WHEN THE DARKNESS COMES

One Man’s Journey Through the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 15

The Two Jeffs

I generally know what sort of day it is going to be before very much of it has happened. Sometimes the radio in my head has already made its contribution, throwing up a song that may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the mood waiting for me, but the more reliable indicator sits considerably lower. It is the pit in my stomach, although even that description doesn’t quite capture the sheer weight of the thing when it arrives.

It isn’t necessarily pain, at least not in the conventional sense. It is more like an excessive weight has been placed somewhere inside me during the night, something heavy enough to be felt physically even though I couldn’t point to the organ responsible for carrying it. My stomach seems to be where it settles, my chest sometimes shares the load, and the rest of me wakes already conscious that something has changed before Logical Jeff has had the opportunity to begin asking questions.

The most disturbing part is that I often have absolutely no idea where it has come from. Nothing necessarily happened yesterday, nothing dreadful is waiting for me today and there may be no conversation, disappointment, financial problem, family issue or other convenient event to which I can attach the feeling. I can lie there searching for a cause because that is what my brain naturally wants to do, but sometimes there simply isn’t one available. There is only the weight.

Logical Jeff naturally wants to classify it because classification is one of the ways I have always tried to understand things. If there appear to be two versions of me occupying the same space, one knowing perfectly well that everything is reasonably okay while the other is carrying this enormous and inexplicable weight, the temptation is to reach for labels that might explain the contradiction. Schizophrenia might wander briefly into the layman’s vocabulary because of the popular but incorrect notion of a “split personality,” and bipolar disorder might get an equally cursory inspection because there are peaks and troughs involved. Logical Jeff doesn’t have to spend very long with either possibility before putting them back on the shelf.

I have never been diagnosed with either, and more importantly they are not what I am describing when I talk about the Two Jeffs. Schizophrenia is not simply having two competing versions of yourself, despite the way the word has sometimes been casually misused, and bipolar disorder involves defined episodes of mood disturbance rather than merely having good days and bad days. Logical Jeff understands enough to know that borrowing either diagnosis as a convenient explanation would create an answer where I don’t actually have one.

The Two Jeffs are therefore not a diagnosis at all. They are simply the best description I have found for the peculiar ability to know one thing and feel another at precisely the same time. Logical Jeff can examine the available evidence, find no catastrophe, recognise the pattern and know that the feeling has eventually passed before, while the other Jeff remains completely unmoved by the quality of his analysis. They are not separate personalities taking turns at the controls; they are contradictory experiences somehow occupying the same bloke.

Perhaps that is why the pit has become such a reliable indicator. A thought can be challenged and a worry can sometimes be investigated, quantified or even dismissed, but it is considerably harder to argue with something that seems to have arrived in the body before the mind has constructed a reason for it. I don’t wake and decide that I am depressed and then develop the physical sensation to match; the sensation is already there, waiting for me to notice it.

That leaves Logical Jeff in the particularly irritating position of being able to discard explanations without being able to replace them with anything more satisfying. He can say what this isn’t, recognise what is happening and even predict with reasonable confidence that the pendulum will eventually swing again, but none of those observations removes an ounce from the weight sitting in my stomach. Sometimes all the analysis produces is the conclusion I started with: it is here, I don’t know why it is here, and now I have to deal with it.

On the worst mornings it can feel absurdly disproportionate to the life surrounding it. I can know that Robyn is there, the family is okay, there is food in the fridge, the bills can be paid and nothing has occurred overnight that should justify waking as though somebody has loaded several bags of cement into my abdomen. Logical Jeff can conduct the preliminary audit and find no material adverse event requiring disclosure, while the bloke actually lying there is already carrying a weight for which there appears to be no corresponding entry in the accounts.

I know what it is like to wake after something genuinely dreadful has happened, which perhaps makes the distinction even harder to understand. On the night of September 11, 2001, Robyn and I sat watching television as the images came through from America and it became increasingly obvious that we weren’t simply watching another news story. We were watching the world change, virtually in real time, and like millions of other people we found it almost impossible to turn the television off because every time you thought you had absorbed what had happened, something else appeared on the screen that seemed to make the enormity of it greater.

Eventually the television had to be turned off and eventually we went to bed, although the images came with us. When I woke the following morning there was an aura hanging over everything, that peculiar awareness in the first few seconds after waking that something enormous had happened and then the memory of precisely what it was returning. The world outside our bedroom looked much the same as it had the previous morning, but everybody knew it wasn’t, and there was no mystery whatsoever about why the day felt different.

