So this isn’t a book about what depression is supposed to feel like. It is a book about what mine felt like, what it did to me, what I did in response and what I now wonder about the bloke who spent so many years insisting he could deal with whatever was sitting in front of him.
This is not anybody else’s story, and I don’t want anybody reading it to mistake it for theirs. It is simply the story of one bloke trying to understand his own rabbit hole, and that bloke happens to be me.
Tomorrow may be better, worse or exactly the same, and experience has taught me not to make promises on its behalf. That is the part I have never been able to reconcile. After all the years, all the experience, all the doctors, all the medications, all the strategies and all the attempts to understand what happens inside my own head, I can still wake on an otherwise ordinary morning and discover the emotional weather has changed overnight.
Emotion complicated things, while action appeared to solve them. That was a remarkably useful philosophy for a boy who would become an accountant, businessman and professional problem-solver, but useful and complete are not necessarily the same thing. I wouldn’t discover that distinction for a long time.
What I cannot honestly do is look back at that boy and diagnose him with depression. I don’t know that he was depressed, and I am not even convinced that unhappy is the right word because he had good times, successes, adventures, horses, cricket, places to explore and a bloody great hill beside the house where rabbits and foxes might leave evidence for him to discover. To impose depression retrospectively simply because I know what happened later would be to rewrite the boy in order to make the man’s story tidier.
Somewhere in that landscape is also a seventeen-year-old boy who had just been told that the future he thought he was heading towards was no longer available. He didn’t call it grief, stress or depression, didn’t ask anybody to help him process it and didn’t sit on the Spirit of Progress trying to understand what it meant. He looked out of the window into the darkness, slept for part of the journey and went home, because that was what happened next.
The philosophy holding all of it together had survived because the Man in the Suit had spent decades apparently proving it right. He had worked, provided, failed, recovered, advised, performed, rebuilt and continued moving whenever life shoved him sideways, and the process had repeatedly carried him through. Only much later did the flaw in the argument become impossible to avoid, because continuing to function had never actually proved the absence of stress.
Then somebody will tell me what the problem is, and despite myself my mind will begin pulling it apart, looking for the simple answer hidden somewhere inside the complicated question. For a few minutes there will be something that needs doing, somebody who thinks I might know how to do it and an old yellow sign with black writing that apparently never really came off my shoulder. Afterwards I can go back to the football, the garden, the Man Cave or the office to write another few thousand words that nobody specifically asked me to write.
There are very good days. There are fishing trips, jokes, family, golf, successful projects, books to write and ridiculous ideas to pursue. There are days when the weight is barely noticeable and days when the pit in the stomach isn’t there at all.
None of that persuades me that the Dog has moved out, but neither does his continued presence make those good days fraudulent. Both things can apparently occupy the same life, which may be one of the contradictions I have taken longest to accept.
I don’t necessarily know what caused the darkness to arrive and I am often no wiser about what caused it to leave. That is frustrating for somebody who has spent a professional lifetime believing that if you can identify the problem, gather sufficient information and understand the variables, you ought to have at least a fighting chance of finding an answer. Depression doesn’t always offer me that courtesy, and after all these years I am increasingly reluctant to invent an explanation merely because having one would make me more comfortable.
Depression medication became different because, in my experience, the side effects eventually cost more than I was prepared to pay. That is a statement about my experience rather than anybody else’s treatment, and I remain conscious that the original decision to seek medical help was still one of the important decisions I made during that period. The first shot mattered even though the subsequent ammunition didn’t ultimately win the war.
The accountant in me couldn’t ignore the pattern forever. Cause and effect had been part of the exercise from the beginning: take this and see what changes, change that and see whether something else changes, reduce one effect and discover another. The problem was that the one effect I was actually seeking remained stubbornly absent from the accounts, because nowhere in that sequence could I find a convincing entry for happy.
That left Logical Jeff with a calculation he couldn’t reconcile. Reducing the variance while maintaining the ability to function should have represented a reasonable result, particularly when some of that variance involved anger at one extreme and disappearing into myself at the other. There was a perfectly respectable argument that a more stable Jeff was preferable to one ricocheting around the tunnel, and I understood that argument perfectly well.
