medal at school, and unfortunately, he passed away before he could pay up. I don’t know if you can see it, but the circles just keep turning. Whether it’s me being funny because this is one way that I have dealt with my depression was to find humor in it, and a lot of the humor that was instilled in me by my grandfather sort of continues to roll with me, even though I’ve got a much darker sense of humor. But again, it was a way for me to stay sane.

The next thing that would sort of make me depressed was the lack of support from my father when it came to my schooling. He was always a person who always wanted me to have another plan. What happens when this doesn’t work? What happens when this doesn’t work? What happens when the third and fourth and fifth and sixth things do not work? What is your next plan? Maybe I just want to start the first one, which was to go to university, which I had gotten accepted to do English literature and creative writing. Now, of course, technically, this is number two of the most plans that I have. Plan one was to go through music because that’s always been a passion of mine. But music was never a valid means of making money or a career, so as much as playing one had been s*** on, playing two was already being held back because my father was employed, which didn’t allow me to be qualified for OSAP, which is a student loan program. Without that, I was unable to go to the university that I wanted to and ended up having to go to the university I ended up going to – Western. It meant I had to live at home, so there was no separation from my parents, which, of course, made my mother happy because me being, as she called me, her miracle baby, I would get to stay close to her and she’d still be able to see me, which – and here’s where the depression comes – within that first year of University, my father lost his job. And when my sister applied and was able to go to university, she was able to go on a full OSAP scholarship to Windsor, which is where I wanted to go, even though she was going for nursing. It stung to the fact that she could go but I couldn’t still stings.

The other thing that would happen within the subsequent years after this was that my grandmother would get sick after moving here to be closer to family. She ended up having surgery to remove blockages in her bowels and never fully recovered. And although she would give my grandfather the world of grief for what I can only assume was existing, she was a powerful and proud Newfoundlander. A lady of big personality and stature. Because both my parents worked, it was very hard for them to go up every day to visit her. But because I was at the University and she was at a hospital in between the university and home, they asked me to go up and visit her, and I continued to do that months continuously, visiting a woman who wasted away in front of my eyes. When she died, I didn’t have much to say. I said my goodbyes in the ICU, and then I went to the bar. And the culmination of a lot of depression ended up in the bottle of whatever I or anyone else would order.

My alcoholism, I pretty much kept under wraps, but it started to fully affect me to the point where in my third year of university, I didn’t go to four of my exams. I just left home, went and sat on the grass or in the library, just writing, journaling thoughts in the hopes that something would ease the pain that was continuously growing inside. And it didn’t. It just drove me back to the bar to drink, where I could talk and joke and be happy with the people around me instead of dealing with the situation that was starting to consume a lot of my thinking in my mind. It was a tough time. It got so bad that I had gone to the bar at 11:00 a.m. I had three drinks and then I drove to school. My father was in Germany on business, so I got to use the car. I got to school, and in between classes, I was taking drinks from a bottle of peach schnapps that I’d stuck in my bag. After class, I drove home, ate some dinner, and then had to go back out because I couldn’t just sit at home. So, I went to the bar, drank two more drinks, then drove to a group project that we were working on for our Shakespearean class. I consumed another drink there. I then drove back to the bar after we were done and continued to drink. After that, I drove my friend home, dropped her off, and then I drove home. I went to bed and woke up the next morning, not to a hangover, but to a thought. It was, “I remember being at all these different places, but I can’t tell you how I got there,” and that scared me to a point where I knew I needed to change something. I didn’t quit drinking, but I did cut it back a bit. Also, I wouldn’t drink if I was driving. It was then I decided I needed to talk to somebody.

I ended up booking an appointment with a psychologist who had been there when my family needed to go through some family therapy. I told him what I needed, and he said he could help. We set appointments, and I went, and we talked. But all the things that were leading to why I was feeling depressed, why I felt I needed his help, and we discussed a lot of things. It was then I decided that I should try to at least fix my schooling, where I was sort of failing out of, and that started another sort of existential depression where I was diagnosed with depression by multiple doctors, all of whom were licensed with 25 plus years of experience. I took those letters to the University of Western, and they said, “Before we can accept these, you need to talk to a psychology student to see if you’re really depressed,” and at that, I decided Western was just not for me. I failed out of University, and I never went back. But of course, all this was before mental health was taken more seriously like nowadays.

