WHEN THE DARKNESS COMES

One Man’s Journey Through the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 11

Flattening the Mountain

I knew something was missing when the village idiot stopped turning up. I don’t mean that I suddenly became solemn, incapable of understanding a joke or wandered around wearing the expression of somebody who had just been informed that laughter was no longer tax deductible. I could still recognise humour and presumably remained capable of producing something that passed for it occasionally, but the instinctive silliness had been dulled. The bloke who would take the piss simply because the opportunity had presented itself seemed to have gone somewhere, and I hadn’t realised how much I needed him until he wasn’t there.

The village idiot or some part of one, has always been an important part of me. He is the bloke who says the inappropriate thing at approximately the appropriate time, who finds something ridiculous in situations other people are taking terribly seriously and who is prepared to make himself the target if there is a laugh available. He is also, I suspect, related to the bloke who looks at a problem from somewhere other than directly in front of it, because neither of them has ever been particularly interested in staying between the lines.

Medication seemed to be putting those lines closer together. It wasn’t something I recognised immediately, because I had gone looking for help with the things happening at the other end of the emotional scale, and losing the village idiot wasn’t one of the possible consequences I had thought to put on the list.

The medical description might have been that we were attempting to reduce the peaks and troughs, and there was certainly some truth in that. My experience of it was slightly different because I never felt as though somebody had taken a bulldozer to a mountain range and simply levelled everything. It felt more like travelling down a tunnel while bouncing from one wall to the other, except somebody had begun padding the walls and simultaneously digging the rut beneath me deeper.

Beforehand, some of those collisions could be savage. One wall might produce a short-tempered explosion of anger, something disproportionate to whatever had actually happened and capable of affecting everybody unfortunate enough to be within range. The other wall could produce almost the opposite response, with me closing the office door, disappearing from everybody around me or sinking into the recliner at home and being physically present without really being available to anyone.

Those were not qualities I was particularly anxious to preserve in the interests of maintaining my authentic personality. If somebody could have removed the anger, the withdrawal and the violence of those emotional collisions while leaving everything else untouched, I would hardly have objected. That was largely why I had gone looking for help in the first place, and pretending otherwise now would turn this into an argument against medication that my own experience does not support.

The problem was that the medication apparently hadn’t received a sufficiently detailed job description. It was doing something to the bouncing, certainly, but it wasn’t limiting its attention to the collisions I wanted removed while politely preserving everything I regarded as useful.

As the bouncing became less savage, the rut seemed to become deeper. There was less movement towards the walls, which meant there was less pain from hitting them, but there was also progressively less opportunity to wander away from the middle. I was travelling more efficiently in one sense, looking ahead rather than constantly recovering from whatever I had just crashed into, but there was something deeply unsatisfying about discovering that the safest place in the tunnel appeared to be a groove from which deviation was becoming increasingly difficult.

Perhaps that was success, and certainly there would have been ways of measuring it that could make it look like success. If the explosions were less explosive and the retreats less complete, then the treatment could reasonably claim to be doing at least part of what we had asked it to do. The difficulty was that I couldn’t remember us ever establishing precisely what success was supposed to look like.

That seems an extraordinary admission from an accountant because my professional life has involved asking exactly that question of other people. What are we trying to achieve, and how will we know whether we have achieved it? What are the measurements, what are the consequences and, most importantly, are we measuring the thing that actually matters rather than the thing that happens to be easiest to measure?

I don’t remember applying quite the same discipline to myself. Perhaps there was an assumption that I would simply know when I felt better, although even the word better becomes remarkably slippery when you try to attach a measurement to it.

Part of the reason was that I trusted the people treating me. I didn’t play games with dosages, deliberately stop taking tablets to see what happened or decide that my own observations qualified me to overrule somebody who had spent years studying medicine. I had spent enough of my career dealing with clients who sought professional advice and then ignored it to understand the absurdity of engaging an adviser only to decide that you knew better.

There comes a point where trust has to be implicit, and in this case mine was. In many ways I was dealing with the doctor exactly as I expected my clients to deal with me, because I had spent years telling people that there wasn’t much point paying for professional advice and then ignoring it because the answer didn’t happen to suit them. Clients came to me because taxation and business were areas in which I was supposed to know considerably more than they did, just as I was sitting in the doctor’s surgery because medicine was an area in which he knew considerably more than I did.

That didn’t mean I expected clients to surrender their brains at the front door of Banks Consultancy. I wanted them to ask questions, understand what we were trying to achieve and challenge me if something didn’t make sense, but ultimately there had to be enough trust for them to follow the advice they had engaged me to provide. I couldn’t very well spend my professional life becoming frustrated with clients who ignored my advice and then, when I became the client in somebody else’s professional world, decide that the rules no longer applied because this time I was the bloke swallowing the tablets.

