Running For My Life

The spooky thing about depression is that it sneaks in. There aren’t really trumpets and loud voices announcing: “Hail, hail, this is depression entering the room, all rise!” Nope. It’s slow, silent, creepy. It doesn’t even look like depression. It starts with small isolation thoughts like: “Maybe I shouldn’t get out today, I just don’t feel like going out”. And then it does the same next day. And then the day after that and so on. And then it starts to whisper louder and louder in your ears: “Why would you go outside, you loser? Didn’t have enough yet? Want more people to make fun of how much of a big, fat loser you are?”



And then you start to breath in guilt and shame, instead of air. Every breathe you take is putting more dark thoughts into your body.



Until you get stuck. You can’t move anymore. At all.



One of the most common sensations I had during those times was me curling down in a corner, crushed by the immense weight of a huge, invisible fist pushing me down. I was feeling like this when I was lying down in the bed, when I was walking around in the backyard, when I was talking to people on the phone. Crushed by an immense, invisible fist, unable to move, in any direction, just waiting to be completely destroyed.



Sometimes I was actually hoping that the destruction will come from that fist, somehow, because it would have spare me the effort of doing it myself. Yes, there were times when I felt the only viable way out from that nothingness was my physical extinction. I think the word many of you use for that is “suicidal”.



The book you are about to read is the chronicle of my way out of that space.



Some parts of it are recorded just as I lived them in the moment, journaling style. Some chapters are literally pages from my journal / blog. But some are written once the healing effect of running started to kick in.



It’s not so much about being able to run hundreds of kilometers - although a lot of it will be just stories about my races - as it is about how to regain balance and overcome anxiety and loss.