Changing Speed

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: DON'T LET DEPRESSION GET YOU DOWN

I could not blame the internet for not finding what I was looking for. I hadn't known what it was that I was looking for. I don't think that I would have recognised it had it jumped out of the computer screen and hit me, something that I imagine many of my dates would have done given the choice. Perhaps more to the point, had I have found what I was looking for during this three year period, I feel certain that I would have rejected it for fear of becoming committed and the possibility of opening wounds that had as yet to heal. Still I had learned from my recent experiences.

For me, depression had highlighted and exploited my inadequacies, my fears. As a child my parents had always told me how intelligent I was. I knew that I wasn't, even back then as a small child I knew that I was not anything special. It was not my place to tell them. At primary school I was intelligent because they told me so. I was put in the top groups for everything and made to help those less able than me. I enjoyed being treated slightly differently from the other children and saw it as no challenge. At grammar school I mixed with peers of equal and greater intelligence than myself. This caused me to become more introvert than I already was, so being able to continue the façade. I was more surprised than was anybody else at the success I attained with regards to qualifications whilst there.

When I began to work for a living people still seemed to consider me to be above the norm. Indeed when I left the bank and started work in the sales of financial services it was thought that I was some kind of superman. Throughout my life I had known that I was nothing more than ordinary, and actually felt that I was substantially less than ordinary. I had lived with one constant fear from my earliest memory, that one day I would be exposed for being the fake that I knew I was. This became the driving factor, causing me to work harder, striving to constantly improve on previous best performances. There were those that would not take on a challenge for fear of failing. In many respects I was able to recognise this in them and help them forward assuming forward to be the correct word. I could actually see myself being mirrored in them, although as a mirror image, I dealt with the same insecurities in the opposite way to their methods.

I recall being told by a sixty-four year old man looking only for retirement when I began my career that my work rate risked me burning myself out. I can remember a number of people that chose not to share my work ethics warn me of the same fate. What did they know? The word experience used to infuriate me because I had no experience and could see no way of gaining experience without following my work ethics and so earning opportunities to progress.

I was never a man that could allow himself to be satisfied for fear that the drive to succeed would diminish leaving my ability to be seen as ordinary or less. I saw my fear as being a fear shared by everybody. Indeed knowing that this fear was a trait found within everybody often gave me comfort and yet I was prone to forget that other people feared to be discovered as being ordinary, normal. The same fear that drove me and others onwards inhibited just as many from attempting to succeed, whatever their own definition of success might have been.

I was always an individual who pretended to be part of some team or other. When depression moved into my life I consciously isolated myself, both mentally and wherever possible physically. I found that I was looking within myself and as I did, I moved downward into ever deeper, darker caves. I was creating the caves within my mind. As I created the caves, so I moved into them. They felt like safe hiding places where nobody would ever think to look for me even if they might have wanted to. I never believed that anybody did want to. These caves gave me places to go, to feel my own hurt in solitude. It was my hurt and nobody else had any right to this hurt or could possibly have had any understanding to it. In those caves I could be oblivious to the hurt I was causing others to experience. That hurt could only be somebody else's fault and not of my doing, as I continued to look only within myself.