Low Mood.
It sort of implies a level of manageability. Not as impactful or hard-hitting as anxiety or depression, but low mood has a massive impact on men every single day.
I don’t profess to being much of an expert in the world of mental health. But I try to be an open book, and I hope that sharing my experiences may just go some way to starting a meaningful conversation between men – history has taught us that open conversation is not something that we are particularly adept at!
At 41 years old, I discovered that I had burned out. Emotions lay so heavy on me that I couldn’t make rational or logical decisions. The stressors I was being pushed by existed in all aspects of my life and so I needed a reset.
I have a recurring dream. The context often changes, but the overwhelming feeling is always the same. What ever the goal is, the harder I try to get to it the slower and heavier I am, the more laboured the movements. The pain crushing, the guilt searing, the emotion overwhelming.
Often where my brother once stood on the edge of a canal, I find a floating trainer instead. Sweating and broken, crying and crushed, I am too late.
In real life my dad saved my brother. In my dream there are no heroes. Just me.
Burnout for me was partly like this dream. Life in slow motion, swamped and terrified by the fear that I would never achieve my goals, that I wasn’t good enough and there was no one to save me.
Thankless tasks like getting out of bed, switching the computer on or taking the bins out, weighed heavy on my muscles and my heart. Enough to bring me to tears.
Then the world would be too slow! I was flitting from task to challenge like a raccoon avoiding a searchlight. The inevitable crash followed of course. Hiding under my desk from the ringing phone hoping and praying I remembered the delete voicemail code before the message rang through my ears.
I distinctly remember being at the gym. Sat on a bench and mustering enough strength to breathe. Zoned out. I couldn’t formulate any movement or any thought pattern. I thought I’d died for a moment. I was in the middle of a busy gym, bright vests, a rainbow of plates and a cocophony of movement to club beat. But glass-eyed and monochrome my low mood halted me and saw the colour drain from me.
That day two men pulled me up. When words didn’t work, instead they moved me, guided me with their light and made the exercise happen. My internalised stillness had ticked over into a faint flicker of power. Heroics aren’t words, for me they were the actions of two people, who from the lifting of weights, helped me find my way back again.
Proof that more than one kind of strength can be found in the gym.
My superpower, is that I can feel emotion emphatically and fully. In comparison to flying or time travel, or super strength, it might not seem much, but knowing how people feel makes you want to fill the world with happiness in spite of the internalised emotions of grief, guilt or inauthenticity.
Try to hide that superpower.
Men don’t cry. Stop being so soft. Fatass. Wuss. You don’t deserve to be alive. Ugly. Gayboy. Give us the truffle shuffle. Teachers Pet. Fuck Off. do us all a favour and kill yourself.
I played it on repeat for a quarter of a century. Skirted around rooms and apologised for my existence. It was offensive as white noise.
Then it stopped. I don’t know if it was for the better or the worse. But it stopped.
I felt nothing.
Numb.
Numb to the emotive landscape. I felt anger or sadness towards myself. Closed to anyone else.
Low mood. Not so unserious afterall. The thing about low mood is if you don’t talk, if it is untreated by I uttered words, low mood leads somewhere.
Talk.
Unashamedly.
Truthfully.
Be kind to yourself and others.
Checkout my friends and collaborators at Men’s Talk Made Easier. It’s good for men to talk.
