Maybe I will keep this one updated

I have tried to keep a regular blog going for a few years now, but for whatever reason, I get all enthusiastic and post regularly for a few weeks but then get disheartened that nobody reads the posts and I maybe just wasting my time.  However, this time I am determined to keep this one going, even if I am the only person reading it.

I will post mostly about my new hobby, fishing and how it has helped me with my depression.  Now fishing was a sport that I was dead against a few short months ago, but then after being diagnosed and being advised by my Doctor to find a hobby, I went fishing with a work colleague, Luke Smith.  I had taken the piss out of Luke and another colleague, Damian Smith, for years about fishing and said that if I did ever go with them I would throw stones into the water and scare the fish away because I had serious problems about hooking a living creature in the mouth and hauling it from it's natural environment. I just could not see how anyone could take any sort of pleasure from the sport and had been dead against it for years.  This was not just the only reason I had for my dislike of fishing.  I had vivid memories of my Dad trying to teach me how to cast correctly as a kid and getting shouted at if I did it wrong.  At the time we lived in a maisonette above the laundrette in Windmill Precinct, and my playground was the car park at the back of the shops.  It was here that my fishing lessons took place, with my Old Fella telling me that before anything else I had to learn how to cast before he would take me anywhere near the water.  I tried to do it the way he showed me, but for whatever reason I just could not grasp the technique he was showing me.  I had to stand on the kerb of a covered area and cast my line until I could hit the doors of the garages that ran along the one side of the car park.  It wasn't a huge distance, possibly 30 to 40 feet from the kerb to the door, but I just couldn't do it.  I tried and tried for hours but after breaking the line a few times, losing the little weights he had put on the line and frustrating him beyond belief I heard the now familiar rant that I got whenever he got frustrated with me, that I was useless.

This wasn't a new thing for me to hear, in fact it was something I heard on a regular basis if I couldn't grasp anything new at the first attempt and produce results that he obviously wanted me to.  The result of this relationship was that I grew up desperate for his approval, but never quite managed to get it.  It also had the affect that I would never try anything new for fear of failure and even today I get quite stressed out if I am sent anywhere by work for a job I am not used to.  Once I get my head around things I am fine, but it still takes me a long time to get enough confidence to try anything and there are a number of DIY jobs around my house that will pay testimony to this.  I'm not going to make this a place where I just bash my Dad, it's just the way he was and I loved him dearly, but he never seemed to have anything good to say about me.  I suppose I grew used to things being this way and accepted it as the norm, that everyone's Dad must have been the same as mine.  I just wanted my Dad to like me, but he was never the sort of person who could display affection easily, but I soon worked out I could make him laugh and I associated someone laughing at me with them liking me, and so began a lifetime of being the joker in the pack.  I have used humour as a shield over the years which continues to this day.

Anyway, before I go on far too long about how I am some sort of damaged, emotional cripple, I will leave it there but just add that my childhood wasn't all doom and gloom, there were some parts that I have very dear memories of, but the experience did leave me without confidence and with very little self esteem.  Feeling I was never good enough has impacted my life and has allowed others to manipulate my weaknesses.  During a disastrous marriage my ex-wife would tell me constantly that I was an ugly, fat useless so and so and that people only really accepted me as a friend because of what they could get from me, that no-one liked me and I should consider myself fortunate that she was with me because I would struggle to ever find a woman who would want to be seen with me.  All of this just compounded what I believed anyway, that I wasn't a nice person.


My breakthrough came when my marriage ended I suppose and I realised that my ex was just transferring her insecurities onto me, but the damage had been done and I have been in two, maybe three serious relationships since then.  I now find myself attracted to women I know I have no chance of being with because they are either married, in relationships or just so far out of my league.  However, this is safe for me because I know that I am not going to be rejected or get hurt.  The times when I have been in a relationship I have gone into it with a feeling that it was going to end badly (for me) and I have kind of engineered the break-up and then got depressed about it.  That has pretty much been my life really, one of pessimism and failure, convinced that everything people have said about me is true and that I am not a likeable person and I had just accepted that was how it was for me and I have plodded on regardless.


My depression has been there for years but somehow I have managed to keep it from surfacing and gone about things like I was on automatic pilot.  I would worry that I wasn't a good enough engineer at work and being placed in positions of trust did help a little and I started to think that maybe I was a better person than I had been told, but the joker was still very much there.  I would play the fool around the other engineers, make them laugh and believed that they liked me because of that, using humour as a shield again.  The depression was always there and I found it very easy to suppress the feelings by larking about but socially I locked myself away and became a recluse.


Things didn't improve much through 2014 for me, despite the birth of my granddaughter in June 2013, when my Mom's health deteriorated rapidly over the course of 9 months. My Dad had passed away in 1999, and my Mom had a second lease of life and she was a totally different person.  She was never in, she was going out more to concerts and social events, travelling abroad on her own and generally loving life, but she developed pains in her legs and arms and found it increasingly difficult to get out.  The decline was very fast and following a few serious falls she was admitted into hospital and it became very clear that she was never going to be able to live on her own again.  This loss of independence hit her hard and steadily her health got worse and worse and she passed away in December 2014.  At first I felt a huge sense of relief that her suffering was over and I began to feel confident about my future, but things were about to get worse for me a few months later.


I had watched my Mother slowly die over the nine months and things came to a head in February when I broke down and was swallowed up by the dark clouds of severe depression.  My bosses at work rallied round and got me the help I needed from my Doctor and touch wood, things have steadily improved. The Doctor told me that maybe I needed a hobby and try doing things that would make sure I was out socialising rather than shutting myself away.  I started looking on the internet at different things I could try and considered allsorts of things, but fishing seemed to have an appeal. If nothing else it would be a chance to prove to myself that my Dad was wrong in his assessment and that I wasn't useless after all.


Luke suggested that I go along with him to try fishing and he gave me some of his old gear so I went out and bought a few extra items from the local tackle shop.  The men who worked in the shop were very helpful and answered all of my questions and suggested what I would need to get me going.  I informed them that I had been given a little telescopic rod with a cheap reel and also a 12' rod designed for catching Carp and they told me to see how things went before buying the more expensive kit.

The day arrived and I went into it thinking I would probably last a few hours before heading home but sitting on the bank of the lake was incredibly relaxing and I managed to last 12 hours before we packed up for home.  I hadn't felt so relaxed in ages and couldn't wait to get out there again.  I caught about 20 fish including a 5lb 14oz Common Carp and loved every minute of the experience.  The thought of hooking a living creature in the mouth had bothered me a little, but I suppose the 'hunter-gatherer' gene kicked in and I soon put those feelings to the back of my mind......I wanted to go again but the next episode left me frustrated.