What was good for the goose was good for the gander, even when the gander wasn’t entirely sure what the medication was doing to him. I didn’t know what the dangers might be in changing dosages myself, stopping suddenly or conducting my own little pharmaceutical experiment, and I didn’t necessarily understand everything the doctor was trying to achieve. I therefore followed the rules, took the medication as prescribed and allowed the experiment to proceed, much as I expected a client to implement a strategy we had agreed upon rather than redesign it halfway through because somebody at the golf club had offered an alternative opinion.

There was another similarity with my clients, though, and it eventually became just as important. Following professional advice didn’t relieve me of the responsibility to watch what happened after the advice was implemented. If I recommended a business strategy and the numbers subsequently told us it wasn’t producing the intended result, I wouldn’t have expected the client to keep doing it indefinitely simply because Jeff Banks had once said it was a good idea. Advice had to survive contact with the result.

That was effectively what I was doing with the medication. I trusted the doctor enough to follow the advice, but that didn’t mean I stopped observing what was happening because, whatever the medical measurements might have been, I was the bloke living inside the experiment. The doctor had the medical knowledge and I respected that expertise, but I had access to one piece of evidence he could never experience directly: what it actually felt like to be me while the treatment was doing whatever it was doing.

The strange thing was that professional Jeff continued remarkably well, which probably made the evidence harder to interpret. I could still deal with clients, understand technical issues, work through taxation problems and produce answers because much of that knowledge had become so ingrained that it didn’t require me to rediscover it every morning. Decades of education and experience had laid down tracks sufficiently solid that the train could keep moving even while something else was changing around it, and from the outside there may have been very little reason to suspect that anything important was being lost.

X plus Y still equalled Z, and I could still get to Z with considerable reliability. If the legislation said something, I could interpret it; if the numbers produced a result, I could explain it; and if a client presented a problem I had encountered dozens of times before, the answer didn’t disappear simply because medication had altered the emotional landscape through which I was travelling.

The trouble is that I have never regarded that as the most important part of being an accountant. I am not a number cruncher; I am a thinker, and there is an enormous difference between the two even though both occupations can apparently be performed while sitting behind the same desk. The distinction became particularly important during those periods because the number cruncher could keep functioning long after other parts of Jeff had begun disappearing.

Accounting provided almost perfect camouflage for depression because so much of the visible work of an accounting practice is built upon routine, process and rules. Bookkeeping is essentially a science of putting things where they belong, reconciling one number against another and finding the difference when they don’t agree. Taxation and compliance add considerably more complexity, but much of the day-to-day work still operates within established systems: information comes in, it is processed according to rules I had known for years, calculations are performed, returns and accounts are prepared and deadlines are met.

That processing function is a major part of what an accounting firm does, and there is nothing inferior about it. Clients need their books reconciled, their accounts prepared, their BAS lodged, their tax returns completed and all the other compliance machinery attended to accurately and on time. The problem, from the point of view of somebody trying to determine whether Jeff Banks was travelling particularly well, was that I could do an enormous amount of that work almost automatically.

Routine therefore gave me somewhere to hide. I could walk into the office carrying whatever darkness had arrived with me, sit behind the desk and perform tasks I had performed hundreds or thousands of times before. The work didn’t necessarily require enthusiasm, creativity or even much emotional engagement from me; it required knowledge, concentration and familiarity with a process that had become so deeply embedded that I could continue following it while other parts of me were struggling.

That made outward functionality a particularly unreliable measure of what was happening inside. A client could send me a set of figures and receive back exactly what they expected, an employee could ask a technical question and receive the correct answer, and a deadline could be met without anybody having the slightest reason to wonder whether the bloke producing the work was depressed. Depression could apparently reconcile a bank account, calculate taxable income, prepare a set of financial statements and lodge a return, which made it remarkably easy for me to conclude that I must still be functioning normally.

There was another layer of camouflage in the very nature of the office. If I closed my door, nobody necessarily interpreted that as withdrawal because accountants close doors when they need to concentrate. If I buried myself in work, nobody necessarily regarded that as hiding because accountants are expected to bury themselves in work, particularly around deadlines. Even silence could masquerade as concentration, which meant some of the behaviours that elsewhere might have suggested something was wrong could look perfectly normal when performed by an accountant sitting behind a desk.

