Maybe happiness is work?
For most of my life, I didn’t consider becoming a husband, let alone a dad, the CEO of a company or happy. I was a wreck, unable to feel empathy for myself (unable to feel anything but despair at all for long stretches of time). I couldn’t guarantee being there, staying, keep trying — neither for myself, nor for a potential wife, kid, business partner, client, or employee.
Thanks to approximately 1200+ hours of therapy and a combination of pharmacological agents that achieved the desired effect without the side effects being triggers for the next depressive episode, I ended up being able to manage my illness. After more than 15 years of agony I finally felt like there could be the second life I hadn’t dared to dream of.
Why would you as a mentally ill person get a child and found a company in the first place?!, some of you may ask. Because I got so much better after years and years of therapy and medication and saw so many undiagnosed, untreated people around me founding companies and families that I thought: «why not me?».
A personal disaster site
I moved from Berlin to Basel because I needed a change, a healthier, more recovery-friendly surrounding free from 12 years of unhealthy, self-destructive, hypomanic, drug-infested memories of despair, self-hate and suicidality. To this day I can’t travel to Berlin without feeling like returning to a personal disaster site.
In Basel I moved into a 9-square-meter attic chamber of a friend. I used his shower, his kitchen, his toilet. I was 32, broke, I had no money on the bank, no job in Basel, just some people I liked and boxes full of books and tools. That was it. Most people didn’t understand why I did it. Many were shocked. I felt free again for the first time in 20 years.
I worked some stupid and some great side-jobs to pay for the extensive costs of life in Switzerland. It’s a rich country — and it shows. I did some theatre related stuff (I studied creative writing for the stage back in Berlin and had founded a theatre company) but then realized I needed to get rid of that as well: it would never pay my bills, besides writing had turned into kind of a trap for my pathologically introspective thoughts. So there I was:
32-years-old, no career, no money, no security whatsoever.
8 years later, I am married to an amazingly smart and beautiful woman, half Swiss, half Portuguese, who is not only what you would call a soul mate, but is hotter than I ever was myself. We have a four-year-old daughter who seems to be a pretty happy, smart, socially active girl. Two years ago, I started a company with my former boss, who had given me a job in his then-project two and a half years earlier.
I still have no money on the bank, but it feels different. More reasonable somehow, because it is related to daring something, not to being incapable of taking part in a so-called normal life. I still see a therapist, but only 6 times a year, not 3 times a week. I still need medication, but in low doses and without noticeable side effects.
Things went well. So well I even started writing again. Just a little bit, without the pressure ob becoming a successful author (even though I wouldn’t mind some success, of course). My motivation to share what goes through my head is not that different from 19 years ago when I started what back then was supposed to turn into a writing career: I want to connect my inner world to the outside world by having it reflected by other minds than my own.
Still broke but different
It feels different because my inner world isn’t the shadowy, lifeless place anymore. It is not exactly a paradise, but it is habitable. Very habitable. And more and more often reason for satisfaction, a certain pride and even something like happiness: I made it.
I not only didn’t kill myself with 27 when I spontaneously decided not to jump from the roof of the abandoned, condemned old Berlin building in a broken part of Wedding I lived in, I also turned my life into something that somehow matches what I always expected of myself: self-determined.
I am no longer dependent on therapists, drugs, or my dysfunctional childhood home. I somehow turned out free. If you told my 25-year-old me I would be writing this text at 40, I wouldn’t even have bothered to react. No way I would have believed it. It seemed too far away a place to make it there. My energy levels were almost too low to get through the day back then — how to imagine a 15-year-stretch dealing with this illness?
Still hard to believe yet true
It worked. It f***ing worked. Often I still can’t believe it. When I’m at home, playing with my daughter. When I see my wife coming out of the shower naked. When I iron a shirt because I’m about to meet somebody important in a country I have moved to seven years ago. When I sit in the garden of the little old hut in the mountains my wife’s family took care of for the last 40 years, staring at the beauty of a sunset in the Swiss mountains.
I don’t believe in miracles. Which is why I think life is about going on. Just going on, however hard it may seem. We can survive a lot. We can change things. We can leave stuff behind. And we can reimagine. If you are in the centre of a clinical depression, this may sound like a joke. Based on my very own experience it’s true though.
I was clinically depressed again and again for months and months over a period of 25 years. I wasn’t diagnosed for the first ten years. I was an addict. I contemplated the option of not being alive anymore as the only way out — day after day, for years.
Let’s see what comes next
All this is now behind me. I don’t know what the future will bring. I don’t think I am cured. But I am somehow able to manage my disease which allows me to keep on building a healthier, more sustainable foundation for the bad times which will most probably come one day. That’s what I gained: more time to work on it.
Maybe that’s what happiness is all about.
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If you are in crisis mode, please get help. Don’t be afraid to be rejected. Don’t judge yourself for being weak: if you are desperate, you are desperate. Mental health is complicated. Get help if it’s tough to imagine how life should go on like this.
Switzerland: call 143 — Dargebotene Hand, 24/7
Germany: (0800) 111 0 111 oder (0800) 111 0 222 (Telefonseelsorge). 24/7
A lot of other countries: https://unitedgmh.org/mental-health-support
