I don't know what it is but I have a complete and total inability to take anything seriously. Perhaps it is nervousness or my medication but I always seem to laugh when it is completely inappropriate to do so.
I just can’t seem to help myself; the slightest little thing seems to be incredibly funny to me. I think it is just the general level of discomfort I feel in pretty much every situation that seems to spark this up.
For example, I find serious meetings very hard to take seriously, once during a small meeting my boss said ‘Maybe it’s because...’ and in the pause between words I suddenly sang ‘...I’m a Londoner!’ – I have no idea what possessed me to say that out loud, he’s not even a Londoner :) It just seemed so funny and the sentence seemed to need finishing.
A similar situation occurred when my team lead said ‘Because...because...’ and I replied with ‘Because, because of the wonderful things he does!’ with a flourish. At which point he looked at me like I had lost the plot and I had to swiftly apologise and ask him to continue.
Libraries are a constant source of amusement for me, there is something about the request to be quiet that just makes me worse. I usually end up thinking about something ridiculously stupidly pant-wettingly funny and I usually have to leave before I completely embarrass myself.
People singing to me or expressing great emotion towards me, particularly in a public place seems to make me double over with laughter – I’m really glad that my husband proposed to me in private or I may have seriously offended him.
To be fair, I am not actually laughing at the event itself, it is simply how uncomfortable I feel in that situation that my brain suddenly recalls something I saw on Robot Chicken or something that someone has said to me that made me laugh. Once that has occurred I get into the inevitable situation where I try desperately not to laugh but the fact that I am suppressing my laughter seems to make it funnier and so I attempt to suppress that until that just becomes so hilarious that I find myself laughing hysterically and I have very little explanation for my behaviour. This is neatly described by Jeff in the TV comedy ‘Coupling’ as ‘The Giggle Loop’.
I often feel uncomfortable in posh restaurants, I generally drop food all over myself or knock things over or swear by accident – I just can’t be trusted in serious situations.
During my graduation ceremony I found that I was going to be the last person on the stage to collect my degree and to be honest, once I found that out I almost couldn’t climb the stairs to the stage as I was too busily mentally restraining my laughter. This wasn’t helped by the lady at the front of the stage who said ‘It’s ever so brave of you going last’ and I turned to see that there was no one left in the queue. I suddenly felt stupendously silly and this just made it harder to stop laughing.
I must seem mad, suddenly bursting into laughter on the bus or my mouth twitching desperately in interviews but anyone who has ever felt this way will completely understand where I am coming from on this.
I particularly like comedy shows as at least there your laughter blends in with everyone else’s but serious plays have me fleeing to the loo at the interval to laugh myself senseless.
Recently I went to a few art exhibitions and while walking around in the silence and the contemplation, my husband kept saying to me things like ‘I really like the use of light in this painting’ which just kept making me laugh as it all just seemed so silly. I pointed out to my husband that I appreciate art in my head very much but I find it difficult to share my thoughts with anyone else for fear that they think I am being somehow pretentious.
I am much better at expressing myself in written form rather than verbally, this is mainly due to my desperate inability to string words together in a sentence when I am nervous but also because if I am writing things down I can laugh as much as I want. I’m laughing now, but you can’t see it so I feel more comfortable knowing that I am laughing at something ridiculous I saw on the internet the other day and as I am in an empty flat, no one can see me.
What I do know is, generally the more serious the situation, the more likely my brain is to find it amusing.
Nevermind, you know what they say, laughter is the best medicine.
Monday 6 September 2010
Don’t send in the clowns...
This may surprise a few people but I have suffered from severe depression for many years. I know, weird isn’t it?
“But you seem so cheerful!” people say to me “You can’t be depressed!”
Anyone who says things like this to me has clearly never seen me in private when I have reached the extreme low points.
Now, you may be thinking ‘Oh, well this is going to be a miserable blog post!’ and I would say ‘Aah, well that is where you’re wrong!’ so there!
On the contrary, this blog post may delve into misery at points but I assure you that it has a happy outcome. With that in mind, I shall continue.
As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, I have suffered from severe depression for many, many years. Whether this is due to my OCD is unknown – it’s difficult to know which came first. All I know is that I was a miserable child, a miserable teenager and a miserable adult.
Several people have said to me in the past that depression doesn’t exist and that it is all in my head – so to speak. I always find this completely insulting and it really doesn’t help when I am feeling so low. Anyone who has suffered through depression will tell you that it is a terrible illness and one which can have an enormous impact on your life and the lives of your loved ones.
In my case, there was nothing particularly bad in my life that caused my recent terrible spell of depression. I have a job that I love, a husband whom I love, I’m now debt free after a lot of effort, I have everything I could want – yet several weeks ago I felt like I couldn’t go on and apart from my OCD there was no reason for this to occur.
It didn’t help that I was recovering from viral meningitis and felt physically terrible but that wasn’t the cause of it. For about a year I have spent most of my time feeling dreadful, feeling unworthy, fat, ugly, useless and a disappointment. My husband tells me I’m wonderful on an almost daily basis but to no avail. Nothing seemed to lift the darkness, I found myself having some terrible thoughts – not specifically about harming myself but I just didn’t want to have to go on feeling the way I did.
There was no obvious reason for it, a time when I should be the happiest in my life and all I could think about was how miserable I was. The worst thing was that I knew that my misery was making my husband sad and it was hurting him to see me that way – but that just made me feel worse.