Yet I got up and got on with it. There was work to be done, people to speak to and all the ordinary requirements of a life that continued despite something extraordinary having occurred on the other side of the world. The heaviness of that morning had somewhere to belong because I could turn on the television, look at the pictures and point directly at its cause. However inadequate any response might have seemed beside the scale of what had happened, there was at least an event against which the emotion could be reconciled.

That is what makes some of the other mornings so bloody difficult to comprehend. I can wake carrying something physically reminiscent of that same sense that the world has changed overnight, except this time the television contains no explanation. Nobody has telephoned with terrible news, the family is fine, the business hasn’t collapsed and there are no aircraft flying into buildings on the screen. Yesterday may have been an entirely reasonable day and today may contain nothing objectively different, yet somewhere between going to sleep and waking up several bags of emotional cement have apparently been delivered and stacked inside me.

Logical Jeff finds that offensive because September 11 satisfies his fundamental requirement for cause and effect. Something terrible happened, therefore the following morning felt terrible; A plus B produced something recognisably resembling C. Depression can produce something resembling C without having the common decency to supply A or B, leaving the accountant staring at an emotional set of accounts that simply refuses to reconcile.

Perhaps the strangest part is that the response can then be much the same as it was on that September morning. I get up and get on with it, not because the two experiences are remotely equivalent in scale or meaning, but because life continues to make its ordinary demands regardless of whether the weight I am carrying has an identifiable cause. The difference is that on September 12 I knew why the world felt heavier, whereas on some mornings I can search every corner of my life and find absolutely nothing that explains why mine does.

Eventually there is no point continuing to ask where it came from. I know what it is, or at least I know it well enough to recognise its arrival, and the absence of an explanation doesn’t make it any lighter. It is here, and now I have to deal with it, just as I have dealt with so many other days when getting on with things was the only useful instruction Logical Jeff had left to give.

That recognition is different from surrendering to it. It is simply the moment when the day changes from whatever I might have expected it to be into the day I have actually been given, and experience has taught me that the two can require very different plans. Before I have properly climbed out of bed, I already know this is one of the days that will need to be treated with kid gloves.

There doesn’t have to be anything wrong. That is one of the things I understand now that I probably didn’t understand when I was younger, although understanding it has proved remarkably useless in preventing it. I can wake after a perfectly ordinary yesterday, with no disaster having occurred overnight, no financial catastrophe awaiting me, no family crisis, no argument with Robyn and no obvious reason why today should be substantially different from the day before, and know immediately that it is.

Those days need to be treated with kid gloves. There is little point attacking anything of consequence because I already know that whatever intellectual resources I might normally bring to the task are going to be competing with something much heavier. If there are weeds in the garden, the weeds become attractive, not because I have suddenly developed an overwhelming passion for horticulture but because weeds are wonderfully uncomplicated things.

A weed does not need a strategic plan. It does not require a board meeting, a tax opinion, a difficult telephone call or a decision that might affect somebody else’s future. You grab it, pull it out of the ground and throw it in the green bin, and if you do that often enough there is eventually a full green bin sitting there as evidence that the day has produced something. On the days when the pit is particularly heavy, that can be achievement enough.

Woodworking can perform much the same function. There are days when an amount of sawdust on the floor is as legitimate an objective as anything I might once have written on a business plan. The timber doesn’t care how I feel, and the sawdust doesn’t demand that I explain myself before agreeing to land on the floor. There is something reassuring about an activity where the evidence of effort accumulates around your feet and nobody needs an answer before five o’clock.

I sometimes wonder whether I would have had that luxury if I were still working full time. If I hadn’t sold Banks Consultancy when I did, there would still have been clients waiting for answers, staff requiring decisions, deadlines that couldn’t be negotiated with and a telephone perfectly capable of ringing regardless of whether I had woken with the pit in my stomach. Perhaps those demands would have forced me through the darker days in much the same way they had for years, because there is nothing quite like somebody else’s problem to make your own temporarily wait outside the office door.

There is even a possibility that full-time work provided a form of protection I didn’t properly recognise while I was doing it. Banks Consultancy supplied a destination every morning, and whether I felt like going there was largely irrelevant because other people depended upon me turning up as the version of Jeff they expected to find. There was always another tax return, another meeting, another problem to solve or another client whose circumstances were sufficiently important to push whatever was happening inside me further down the list.

