So, I know you are asking, albeit so quietly that I can’t hear you, “how are you coping with this endless semi-lockdown? You’re probably taking as much by way of anti-depressants as is legally allowable and in all likelihood more than is good for you in the long run. How do you get out of bed in the morning?”
I have two things to get up for. Firstly, and most importantly, I have to get up whenever my partner gets up because she is suffering from truly agonising sciatica. I have to help her downstairs and attend to many of her needs until she gets mobile later in the morning. She cannot usually sit down again until the afternoon, such are the excruciating levels of pain she suffers. Yes, here’s the thing: she refuses to go sick from work. Indeed, she has not been sick from work for over four years. There’s commitment for you.
The second reason is to buy my newspaper. As my loyal reader is well aware, only old people buy newspapers. I am one of these old people. Don’t tell the police, please, because they will arrest me, lock me up and throw away the key. I regard it as essential, especially when on a day like today my newspaper of choice, the mighty and largely unread-by-most Guardian, includes columns by John Crace, Rafael Behr and Marina Hyde, all on the same day. Without my ailing partner and my Guardian, getting up would be a huge struggle. This proves only one thing: I have not yet been overwhelmed by my depression.
Trust me, I know I am in a far better position than many. I live in a nice, cosy house with my partner and three eccentric cats. I have a small garden. I am near a wide variety of supermarkets. I can go out for a walk if I want to, even if, somewhat ungratefully, I find that the sheer boredom of small variations on the same daily walk is worsening my mental health, not making it better.
I am aware of medical advice that exercise is good for your mental health. I am also aware that simply saying ‘exercise is good for your mental health’ is little more than a glib, meaningless slogan because sometimes I feel so shit I simply can’t get out of the door. Those endorphins are a fat lot of good if you are too ill to do anything to release them. Rather than being grateful to those who forever urge exercise to make your mental health better, I feel contemptuous of their glib assumption that all you have to do is go out for a run or a walk or a cycle. If I could do all that, I wouldn’t be ill, would I? It’s no better than urging me to ‘snap out of it’ because mental illness is merely self-pity. So ‘get over yourself’.
Yes, I know there is always someone worse off than you – and me for that matter. I’m not blind to all the misery and distress that’s out there, you know. I’ve buried both my parents and my stepfather, all my grandparents, my one uncle and auntie and countless family and friends. I’ve been aware throughout my life, especially in the last five years in the third sector, that life itself is the struggle for the millions of people society has left behind. It’s why I choose to do a little part time job in order to put something back into society and not sit on my arse doing nothing. But, for all that, my struggle, minor though you might think it is, is still my struggle.
My dad always urged me never concern myself with the things I could not change. He was smart and of course he was right. But still I do. And what I worry about most is what’s locking down the world: Covid-19.
Covid-19 has already claimed the lives of a close family member, a number of friends and relatives and friends of friends, if you know what I mean. I am concerned I might catch the wretched thing but I am far more concerned that others might. I look to the future, if I can through the eyes of the young, whose futures were already hugely at risk under the coming hard Brexit. This virus will undoubtedly destroy large numbers of companies and render millions unemployed. Our economy will lie in ruins when this is all finished and there is no vision of the post Covid-19 future that looks bright. Depression with added realism is a heady combination.
I’m trying to get into a routine, something I always encourage those people I serve in my professional life to do. 10.00 am this, 14.00 that. Writing to self-order. Routine, habit, other reasons to get up for.
I am lucky that I have things to get up for. If I had no partner and no Guardian, I might not get up at all.
