Recent years

This happened in my forties:

I got divorced,
I remarried,
I faced retrenchment at work twice,

I didn't realise that my depression had sneaked back.

Divorce:
After nearly 20 years of marriage, with two beautiful children as a result, I just could not do it anymore. I felt like we were both caught up in some type of downward spiral. We were not able to help each other, and most likely, making things worse for each other. The bad things that happened became the only things that I could see (depression sneaking in and laying it's traps). How it all effected the children, and knowing that I made the decision to do this was weighing extremely heavily on me.

Remarry:
There are many beautiful people in the world, but it is not always easy to find them. I remarried when I found that beautiful person who seemed perfect to me. Ultimately though, I was wracked with guilt. Guilt for leaving my children (even though they were living close by, and I saw them pretty regularly), guilt for dragging someone new into my black-clouded world, guilt for not being able to give everyone who loved me enough attention. Depression works in insidious ways.

Retrenchment at work:
In what, I guess with hindsight, was a perfect storm, events conspired to make my world even worse. With all the events going on in my personal life, I was struggling to cope at work. Unfortunately, the timing was abysmal. At roughly the same time, there were restructures and management shake-ups. This meant that there were very few people left who had witnessed the incredible work that I had done in the past, and could attest to this. All that the new eyes could see was some subdued, withdrawn individual with an irregular productivity profile.

Ultimately, the work-place is not a convalescence home, and my managers had had enough. Over the course of the next few years, I was asked to reapply for my job at least five time, and in one of those occasions I was pushed out of it. Fortunately for me, another manager saw something in me and brought me into his team. I think that I then proceeded to let him down. Only to be reinstated into my previous job roughly one year later. I do believe, however, if I had had a better manager, I would have been much more productive. I am a strong believer in the fact that your leaders can either diminish you, or multiply you. In my case, in the perfect storm, my manager was an extreme diminisher. The hole that I falling down was just getting deeper and deeper. In the end, I took the initiative and left. I had no new job or real way of supporting myself and my family.

Depression sneaked back:
Reading this, and thinking back, it is obvious to me that depression was playing a larger part in my life all this time than I realised, and was most probably responsible for a lot of the outcomes. I had been treated for depression in my twenties with medication, and had somehow believed that I had shaken it off. I had stopped the medication after a few years, and had been coping just fine since. I will never be able to pinpoint when exactly it came back, if it was a gradual process, or if I was even any better. I was going to General Practitioners with all sorts of ailments, and on more than one occasion was asked whether I was depressed. I didn't think that I was, how wrong I was. It had been there for a long time intertwining with all events in my life making it impossible for me to determine whether I was depressed because of the various life events I had been experiencing, or whether I had brought all this into my life because I was depressed.

I still don't know. I just know that the most important thing is to keep moving forward. I am surrounded but people who love me, all my children, my wife and my family. I am a lucky guy - I just can't cope.