How playing the drums helped my depression

When I was 38 (around 4 or so years ago), I quit social media and spent the next two years learning to play the drums. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done. It made my spirit happy. It was like dancing. And punching. Creative and cathartic. For several years prior, I had been wallowing in the depths of an online void, achieving what felt ultimately like the slow death of my soul. I now refer to it the Anti-Life, as drums helped my depression.

Getting to the Anti-Life had been swift and unexpected, yet initially very thrilling. I’d been studying for a university degree when social media burst onto the online landscape. I found it a welcome diversion from the tedium and intensity of study. More than a diversion – it was gloriously hedonistic. I would log on and plunge myself into hours, days, weeks, of largely meaningless yet highly pleasurable procrastination with fellow avoidant comrades on various social media sites and Forums.

Sitting in front of the computer and intermittently surfing for academic sources allowed me to kid myself that I was studying but the truth was, I was careening off course. I always managed to eventually apply myself to my studies and I achieved good grades but I’d wasted irrational amounts of time and adrenaline in the process, putting my mind and body under senseless pressure by cutting the work down to the wire. It was an inefficient and unhealthy approach. It made my study experience harder and it opened the door to a growing negative undercurrent that began to slowly chip away at the foundations of my health and happiness.

It made my spirit happy. It was like dancing. And punching. Creative and cathartic.

What started out as a handy form of escapism soon turned into a full-blown compulsion and I began to notice that even when I had logged off I was still, mentally, logged on.  Online interactions followed me into my offline day, into my thoughts, into my bed, into my ability to sleep soundly and through the night.

I started to find out things about my ‘friends’ that I didn’t want to know – the ugly, secret thoughts of people who had fallen into the false anonymity trap of online socialising, where a computer screen shields people from the direct effects of their words on people’s actual faces. I bore sorrowful and frightened witness to vicious, unfeeling comments and opinions that initially hurt my heart but gradually turned it to stone. Worse than this, I allowed myself to become a functioning part of the soul-less part of this machine.

I found myself engaging in senseless arguments, trading insults with internet trolls and people I would probably avoid in the outside world, or people whose arrogant bravado would ordinarily be tempered by the norms of real life social contact. I began to develop a deep misanthropy; a profound lack of faith and respect in my fellow humans; and in my own emerging perverse behaviours and feelings. At the heart of it all, I was sinking into a chronic depression. I had found myself face-to-face with my own deep lack of fulfilment in my own life, my own unhappiness and insecurities, reflected back at me in my constant engagement in senseless power struggles with people whose opinions and ways of being should really have meant little to me. This wasn’t what I wanted for myself, for my life.  My addiction was making me feel spiritless and empty, and ashamed of myself.

The prolonged anxiety inevitably affected my physical health, giving birth to hallmark symptoms of fatigue, poor digestion, body aches and pains, and hormonal ups and downs that occur when the nervous system, exhausted by constant sympathetic arousal, starts to give up.

One day, after months, maybe years, of this insidious despair and sickness, I had a simple revelation. I finally took the blinkers off and self-confessed that what I was doing wasn’t constructive to my well-being. I asked myself what I’d like to be doing, where I’d like to be heading. It dawned on me that I wanted to play the drums. And so right there, I disabled my social media accounts, looked up a local drum teacher, and started drumming. Life began to feel lighter and more joyful from that point on.  I’d re-engaged with my actual life and was realising myself (so THAT’S what Maslow was on about!).

Unwisely, a couple of years later, I looked back. Wanting to connect with distant friends and family through social media, and believing I could moderate my use, I dipped a toe back into the water. I was confident I could play on the outskirts, with minimal harm. This was naïve. The foreseeable unfolded to reaffirm what I knew deep down inside – social media and I are intrinsically incompatible. We can’t have a relationship without it ending in tears – mine.  I started re-engaging in old patterns; the anxiety and depression rose back to the surface, this time harder and faster.

The foreseeable unfolded to reaffirm what I knew deep down inside – social media and I are intrinsically incompatible.

I spent the next two years spiralling backwards, my drum kit gathering dust in the corner, along with my hopes and dreams. I knew what was happening but it took me awhile to extract myself from the pull of the addiction. And this is where I had to finally admit to myself my own insistent patterns of being; my deep-seeded vulnerabilities to social anxiety and depression; my struggles with emotional coping and addictive behaviours; and a persistent lack of belief in myself that sees me habitually choosing to submerge myself into escapisms, rather than facing my life and the things I want to do headlong and with courage. It finally (and oh so thankfully!) dawned on me, once again, that I was making a choice to place myself in harm’s way. And with that admission, I found the power within myself to let it all go.

Last week, I logged off. Since then, a lot has happened. I read a whole book (something I have not been able to apply myself to for years); I re-engaged with my love of writing (back to bloggind!); and I dusted off my drum kit (my trusty, wild and wonderful friend!). Already I can feel myself returning. I’m beginning to move forward again. Away from that thing called Addiction and into that wonderful thing called Life.