My Own Worst Enemy

Ignorance isn't always bliss.  In fact, in my case it was the complete opposite.  Had I not been ignorant I could have saved myself a lot of problems.  Now I've got some knowledge of stress and depression I can see that there were plenty of indicators that I was on a slippery slope...

I've never really wanted to be a team manager.  Nothing against the job, but it's just not for me.  I'm more of a "sit quietly in the corner and work at my own pace" person.  Unfortunately for me, I was working for a company where becoming a team manger was the easiest way to progress.  Being the stubborn man that I am, I decided that I'd take the longer, harder path to success and try to get into marketing.  Back in 2006,  I was getting a  bit bored at work, but I thought I could cope with it as I was being sponsored to get my Professional Diploma in Marketing.  All I had to do was put the hard work in for 3 years and I'd be able to climb my way up the company ladder!

I actually enjoyed my college work.  I made some great friends, the course was interesting and I felt like it would help me progress.  However, I was getting increasingly fed up with work and it was around this time that I started showing signs of stress outside of work.  Pointless arguments, lethargy, a short concentration span and a generally negative outlook were all creeping into my life, both inside and outside of work.

Of course, I thought it was just a phase and I'd come out the other side no problem - especially when in 2009 I got my qualification and was all set to go.   Unfortunately, something called the Global Economic Crisis came along and any thoughts of progress came to a juddering stop.  So there I was, fully qualified for some jobs that didn't exist anymore!  I tried looking for jobs at other companies - I even got a couple of interviews - but I was stuck where I was and it was severely getting me down.

I realise that in the grand scheme of things I was still in a better position than a lot of people.  I hadn't been made redundant or even had to cope with a pay cut, but as I've said before, we're all different, and I was discovering that I wasn't very good at coping with adversity.

2010 saw my problems increase and I was getting increasingly frustrated and down.  I was in a bad mood most of the time, but was managing to hide it form most of my friends.  I was lucky enough to have a supportive and loving girlfriend who I could talk openly to, but whilst that was great, it wasn't giving me a solution.  By now, I should have realised that things were only going to get worse unless I sought help.  Unfortunately, I just carried on and was rapidly reaching my breaking point.

Change the World

We all want to make a difference.  Some of us want to become famous, soon of us want to invent stuff; but most of us just want to be respected and admired.

My working life prior to age of 21 didn't give me much potential for that, most of my energy was focused on playing cricket.  During school/university holidays I worked at a Market Research agency.  My scope for changing the world was a bit limited when asking random people "If there was a general election tomorrow who would you vote for" or "What is your favourite section of the Sunday Times".  No, I needed to bide my time and wait for my chance to make a difference.
I thought my chance had come along when I landed my first post University job.  As I mentioned in my last blog, I was working in a call centre to begin with, but so what. I was young, it was a massive company and I was going places.  Best of all, in the early days, that place was often the local pub.  Socializing was as important to me working life as answering phone calls, it was a big part of corporate culture.  It didn't matter that my performance was average, I was intelligent and there were plenty of jobs I could progress to.

Sure enough, I soon moved a rung up the ladder and was working in the complaints department.  It was around this time that the first seeds of doubt started appearing in my head.  I was still reasonably happy, still making friends and still wanting to make a difference.  However, I was becoming a bit skeptical and disillusioned with how things worked.  I wasn't used to being a tiny cog in a massive machine.  When I played cricket, I was an important part of most matches I played in - my performance made a big difference. Here, my performance had no impact on the company performance at all.

I realise that this is the case for a vast amount of people in large organisations. If 50,000 work for the company it means you're a pretty small part of that.  For a lot of people that's all well and good, and they can focus on the bigger picture and see how they are contributing to it. In many ways, I wish I was like that, it would have made me feel a lot more relaxed, but as I've previously stated, we're all different.

However, as I said, I was still relatively happy and looking to progress.  I was living with a couple of friends from Uni, I had a girlfriend who also worked at the same company and I was making some money for the future.  Looking back, it's not surprising that I (or anybody else) failed to spot signs of stress or mental illness.  After all, my story is still pretty similar to millions of others.  There was nothing glaringly obvious to suggest that trouble was ahead.
At the risk of hyperbole (as well as using a terrible metaphor!) - there were a couple of reports of bad weather, but no sign of an iceberg!

Where Do I Begin?

According to my primary school teacher, all stories have a beginning, a middle and an end.  With hindsight, she was stating the obvious somewhat, but if we apply that thinking then this is the beginning.  This is the background to the story.  Over the next few articles, I'll be discussing the various stages of stress and depression, but firstly I want to give a bit of background on myself.
It's not a tale of a broken home, a troubled childhood or a life of crime (I did nick a pack of Chewits from the local corner shop, but no charges were ever made), just a case of me painting a picture of where I was at when I first displayed symptoms of stress.

I come from a tiny village in Kent.  So tiny that my aforementioned primary school had 6 pupils in each year! I passed my 11+ and went to a considerably larger Grammar School - the absurdly named Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School for Boys.  I was a quiet lad and an only child, so being suddenly surrounded by 1000 other kids was a bit overwhelming. Nonetheless, I enjoyed my school days. I was neither a bully or bullied, I was academically average, but my main strength was that I was a very talented cricketer.