So, I sat in my psychiatrist’s office around two weeks ago in a sorry state. I was at as low ebb as I could have reached to be honest. I’ve tried everything over the past year to improve my mood but nothing seemed to work. I have had Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for my OCD and have taken various anti-depressants but I just didn’t feel any better.
This time my psychiatrist advised me to take new medication, I was offered the same medication last year and I refused it as I didn’t want to take any more medication than I was already on. However, this time I was so miserable and so desperate to feel better I accepted the medication at as low a dose as possible. Now, everyone is different and I am in no way suggesting that what helps me will help anyone else and I would strongly advise anyone with depression to seek help from their GP as different therapies benefit different people.
I took the low dose of the medication and I have to admit that I felt like a zombie for around 2 or 3 days, I kept drifting into sleep at odd times. The first day I couldn’t keep my eyes open, I was so sleepy. The side effects were not nice but after a few days I started to feel quite cheerful.
For the first time in a long time I actually felt quite happy, sort of content. I didn’t feel drugged up or hazy – just a feeling that everything was going to be ok. The OCD voice in my brain that generally told me that I hadn’t done things properly seemed to quieten down considerably and for the first time in a year I found myself looking forward to things.
The oddest thing is, I’ve spent so much of my life feeling miserable inside that I actually have no idea how to cope with not feeling that way. Isn’t that weird? I’m so used to feeling miserable and worried and desolate that now I don’t feel it I sort of miss it – I was so used to it, that living without the constant misery is actually very peculiar. I commented to my husband recently that I am so used to living with depression that I don’t really know how to act without it.
I don’t feel euphoric or high, I just feel like everything is ok. Who knows how long it will last, I am only to be on this medication for a few months so we’ll just have to see what happens over the next few months but even a break from the depression is very welcome, regardless of how long it lasts.
It at least gives me hope that perhaps I won’t feel as bad as I did forever, there is hope.
“But you seem so cheerful!” people say to me “You can’t be depressed!”
Anyone who says things like this to me has clearly never seen me in private when I have reached the extreme low points.
Now, you may be thinking ‘Oh, well this is going to be a miserable blog post!’ and I would say ‘Aah, well that is where you’re wrong!’ so there!
On the contrary, this blog post may delve into misery at points but I assure you that it has a happy outcome. With that in mind, I shall continue.
As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, I have suffered from severe depression for many, many years. Whether this is due to my OCD is unknown – it’s difficult to know which came first. All I know is that I was a miserable child, a miserable teenager and a miserable adult.
Several people have said to me in the past that depression doesn’t exist and that it is all in my head – so to speak. I always find this completely insulting and it really doesn’t help when I am feeling so low. Anyone who has suffered through depression will tell you that it is a terrible illness and one which can have an enormous impact on your life and the lives of your loved ones.
In my case, there was nothing particularly bad in my life that caused my recent terrible spell of depression. I have a job that I love, a husband whom I love, I’m now debt free after a lot of effort, I have everything I could want – yet several weeks ago I felt like I couldn’t go on and apart from my OCD there was no reason for this to occur.
It didn’t help that I was recovering from viral meningitis and felt physically terrible but that wasn’t the cause of it. For about a year I have spent most of my time feeling dreadful, feeling unworthy, fat, ugly, useless and a disappointment. My husband tells me I’m wonderful on an almost daily basis but to no avail. Nothing seemed to lift the darkness, I found myself having some terrible thoughts – not specifically about harming myself but I just didn’t want to have to go on feeling the way I did.
There was no obvious reason for it, a time when I should be the happiest in my life and all I could think about was how miserable I was. The worst thing was that I knew that my misery was making my husband sad and it was hurting him to see me that way – but that just made me feel worse.
So, I sat in my psychiatrist’s office around two weeks ago in a sorry state. I was at as low ebb as I could have reached to be honest. I’ve tried everything over the past year to improve my mood but nothing seemed to work. I have had Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for my OCD and have taken various anti-depressants but I just didn’t feel any better.
This time my psychiatrist advised me to take new medication, I was offered the same medication last year and I refused it as I didn’t want to take any more medication than I was already on. However, this time I was so miserable and so desperate to feel better I accepted the medication at as low a dose as possible. Now, everyone is different and I am in no way suggesting that what helps me will help anyone else and I would strongly advise anyone with depression to seek help from their GP as different therapies benefit different people.
I took the low dose of the medication and I have to admit that I felt like a zombie for around 2 or 3 days, I kept drifting into sleep at odd times. The first day I couldn’t keep my eyes open, I was so sleepy. The side effects were not nice but after a few days I started to feel quite cheerful.
For the first time in a long time I actually felt quite happy, sort of content. I didn’t feel drugged up or hazy – just a feeling that everything was going to be ok. The OCD voice in my brain that generally told me that I hadn’t done things properly seemed to quieten down considerably and for the first time in a year I found myself looking forward to things.
The oddest thing is, I’ve spent so much of my life feeling miserable inside that I actually have no idea how to cope with not feeling that way. Isn’t that weird? I’m so used to feeling miserable and worried and desolate that now I don’t feel it I sort of miss it – I was so used to it, that living without the constant misery is actually very peculiar. I commented to my husband recently that I am so used to living with depression that I don’t really know how to act without it.
I don’t feel euphoric or high, I just feel like everything is ok. Who knows how long it will last, I am only to be on this medication for a few months so we’ll just have to see what happens over the next few months but even a break from the depression is very welcome, regardless of how long it lasts.
It at least gives me hope that perhaps I won’t feel as bad as I did forever, there is hope.
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