I had spent much of my professional life, however, trying not to become the accountant who simply processed whatever arrived in front of him. I didn’t want to take a client’s numbers, feed them through the appropriate machinery, produce the technically correct answer, collect a fee and send everybody home. The numbers mattered enormously, but they were usually evidence of something that had already happened rather than the beginning and end of the conversation.

The part of accounting that interested me most began where the processing finished. I wanted to know why the numbers looked the way they did, what decisions had created them, what the client was trying to achieve and whether there was another way of getting there. That required more than remembering where something belonged in a tax return or knowing which side of the ledger received the debit, because it required curiosity, lateral thinking and enough mental freedom to move beyond the routine answer.

That was why continuing to function professionally could fool even me. The accounting practice provided plenty of evidence that I was still capable of being an accountant, but much of that evidence was measuring the very part of accounting I had never considered particularly representative of me. I could hide inside the science, the bookkeeping, the compliance and the process because they were familiar enough to continue without requiring all of Jeff Banks to turn up.

The more troubling question was whether the thinker had turned up with him. A completed tax return could prove that I had processed the numbers correctly, but it couldn’t tell anybody whether I had looked beyond them, challenged them, played with possibilities or asked the question that wasn’t sitting neatly in the file. Depression could hide remarkably well behind competence, and medication could make the process even smoother, while neither necessarily told me whether the bloke behind the competence was actually travelling particularly well.

What interested me was the question behind the numbers, and sometimes the question beside them or somewhere completely outside them. Why had this happened? What were we actually trying to achieve, and what happened if we moved this piece over there? Was there another structure, another strategy or another way of looking at the problem that produced a better result while remaining within the rules?

Sometimes X plus Y genuinely did equal Z, and there was no virtue in inventing complexity merely to demonstrate how clever I could be. But I built a career partly upon wondering whether anybody had bothered to ask what happened if there was also an A, B or bloody Q sitting somewhere outside the equation. The answer wasn’t always useful, but asking the question was part of what separated thinking from processing.

That required sideways movement, and sideways movement was exactly what the deepening rut seemed designed to prevent. It required the ability to wander away from the obvious path occasionally and perhaps bang into a wall, because sometimes the wall turned out not to be where everybody thought it was. It required curiosity, imagination and a willingness to entertain an idea that might initially sound ridiculous.

Quite often it also required the village idiot. The bloke prepared to say something silly was sometimes the same bloke prepared to ask the question everybody else had dismissed as silly, and separating those two versions of me was proving considerably more difficult than I might have liked.

The medication didn’t stop me thinking, and I want to be careful about that because hindsight can easily turn an uncomfortable experience into a much neater story than it actually was. I cannot identify a client who suffered because I took a tablet, nor can I point to some brilliant strategy that would definitely have emerged had my brain been chemically unencumbered. I cannot prove that some great piece of creativity was sitting outside the tunnel waiting for me while the medication prevented me from reaching it.

What I can say is that process seemed to become easier than possibility. The tunnel had become more padded, and process was the rut running straight down its centre. There was something almost seductive about it because I could continue functioning perfectly well by staying there, using the rules, legislation and accumulated experience to produce answers without needing to bounce very far in either direction.

Except Jeff Banks had never been particularly interested in staying in the middle of the bloody tunnel. The accountant I never wanted to become probably could have lived there quite happily, because there is a certain comfort in knowing that the process will carry you from the question to an answer without requiring much wandering along the way.

That was where the flattening became more complicated than the simple removal of unwanted symptoms. If the same treatment that reduced the painful collisions also reduced my inclination or ability to move laterally, then I had to start wondering exactly what we were treating. There was a difference between controlling something that was hurting me and gradually removing characteristics that I regarded as part of me.

The village idiot became evidence of that difference because humour wasn’t something I switched on when somebody required entertainment. Taking the piss, finding the absurdity in something and occasionally making myself look ridiculous were woven into the way I related to people. When that diminished, I didn’t simply become a slightly more serious version of myself; I became aware that something recognisable had gone quiet.

There were physical consequences as well, and they were rather harder to disguise as philosophical questions about identity. The medication did not take affection away, but it certainly produced sexual dysfunction, which introduced another fairly substantial item into any calculation of benefit and cost. Whatever was happening chemically was clearly not restricting itself to the little box marked depression before politely leaving the rest of me alone.

That shouldn’t have surprised me, although perhaps at the time it did. We tend to divide ourselves into convenient departments because that makes problems easier to describe: mood over here, sex over there, work in another box, creativity somewhere else and the village idiot apparently wandering around the building without a security pass. The body and brain seem rather less interested in our organisational chart.