In fact, my sole ambition in life was to become a professional cricketer.  I spent most of my spare time either playing or watching cricket.  I was a regular visitor to Kent cricket matches and represented the county at under 13, 15 and 17 levels, as well as playing for both the school and a local Kent league team.  Sadly, I wasn't quite good enough to make it as a pro - I had a trial but didn't get in.  I was disappointed but not bitter, if truth be told I was never quite good enough to make it.  I was a very effective player at my level but not quite good enough to make the jump up.  So instead of wearing white for a living, I went to university in Birmingham.

Not Birmingham University though, I went to UCE.  Although, if anyone asked, I just said I went to University in Birmingham.  It sounded better that way.  I loved University, I didn't learn much academically but it was great life training.  I made some friends for life, and eventually ended up staying in Birmingham after I finished my degree.

Unfortunately, this meant that I had to get a job.  I had no real career dream anymore, but I did want to work in a job that I enjoyed and paid well.  So I signed up with an agency, and a couple of weeks later they got me an interview with a large multinational company.  I would only be working in the call centre, but I had was pretty sure I'd be working my way up the ladder soon enough.

So far so good I guess. That's the background to my story.  It's not massively different from the first 21 years of a lot of people's lives.  I only tell it so when I do get to the "middle" of my journey, there's some context to my story.  At this stage, I had no symptoms of stress and was a perfectly healthy 21 year old, who drank too much, couldn't cook and watched far too much football.

My Journey

Over the next few weeks, I will writing about my experiences of suffering from stress.  I'll look at how it starts and the various stages of the "journey" that I went through.  But it kick things off, I thought I'd write an overview of my experiences...

We’re all different.  And whilst that’s a great thing, it is something that we don’t always appreciate or recognize. 

If you work in an office, there’s probably a chap who sits in the corner and, in the main, keeps quiet.  You might sometimes talk to him about last night’s football match or a film that was on Channel 4 the previous evening.  He seems nice enough, but you don’t know much about his personal life.  After all, there are loads of people in the office and you can’t be best friends with everyone.

The majority of the time, he will be a perfectly happy individual, with a good life, both at work and outside of it.  However, sometimes there’s a bit more to it than that.  The perfectly happy looking chap in the corner could have depression or suffer from stress.  The same could be said for the IT consultant, the “wacky” woman who dresses up for Children In Need every year or even the manager who’s making sure you hit your targets.  The truth is that stress and depression can often be completely hidden.  I know, because I’ve hidden it myself!

Not because I didn’t trust people or didn’t want to talk about it. But because….well actually that’s not easy to explain.  In fact, it’s completely illogical and can’t really be understood.  It is a mental illness, so I guess it’s bound to be irrational!

I’m a cynical man – I think Deal or No Deal is fixed (My opinion, not that of AUM!) and I’m not convinced by the Moon landings.  As such, I was pretty cynical about stress and mental illness.  To me it seemed like a good way for people to have a few weeks off work on full pay!  Even when I was showing signs of stress, I didn’t fully appreciate the reality of it.  I thought I was just feeling a bit down, getting a bit annoyed too easily, getting upset too much.  After all, nobody else was commenting on it or making a big deal of it.  My managers at work didn’t notice anything wrong, but why would they?

Then something happened.  Not anything major or memorable, but something that just tipped me over the edge.  I can’t even recall it entirely, just a piece of work that I found difficult or confused about.  I’d love to tell a story here about an epiphany, some major incident that pushed me over the edge, but it’s not like that.  The upshot was that I went home feeling terrible, upset and unable to really understand why.  I’m not writing this for a sympathy vote or to pull at the heartstrings, so I won’t go into details.  Suffice to say, my girlfriend got me to go to the Doctors immediately and the Doctor declared that I was suffering from stress and I had many symptoms of depression.

I’d always thought 5 months off work sounded like a great idea!  But until the final week of my hiatus, it didn’t feel like I was off work at all.  Counselling, mental exercises in my head, sitting around worrying, long walks on my own were the order of the day.  Actually the long walks were good, apart from when I got caught in a hailstorm in the middle of a field one day. That hurt! Although if you ever need to take your mind off something, I can recommend standing in the open air in a hailstorm, you’ll forget what’s bothering you in an instant.

All the time, I had to have faith that the process I was going through (which included various legal drugs!) would work.  The Doctors, the counsellor and my girlfriend all told me it would, it was just a case of me having their faith, because most of the time you can’t actually envisage yourself getting better.  I spoke to a couple of friends and family members about it, but kept it from other people.  Not because I didn’t trust them but because I preferred to have people who didn’t feel like they had to tread eggshells around me.  And that’s one of the strange things about depression – you can keep it from people and they can be none the wiser. 

Without wishing to sound like I’m linking into a sales pitch, AUM are here to stop you and people at your organisation from being like I was.  We also do other stuff, and you can find out about that here.

Luckily for me, my story has a happy ending. Shortly after recovering, I landed this job at AUM and am now in a position to help other people who may be experiencing something similar to what I went through.

The point is that you can take steps to ensure that you don’t end up suffering from stress, and you can help people who work for you having the same problems.  If you’d have asked me 15 months ago, I’d tell you to not bother and that you/they just need to get a grip.  But that’s utter nonsense and I now think it’s great that companies like AUM exist to help yourself and other avoid reaching breaking point.