Welcome

Hello and welcome to the first of what I hope will be a series of blogs, first a little background information about myself.
          I`m Brad and at the time of writing I`m 33 years old and I suffer from depression, I wont go into the reasons why I started to suffer from depression and anxiety but i will go into how its affected me.
          I suppose I`ve been suffering from depression my whole adult life, this came to a head in October 2014 when I was briefly admitted to hospital suffering from a panic attack, although the nurses were wonderful and quickly identified it as a panic attack, the doctors not so much, they actually thought I was faking!
          The events leading up to this attack left me broken, I became like a zombie, same thing every day, I stopped talking to work colleagues, friends, everyone I knew, when I did try talking to people I essentially got the response "don`t be stupid, men can`t get depression" or the things that really REALLY shouldn`t say to someone with depression, my self worth plummeted, I started hearing voices (little side note here, when I finally did go to the doctor he was relieved that the voice was my own as it was a sign of depression and not something worse) suicidal thoughts became a daily occurrence, not helped by the voice encouraging me and the fact that everyone else i knew was doing far better than I was, starting new relationships, moving into their own houses, getting much better jobs and yet here I was university educated, experienced, world traveled man unable to find anything more than a crappy minimum wage job that I hated.
          One night in late January 2015 I decided I`d had enough, I left a note and detailed who I wanted to have the things I`d left behind, I had decided to throw myself off of Beachy Head, a kind of poetic justice, a person who enjoys climbing found dead at the bottom of a cliff, if they found me at all, my car however had no petrol in it, not a problem I thought, there`s a petrol station not far from where I live, first of all though I needed to check how much money I had in my bank...the screen flashed up £18.15, i had to laugh at the irony, my shitty crappy job had inadvertently saved my life, I didn`t have the money to get to Beachy head, I turned around and went home, I was such a failure I couldn`t even kill myself properly!
          2015 was hard for me, I lost friends, lost hope, lost myself, I became a walking shell, I stopped doing the things I loved, hiking, rock climbing, canoeing, just generally being outdoors, naturally I put on weight and lost fitness, something else for the voices to feed on, in the end my day consisted of;

Wake up (if I`d slept) voices saying "your fat, your poor, your useless, you`ll never have a girlfriend, you`ll never own a house, you`ll be homeless soon"

Drive to work with the voices "fat, useless, poor, bald, ugly and homeless"

Go through the working day, here at least I got a reprieve as I needed to concentrate on what I was doing

Drive home, voice still going

cook dinner, voice still going

eat half of it, voice still going

          I never had a break from them, what didn`t help was in early 2015 I had nothing but trigger after trigger after trigger, this made my depression so much worse, I tried exercise to help but at this point I was so unfit that I could barely walk around the local field, as you can imagine the voice had a field day with that! I`d hit rock bottom, I`d started drinking heavily...for me, one bottle of wine every two weeks may not seem much but I am a person who buys a six pack every two to three months or so and makes it last six days, so make of that what you will.
          2015 was also the year that I began to seek help with not so gentle persuasion from my friends, 2015 became 2016 I hadn`t noticed any significance improvement, sure I had the voices under control but what about the rest of me? I still held the crippling beliefs about myself, my adventurous spirit was gone, I used to think nothing of packing my bag and going for a long walk, signing up for a charity walk somewhere or calling a friend and saying lets go climbing here or there, now it was just a struggle to get out of bed and go ten miles down the road!
          So why am I writing these blog? 2 reasons, to prove to myself that I can do things and secondly and perhaps more importantly to document me recapturing my adventurous side, I`ve been out of these activities for nearly three years now so it will be slow progress and I`m not expecting to be as good as I was before straight away but I am determined to get back to what I truly love doing.