You, my loyal reader, may recognise the times when the black dog has got me by the short and curlies. It’s when I keep writing about it. On and on, over and over, like a broken record.
I’m not actually that bad at the moment. I’m functioning reasonably well and I don’t think anyone has noticed. I know it’s not that bad because there are some times of the day, though not the times during the night when I wake up and can’t get back to sleep, that I forget about it altogether.
I used to think to myself: “What have you got to be depressed about? You’ve got a pretty good life, with a wife, two boys, three cats and a whole load of tropical fish. You’ve got a job you like (at last) and you can listen to music and write pretty well whenever you like. What the hell are you depressed about?” But then I remembered that being depressed isn’t the same thing as being ungratefully miserable. It’s being ill.
What does it feel like, you don’t ask. I answer that it’s different things to all women and men. A friend of mine, who suffers from severe depression, can barely function at all when it hits him. He never knows when it’s coming, but when it does, he says – and I quote – “It’s as if my body weighs so much I can’t move.” So he stays in bed until it passes. That can take a few days, sometimes as long as a week. And do you know what he does about work? He rings in with the flu or some such physical ailment. “They’d never take me seriously if I rang in with depression. They’d tell me to pull myself together and ask given the job and life I have, ask how on earth could I be depressed? But the nice car doesn’t make me better. Only drugs can do that.”
I’m happy, which is completely the wrong word, but bear with me, with the black dog I have. He’s there all the time in varying degrees but only on a handful of occasions in my life has he won and I mean completely won. He’s left me walking through treacle and thinking through the thickest fog and sometimes, many times, I have broken down, but never, yet, completely broken up.
Now, it’s a combination of fatigue and an inability to think properly. And I see only the bad things. My concentration is all over the place and my diet needs sorting out – and quick. The world looks a horrible place, I keep thinking, and when my mood changes, I realise that, unfortunately, much of it really is.
I certainly don’t want sympathy for writing this. Please, no sympathetic words. I didn’t write it for that. I’ve been in contact with some friends this week who are finding it hard to cope and I, of all people, have been offering advice. And my advice is always the same: see a doctor, ask to see a therapist or counsellor and if none of that works, or if it only works a bit, then you may find that the drugs do work and they don’t make things worse. I need both.
I’m in a state of slight shock too because as well as my close friends who have confided in me since I ‘came out’ as a clinical depressive there are many other friends and acquaintances, as well as people I don’t even know but appear on social networks, who have the same sort of pain.
It gives me no pleasure as I learn, increasingly, that the trickle of mental illness is actually a Tsunami.
I’m bumping along, if not the bottom, then about halfway down and I am coping. I am seeing and talking with people who are much, much lower and worryingly some of them are not coping well at all.
Yes, in terms of black dogs, mine, lately, is not the worst in the world. He’s a real pain and he blights so much of my life, but, my god, I know there are black dogs who wreck lives and even end them. Actually, my life might have been very different if I had been, well, ‘normal’, whatever that is, but it’s too late for all that.
I don’t think I will ever defeat depression and anxiety but I am hoping they won’t kill me either. I don’t think they will, not at least in one fell swoop. I’m the lucky one because I am still here. Make sure you stay lucky too and that means being proactive. Things might not get better but they needn’t get any worse. Sometimes that’s enough.
