Lessons learned after four weeks of stress leave

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 3/8/2018 (898 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The wake-up call, this time, came after Anthony Bourdain died. It came when I was curled up under a blanket, tears staining my pillow. Thinking about how the author and traveller’s life had ended, lost in that aching pain.

For days, I struggled to understand the depth of my grief. I felt Bourdain’s absence, in ways that seemed outsized for someone I didn’t properly know. Yet all the same, his death left me undone, fixating on a sad, lonely question.

If even he didn’t want to see how the story ends, what hope was there for me?

That thought would lead me to decide, for the first time in my life, to take stress leave from work. It would lead me to face the evolution of my depression, and grapple with the slow dissolution of the ambitions I once tended.

This was not the most depressed I have ever been. Yet in the wake of Bourdain’s suicide, it was as loud an alarm bell as I have ever heard rung. A warning: whatever spirit has kept me going was now ready to throw in the towel.

So this is a personal column, the kind I have done many times, yet more and more resist doing. Because my problems are not special, nor am I someone who needs more of society’s attentional triage than many others.

I have a steady job, four cats and a partner. I have food in the cupboards, and a body that is — other than the exhaustion that saps my strength — mostly healthy. And I have a rare, precious thing: work that has meaning.

Yet after I spoke about my experience on Twitter, I heard from dozens of people in the same situation. People wrestling with the same malaise, the same fog that chases joy from a day, and I realized my voice had a place.

The privilege of a writer is that we are given space to say what others don’t always have room to speak. There is no risk to me for being public (again) about my depression: only a chance it could make little changes happen.

So yes, I must write about it. Not only to "spread awareness," because there are so many campaigns to do that already. Yet awareness is only so good as the action it commissions, and that is where I want to focus my story.

With all that in mind, I’d like to tell you a little about my time on mental health leave.

The decision was a long time fomenting. For months, it seemed, I had been hanging onto my life by dangling threads. Doing just enough of that, and barely enough of this, to hold a tattered semblance of a life together.

Yet as much as I tried, it was falling apart. My inbox piled up with emails unseen and unanswered. I dragged myself from my bed to meetings, half-slept and undershowered. I woke every morning with a gut full of dread.

When I read what little I had published, it spanned out like the terrain inside my mind: flat, formless and empty.

"What are you thinking right now?" my therapist asks.

I shake my head: nothing. There is nothing. That is what scares me most of all.

This was not the most depressed I have ever been. Yet in the wake of Bourdain’s suicide, it was as loud an alarm bell as I have ever heard rung. A warning: whatever spirit has kept me going was now ready to throw in the towel.

So that was when, with the support of my editors, I took a leave of absence from work.

Rest is necessary, and time to build support is a critical part of mental health recovery. But time lived without meaning casts a shadow on you.

Over the next four weeks, I read a little, and napped a lot. I went to visit friends in the country and we ate wild raspberries plucked straight from the bush. I retreated from the news, insulating myself against its violent jolts.

The boys trapped in the cave, though, I consumed news about them with a fervent obsession. I lay in bed until nearly dawn, phone rested beside my cheek. Falling asleep as news trickled out of their rebirth, re-emergence.

If we can do that, I thought, if we can bring these boys back into the sun, maybe we are not so far gone.

And all in between, there were appointments: medical, massage, therapeutic. Appointments to try to connect those myriad frayed threads, to pull the pieces of my life back together again. Some of it worked. Some didn’t.

When I decided to return to work, it was because time is no longer what I need. Rest is necessary, and time to build support is a critical part of mental health recovery. But time lived without meaning casts a shadow on you.

So I came back, because this is what I know how to do. It’s scary sometimes, but it can also be liberating, too.

Now, as I step back into this strange life of a writer, as I try to negotiate again the myriad connections between subject and storyteller, I want to reflect on a few things: what I learned, after four weeks on mental health leave.

I learned I’d been too long neglecting my body. I learned that the patterns of my life are etched on my body, like the wrinkles on a dress that languished too long in storage. That’s how I felt: folded, forgotten, shelved away.

The muscles of my upper back, knitted into knots that screamed protest as firm hands worked them away. A writer’s back, the massage therapist told me. The kind you get from hunching over your keyboard every day.

I learned how the multitude pressures of life had buried me under a rock cairn made of a thousand small problems. I learned I’d become so afraid of failure, that doing nothing at all had become the only safe option.

And in the lazy afternoon of another undifferentiated day, I watched a red squirrel scampering across boughs no wider than my finger, lost in a chase of his own imagination. I thought about play, and yearned for that freedom.

if you are an employer, or an employee who can raise your voice, please take a few moments to think about how your workplace supports mental health. Are managers informed? Are there safe avenues for help?

We all need that time, to dance through the branches. So that’s how this column ends, with a call to action.

The links between mental health and work have been well researched, and well established. It is, for many, a critical part of their mental foundation: it does, after all, consume a significant chunk of our time and energy.

And work can be tolerable, satisfying or exciting. It can also be hopeless, suffocating, isolating, grinding: some research has found that workers who have less control over their work experience higher rates of depression.

So if healing the mind is a puzzle, then work is almost always an anchoring edge part.

What this means: if you are an employer, or an employee who can raise your voice, please take a few moments to think about how your workplace supports mental health. Are managers informed? Are there safe avenues for help?

The Canadian Mental Health Association’s Winnipeg office offers several workshops on mental health in the workplace. So does the Manitoba Human Rights Commission. SAFE Work Manitoba offers an online course.

Even if you think your workplace is well informed, it never hurts to have a refresher. That knowledge could help save a life, or at least, make a struggling life in some small way better. More than ever, that has to matter.

And above all, if you see yourself in this column, if you recognize something of yourself in anything I have written: be good to yourself, in the ways you are able. Find space for yourself to breathe: a few minutes, an hour, a week.

Wherever that space opens up for you, I hope it helps bring the healing you need.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca