I can report, dear reader, that I am still undergoing therapy for my mental ill health. I can’t remember how many sessions of therapy I have had so far – they tend to all blur into one – but they are very deep sessions and very, very tiring.
My black dog came along, I have finally learned through five decades of therapy, very early into my life. I had long believed that it all kicked off when I was 12 or 13 years of old, but my therapist and I have gone back before that and whilst my memory from my early years is somewhat threadbare – I was very young at the time and I’m not now – we have managed to find some early examples of things which were starting to go wrong when I was still at Junior School and, quite probably, before that too.
I recall vividly my night terrors, general anxiety and bouts of depression when I started at senior school, but this time I have managed to recall some darkness from before that. Sitting, alone, on the platform at St Annes railway station – yes, there really was one – with no one else around as the expresses thundered through. Walking through the park across the road, in driving rain, getting soaked to the skin, but just sitting there on a wet, slimy bench. Walking along Winchester Road in Brislington, on my way back home from my grandparents, my legs feeling like lead, my brain full of mush, having to stop every so often because my body felt so tired. Yet I had done nothing particularly exceptional in order to be SO tired other than walk to school, sit in lessons and not understand what was going on and then go to my grandparents until my mum got home from work. And I managed to remember, for the first time, what a miserable time that was.
It’s funny, isn’t it? I had parked my childhood memories as being largely “normal” and typical of a young boy growing up in the city. I remembered all the good bits – and there were some – and the bad bits, the really sad bits, I had subconsciously buried forever, until the last few weeks. There was me thinking all the dark stuff came along as I reached puberty and then adolescence and it turns out it started before that. If I am able to recall more stuff today at my latest session, I may trace the illness right back to the womb.
I now get that everything dark started right at, well, the start. I am not sure how mental illness strikes at the immature, still developing mind, or what sets it off. I am guessing that even science hasn’t worked that one out yet. It seems that no one, least of all me, picked up any of my symptoms during that time. Maybe I developed techniques for hiding it from everyone, I don’t know. No one at school, certainly not the teachers, had the slightest notion that there was anything unusual going on, it occurred to no one that something might be amiss as I struggled with even the most basic lessons. I suppose in these relatively unenlightened days, you were regarded as either bright or thick and I was regarded as the latter, which of course may be true anyway. What was clear to me was that nothing made any sense, as it didn’t through senior school and then a lifetime in work. My struggle, my entire life struggle, was all about getting through a working life without being sacked for not being able to do so many things that others found easy. I suppose I must have had some attributes that made me worthwhile employing, but I know there were times when this cannot have been the case.
I remember, just, being at Lyme Regis with my grandparents. I went off playing in the wet sand, all on my own. It was cold, it was drizzly but I just sat there, getting even wetter, feeling incredibly low. I doubt if I was more than eight at the time, but I was already, in a sense, self-harming already. Almost a lifetime later and I have only just realised it.
And this. I have learned that whilst I thought I had a decent childhood, I have done a 180 on it now. I knew we were poor, that I never ate out until I was in my twenties, that I had nothing like the luxuries my peers and friends owned, but I set those aside, making the best of what I had. But it turns out I didn’t. In fact, the seeds of despair had been sown and it paved the way for a life I always found incredibly difficult.
I told my therapist I was going to write about this stuff, partly through catharsis but also to help others who might not want to admit their own illness. They might not want to come out, but I want them to know there are things you can do about it. You know when something is not right.
I also know in my heart that this black dog will never fully go away and that the rest of my life will be about managing it. I am going to try to find out why it is that there is so much in life that doesn’t make sense and that I don’t understand and, more importantly, whether it matters. I can write, as you can see, but not well enough to earn a living at it (or even make a few coppers!) which means I have to look around to find things I might be able to do to a decent level of competence. It is not a very long list.
I am doing all right at the moment. The drugs do work and the therapy, although it is very hard work, makes a difference. It’s not difficult to write about it and I really don’t care how people regard it, or indeed me. My name is Rick Johansen, I suffer from severe depression, along with four types of anxiety and I am going to write about it. There. I did it.
