The drugs do work

My friend has been suffering from terrible mood swings.

He doesn’t tell anyone, he just struggles on and gets by with the aid of a painted smile.

The drugs do work, just, they don’t make things worse; they make things less worse.

The onset of autumn and its accompanying darkness do make things worse and he says it’s now a fight to get through to the spring equinox.

He was out walking the other day. The wind was howling, the rain was pouring. So he went to the nearest seat and sat down and he got wetter and wetter. It wasn’t the self-harming that you read about but it was self-harming nonetheless. There were times when he wished the rain would completely overwhelm him, take him away without him noticing but he knew it wouldn’t. He has felt like this many times before but he never quite wanted to die.

He knows that his life has been pretty good of late. He does not have the same problems as many people have. He isn’t in pain, he isn’t financially broken. He has a family who love him and that, in his darkest hours, is what keeps him believing.

There is a guilt trip about it too. So many people are worse off. They have far shittier lives, some people he knows have nothing more than the house they live in, a leaky roof above their heads. They work massively long hours in order to earn not very much but they don’t go around staring into space. Well, at least they don’t tell him they do. So maybe they do?

My friend still does things that others find irrational, illogical. When the mood takes him, he cannot be stopped doing what he has to do. Something will be locked in his head and he has to follow it down that straight line, even if he knows in his heart it’s the wrong way. Social events he knows he will enjoy, he declines. Put those blinkers on.

He is glad to be alive – just – and he wants to stay that way. He knows that we are not on this earth for any reason other than through the accident of our birth, there is no grand design, nothing is organised by fate. And there is no certainty other than death.

I tell him to keep going because the alternative, nothing, is probably worse.