But there is another possibility, and Logical Jeff cannot dismiss that one nearly as easily. Perhaps I would simply have kept pushing because pushing was what I had trained myself to do, adding another coat to the veneer whenever the previous one started showing cracks and convincing myself that endurance was evidence that everything remained manageable. I had become very good at functioning, but functioning and being well were never necessarily the same thing.

Had I kept Banks Consultancy and remained buried in full-time practice, perhaps there would have been fewer afternoons pulling weeds because there simply wouldn’t have been time for them. There might also have been fewer opportunities to notice how heavy some of those days actually were, because a client sitting across the desk has an extraordinary capacity to demand your attention. Whether that would have made me better or merely busier is something I cannot retrospectively calculate.

The darker possibility is that I might simply have worked myself into an early grave. That doesn’t require me to manufacture some dramatic alternative history in which I collapsed across the desk during tax season; it is enough to wonder how long a person can keep demanding performance from himself while treating every warning sign as another inconvenience to be worked around. I spent a lifetime being able to find another gear when one was required, but nobody ever guaranteed there would always be another one available.

Selling Banks Consultancy therefore created a strange freedom that I am still learning how to use. On a bad day there is no longer the same machinery forcing me into the office and demanding that Public Jeff take over, which means I can sometimes acknowledge that today is not a day for difficult decisions and choose the garden or the shed instead. That may be healthier, although it also leaves more room to notice the darkness because there is no longer a queue of clients available to drown it out.

I don’t know which version of events would have been better, and pretending otherwise would give hindsight powers it doesn’t possess. Perhaps full-time work would have continued carrying me through the troughs, perhaps it would have hidden them more effectively, or perhaps I would have continued loading responsibilities onto myself until something eventually gave way. Logical Jeff can construct a perfectly respectable argument for each possibility and still be unable to produce the answer.

There are alternatives to the weeds and sawdust, of course, although some are considerably less sensible than others. I enjoy a good bourbon and make no apology for doing so, but there is a substantial difference between enjoying a bourbon and drinking because I am looking for a way out of the way I feel. If the choice is between filling the green bin and attempting to drown the Black Dog, the weeds are going to have a very bad afternoon.

Perhaps that is one advantage of having reached this particular stage of life. I now have the option of allowing a bad day to be a bad day without also requiring it to be a productive professional one, and there are mornings when a full green bin or a floor covered in sawdust is sufficient evidence that I kept moving. Whether retirement has made the Black Dog easier to live with is another question entirely, but at least these days I don’t always have to put on a tie before taking him to work.

This is where the Two Jeffs live, although describing them as two separate people would be giving the arrangement far more order than it deserves. They occupy the same body, have access to precisely the same evidence and can look at exactly the same circumstances while arriving at responses that bear almost no relationship to one another.

One of them is Logical Jeff, although I am not entirely sure he deserves the capital letters. He is the accountant, the businessman, the problem-solver and the bloke who has spent most of his working life believing that if you can identify a problem, gather sufficient information and apply enough thought, there is a reasonable prospect of finding an answer. He believes in cause and effect because most of the world I have inhabited professionally requires cause and effect to function.

The other Jeff couldn’t give a damn about any of that. He has access to Logical Jeff’s evidence and apparently regards it as interesting but largely irrelevant information, rather like being told the overnight temperature in Helsinki when what I really want to know is why there is a bloody great weight sitting on my chest.

It would be tempting to describe them as being engaged in some great internal debate, but that would give the conversation more importance than it deserves. Debate requires the possibility that one participant might persuade the other, whereas Depressed Jeff has never shown much interest in being persuaded. Logical Jeff can arrive carrying spreadsheets, supporting documents, expert opinions and sixty-six years of historical data, and the other bloke can effectively look at the entire submission and ask what any of it has to do with how he feels.

There have been times when I have figuratively put my hands around my eyes like binoculars. The purpose is not to examine something in the distance but to eliminate everything around it, narrowing the field of vision until all that remains is the direction in which I need to go. I don’t need to see the entire journey on those days because seeing too much of it might be part of the problem. I need to see enough to take the next step.

Somewhere out there is the light at the end of the tunnel, although I have always retained the suspicion that it might be a freight train coming the other way. That possibility seems slightly more believable on the darker days, but it doesn’t change the direction of travel. The important thing is to keep heading towards the light and hope that, when I eventually reach it, I don’t discover the 8.15 express bearing down on me.