It became increasingly difficult to decide what constituted improvement. If I wasn’t bouncing off the walls as violently, that was an improvement, but if the price was losing humour, sexual function and some of the sideways movement I associated with creativity, the calculation became considerably less straightforward. The accountant in me could understand the argument for reducing volatility, while the thinker in me was beginning to object to the assumption that reduced volatility was automatically the same thing as getting better.

Perhaps the greatest miscalculation was identity, because we had begun with symptoms rather than with a definition of the person we were trying to preserve. Anger was a problem, withdrawal was a problem and the troughs were unquestionably a problem, so anything capable of reducing their depth deserved serious consideration. I had gone looking for help because parts of the way I was living were hurting me and, inevitably, affecting people around me.

Somewhere along the way, however, the question changed from whether the medication was affecting the symptoms to whether I recognised the bloke experiencing the improvement. That was a much harder KPI because there was no obvious scale upon which I could measure whether the person emerging from treatment was still sufficiently me.

A doctor could ask whether the anger had reduced, and I could answer that. We could discuss whether the troughs were shallower, whether the peaks were lower and whether the overall range had narrowed. Those were all legitimate questions, and none of them required me to conclude that medicine had somehow failed simply because the answers weren’t exactly what I wanted.

What was considerably harder to put on a questionnaire was whether the village idiot had gone missing. There wasn’t a box for whether I was still sufficiently inclined to take the piss, nor another asking whether I was following the established process because it was genuinely the best answer or because the part of me that normally went looking beyond it wasn’t wandering as far anymore.

Nobody could put a percentage against how much Jeff Banks remained in Jeff Banks, and even I couldn’t reliably calculate it. I could only recognise that the bloke travelling down the middle of the tunnel was becoming increasingly competent at staying in his lane, and staying in my lane had never been one of my more recognisable characteristics.

That is why I remain uncomfortable with any simple conclusion about those years. The medication did something, and to say otherwise would be unfair to the doctors, unfair to the treatment and inconsistent with my own recollection because the bouncing against the walls did become less savage. The problem was that I had never asked for every bit of movement towards the walls to disappear.

I certainly hadn’t asked to become the accountant I had spent my career trying not to be. The technically proficient number cruncher could survive perfectly well in that tunnel because process would take him almost anywhere he needed to go. Give him X and Y and he would reliably produce Z, perhaps with a neatly prepared set of working papers explaining exactly how he got there.

The thinker wanted to know why we were going to Z in the first place, and whether anybody had checked what was down the road towards Q. That bloke needed room to wander, along with the occasional stupid thought, ridiculous question, inappropriate joke and willingness to look outside the equation for something everybody else had missed.

I cannot prove that the peaks and troughs created those things, and I don’t want to romanticise the anger or the darkness by pretending they were some necessary price I had to pay for creativity. I only know that, in my experience, the flattening seemed to affect both the parts of me I wanted quietened and some of the parts I wanted left alone.

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.

The other Jeff wasn’t nearly as convinced because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life living at the average. I don’t mean that as some grand declaration that ordinary is beneath me, because plenty of the best parts of my life have been wonderfully ordinary. I mean that if achieving the average requires removing the edges from the person experiencing it, then perhaps the average is the wrong measurement.

Perhaps that was the question we hadn’t known to ask when the experiment began. We were concentrating on how far down I could fall and how violently I could hit the walls because those were the things causing the obvious damage. It took longer to notice that reducing the capacity to reach one edge might also affect my capacity to reach another, and that some of what lived near those edges wasn’t something I necessarily wanted treated.

Eventually that mattered enough for us to stop pursuing that particular avenue. There was no dramatic rejection of medicine and no conclusion that the doctors had been wrong to try, because they had been dealing with the problem I had taken through their door and the medication had produced some of the effect we had been seeking.

The difficulty was that the result didn’t feel sufficiently like me. The walls were softer, the bouncing was less violent, the rut was deeper and the journey through the tunnel had become considerably straighter, so for some definitions of success perhaps that was exactly what treatment was supposed to achieve.

Somewhere back along the tunnel, though, the village idiot had stopped bouncing off the walls with me. By the time I realised how much I missed the bastard, I had also begun to understand that I wasn’t simply trying to stay out of the troughs; I was trying to preserve enough room to think, laugh, wander sideways and occasionally head towards Q for no better reason than wondering what might be there.

I wasn’t trying to become a better-behaved version of myself, nor was I trying to preserve every damaging extreme in the name of individuality. I was trying to remain Jeff, and somewhere between the padded walls and the deepening rut we had discovered that this was considerably harder to measure than whether X plus Y still equalled Z.