Since then, there have been many other reasons to be depressed. My mother fought and, unfortunately, lost a battle with glioblastoma, a cancer of the brain. Her death I internalized almost everything, but her death was also more of a release because of how the cancer made her suffer, and I just focused on that. Even though her death pretty much wiped out an entire bookshelf of books, a lot of knowledge that I’ll never get to put to good use. The death of my other grandmother can be chalked up to she was in a home, she was in her 90s and got the flu, a life well-lived, and like the scene with Burgess Meredith in Grumpy Old Men, it’s just that God finally remembered her. The last death that truly struck me was that of my IT quality assurance mentor, Sunny. He was a great conversationalist; sure, we butted heads over certain things, but we were never really angry with each other. We just saw things from different perspectives, but he always challenged me in the best way, and our friendship started, grew out of that. I knew he wasn’t feeling well, and on the last day I saw him, I told him to go see his doctor. He told me he didn’t like his doctor. I told him to go to the hospital and deal with what he needed to deal with. I said, “See you later,” and left the office. He died in his sleep that night, and we didn’t find out until the next day. His death sort of spurred a lot of emotion for me because I was already sort of not in a good place, and people knew that. But I also knew can’t return to drinking as much as I wanted to. Couldn’t phone my benefits EAP and made sure I was talking to people to make sure I didn’t fall into the same category again why I just allowed alcoholism to perpetuate and not and try to not deal with the situations that were causing the issues.

Nowadays, mental illness has become more prevalent in conversations. People are more open with the things that afflict them, whether it’s depression, whether it’s ADHD, whether it’s anxiety. It’s become more talked about in a more positive way. I know that a lot of what I have experienced happened in times that aren’t that far back but far enough back where it wasn’t taken as seriously. People just think, “Oh well, you’re lazy, you don’t want to get out of bed.” Well, because I don’t see much of a point. And now that we’ve gotten to a point where we can talk about this and where people don’t have to suffer in silence like I did, it makes talking about it easier. It makes making these posts easier. I wish things had been different because where would I be if things had been different? Now I do try to not focus on those questions mainly for the fact that it doesn’t matter because if things had been different, maybe this post doesn’t happen. I may not be here or maybe I’m here and doing something different. We don’t know. All I know is that this is the current present and this is where I am, and I think that mindset is what keeps me moving forward. It’s taking me a long time to realize that focusing on the past doesn’t help your present and it also doesn’t help your future. All it does is keep you living in what-ifs and to me that is what kept me depressed for a long, long time.

Now, I am currently working on finding a new therapist, someone who can help me deal with a lot of the things that go along with my ADHD, the things that have been sort of being explained through some of these posts and just trying to make sense of it all. I can say for certain I’m not depressed, so luckily at most I may just have to bring that up as a past history. But I also know that there are things that I should be talking about and creating new ways of dealing with these feelings with these symptoms and creating a better situation for myself as well as my family. So that’s good and I hope at some point maybe I can create something out of that to be able to add here.

One thing I should mention just in case anyone else is maybe thinking that they may be depressed, here are some of the things to look out for:

Some symptoms are feeling sad and hopeless either most of the day or nearly every day, a loss of interest or pleasure in activities once enjoyed, significant changes in appetite or weight, difficulty sleeping or oversleeping, loss of energy or fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, guilt, and helplessness, difficulty concentrating and making decisions, restlessness or feeling slowed down, and recurrent thoughts of death or suicide.

The causes of depression are not known, but it is likely a combination of genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological factors, meaning pretty much everyone can become depressed.

There are many treatments to help with depression: therapy like cognitive behavioral therapy, there’s medication that could be prescribed by a doctor like antidepressants that can help with sort of the physical feelings of depression, and just lifestyle changes, a better diet, regular exercise, good sleep can all help counteract the negative aspects and feelings. But a lot of the times these treatments are best melded together to create a more comprehensive plan, at least that’s how it worked for me.

And of course If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, please call 911 immediately.

Here are some suicide prevention resources in Canada that you can reach out to for help:

Canada-wide resources:

9-8-8: This is the new national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline number in Canada. It provides free and confidential support 24/7 by phone or text. You can call 9-8-8 or text HOME to 741741.

Kids Help Phone: Call 1-800-668-6868 or text CONNECT to 686868. Available 24/7 for youth 20 and under.

Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention (CASP): Visit their website [https://suicideprevention.ca/] for resources and support, or call the Distress and Referral Centre at 416-408-HELP (4357).

Hope for Wellness Help Line: Call 1-855-242-3310 or text WELLNESS to 741741. Available 24/7 for all Indigenous peoples in Canada.

The one thing I can say about depression is that you’re never alone. There’s always someone to reach out to who can help you through whatever you’re going through. It doesn’t have to be a professional; it could just be your friend. I know because I’ve been there, and I can say there’s always a really good reason to stay here. Now, of course, this is a very deep, dark, and sometimes scary conversation to have, but sometimes we just need to have it.

I was going to leave something by George Carlin here because he has some great takes on life, but I can’t really find a really good one. So, I’ll just quote him here, and we can go about our lives. In one of his specials, at the end of some sort of bit he was doing, he just leaves it up to the people, looks at them, and goes, “I have no segue for this so I will just take a small bow” (just know I bowed towards the screen).

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash