When the Darkness Comes

Yet ask me to reconstruct exactly how I felt during a particular low period and the words can still disappear. I know there were ups and downs, I know some of the things that happened and I know considerably more about the patterns, but knowing that Tuesday Jeff was down there does not necessarily allow Friday Jeff, or sixty-six-year-old Jeff, to describe precisely what it was like to be him.

There have been times when I have laughed while depressed. I have solved complicated problems while depressed, played golf while depressed, written while depressed, helped other people while depressed and probably appeared entirely normal while depressed. Functioning and being okay have never been synonyms, any more than enjoying two hours of fishing proves that everything waiting back on shore has somehow disappeared.

I use the language of war carefully because I don’t spend every day fighting. That would give the Black Dog far too much importance and would make the rest of my life sound like little more than leave between battles, which it certainly hasn’t been. There have been marriages and children, grandchildren and businesses, fishing trips and golf games, woodworking and friendships, laughter and arguments, books written and ridiculous ideas pursued, all happening while this other contest occasionally demanded attention in the background.

I don’t keep moving because I have discovered the secret to defeating depression, and I certainly don’t keep moving because Logical Jeff has finally produced an argument so compelling that the other bloke has conceded defeat. I keep moving because movement has become part of the way I deal with something I cannot reliably control. Some days that movement can be substantial, while on others the appropriate measure of progress is considerably smaller.

The more difficult question is what happened after the justification ran out. The whistle had blown, the decision stood, Robyn was right that there was nothing I could do about it, and somewhere inside I knew that as well as she did. Yet the anger could remain long after the moment that created it had passed, which makes it harder to know exactly where justified frustration finished and something else took over.

Perhaps that is another form of collateral damage, although this time the damage is being inflicted by an old survival mechanism that doesn’t realise the emergency has ended. The drive that helped me get back on my feet doesn’t automatically know when its work is finished. The car is sitting somewhere near the destination, the engine is still running and I remain reluctant to move the gear lever into Park, even though every instrument on the dashboard is telling me that I can.

The brochure could never have fitted all of that on the front page, and perhaps nobody would have bought the product if it had tried. It would have needed to explain that work might be exhausting and still provide structure, that retirement might be liberating and still create stress, and that having enough money does not necessarily teach anybody what enough means.

There is still tomorrow, which is ultimately the only proposition I have ever needed the darkness to leave intact. I don’t know what tomorrow contains, I don’t know which version of me will wake up to meet it, and I certainly don’t know whether the pendulum will be travelling up or down when I get there, but after everything life has already managed to put in front of me, one possibility remains sufficiently intriguing to keep me watching: I ain’t seen nothing yet.

The irony is that the positive end isn’t much easier to describe. I can tell you when something has gone well, when I have laughed, when I have enjoyed myself, when I have completed something worthwhile and when I have looked at one of my children and felt a pride that requires no definition whatsoever. What I cannot reliably tell you is whether the collection of those experiences adds up to this thing called happiness or whether I have spent a lifetime using a word without ever being entirely sure what everybody else means by it.

I have remembered things I didn’t particularly want to remember. I have also discovered that things I thought I remembered clearly have become surprisingly difficult to retrieve, while other moments apparently filed decades ago can walk straight back into the room without bothering to knock.

That creates its own weather, although once again I cannot forecast precisely what that weather will be. There are days when writing gives me a sense that I am finally putting words around something that has existed without adequate language for most of my life, and there are days when I wonder whether repeatedly opening the door to see if the Black Dog is still outside is a particularly intelligent thing to be doing.

There is still one question sitting there, though, and it is probably the same question hiding underneath much of what I was trying unsuccessfully to explain in that doctor’s surgery in 2012. It survived the questionnaire, the medication, the smaller arc of the pendulum, the exercise bike, the work, the retirement, the garden, the golf, the fishing, the writing and every attempt by Logical Jeff to reduce the whole business to something capable of being reconciled.

Perhaps I have effectively won, or perhaps that is simply Logical Jeff attempting to reconcile another set of accounts that refuses to balance. After the doctor’s surgery, the medication, the side effects, the businesses, the retirement, the diary, the books, the exercise bike, the Man Cave and all those years of pushing towards the light, one question has stubbornly survived every answer I have found.