Logical Jeff knows that the darkness will eventually pass. He has evidence for that because it has passed before, many times, and there have been enough peaks and troughs across my life to establish the pattern beyond reasonable doubt. He also knows that another trough will eventually arrive because the pendulum has been swinging for far too long to pretend otherwise.

That knowledge does not make the trough disappear, and that may be the most infuriating part of the whole arrangement. While I am sitting somewhere near the bottom of it, there is another part of me saying that I have been here before and will not necessarily be here tomorrow. Sometimes that is useful and sometimes it is merely factual, and there is an enormous difference between those two things.

I have never found much rhyme or reason to the peaks and troughs. I have spent years trying various ways of altering them, including professional help and medication, and some of those things changed aspects of the experience without producing the result I originally imagined I was seeking. That story belongs elsewhere, but the residue of it sits very comfortably inside Logical Jeff because he remains deeply offended by the mathematics.

The mathematics ought to be simple enough: A plus B should equal C. If A is depression and B is medication, therapy or whatever other intervention is being applied, then somewhere in my simplistic accountant’s version of the world C ought to be happy. It isn’t, and that annoys the absolute crap out of me.

I understand that medicine is more complicated than an accounting equation and that the people treating me were not promising to manufacture happiness in tablet form. The bloke living with the result was entitled to have an outcome in mind as well, though, and my outcome was never simply to become a more conveniently managed version of miserable. If A plus B wasn’t going to equal happy, I at least wanted C to feel sufficiently different from A to justify everything we were doing to get there.

Perhaps part of the problem lies in the inconvenient fact that we are sentient beings. We don’t merely exist in a particular emotional state; we are capable of observing ourselves existing in it, comparing it with yesterday, remembering what happiness felt like and wondering whether what we are experiencing now qualifies as better. You can alter the peaks and troughs on the graph, but unfortunately the bloke represented by the line is sitting there watching what you are doing to it.

That makes the definition of success considerably more complicated. If I were a machine, perhaps reducing the amplitude would be sufficient evidence that the repair had worked: input treatment, observe reduced variation, tick the appropriate box and send the machine back into service. But I am not a machine, and I don’t experience life as a graph. I experience the troughs from inside them, certainly, but I also experience the peaks, and I am sentient enough to notice when something intended to reduce one appears to have taken something from the other.

That has been one of my frustrations with professional treatment, although with hindsight I have to acknowledge that some of the difficulty existed on my side of the desk as well. The professionals had symptoms they were looking for, questions designed to uncover them and a vocabulary developed around describing them. I had the symptoms, or at least whatever version of them applied to me, but I didn’t necessarily have the words required to tell them what they were looking for.

That distinction is more important than it sounds. I wasn’t incapable of describing things and I certainly wasn’t short of vocabulary; I had spent a professional lifetime talking to clients, explaining complicated concepts and finding different ways of saying something when the first explanation didn’t work. The problem was knowing which words applied to this. Nobody had ever taught me how to translate a pit in the stomach, a weight across the chest, inexplicable anger, withdrawal, loss of enthusiasm or the simple knowledge that today felt much harder than yesterday into the language a doctor or psychologist might recognise as significant.

Sometimes I didn’t even know that what they were asking about was connected to what I was experiencing. A professional might ask a question using terminology that made perfect sense within their world, while I was mentally searching through my own experience trying to work out whether the thing they had just described was the same thing I had been living with under an entirely different name. They knew the destination of the question; I was trying to work out which road they wanted me to travel to get there.

That made the assessment strangely lopsided. They were trying to discover what was happening inside me, but the only witness with direct access to the evidence didn’t necessarily understand what evidence he was supposed to be giving them. Logical Jeff could answer the literal question perfectly well and still miss the significance of the answer because he didn’t yet understand the language of the investigation.

Perhaps that communication problem also affected what happened once treatment began. The professionals understandably had their own measures of an appropriate outcome, but I was sitting on the other side of the desk trying to describe an outcome for which I wasn’t much better equipped linguistically than I had been when describing the original problem. I knew I didn’t want to feel like this anymore, but not feeling like this is not a particularly precise clinical objective.

What I wanted was probably something closer to myself, although even that becomes difficult to define when the person doing the defining is the person being treated. I wanted the pit reduced, the darkness lifted and the troughs made less destructive, but I hadn’t necessarily contemplated that altering those things might also alter the peaks. When that seemed to happen, I could recognise the difference perfectly well without necessarily possessing the language to explain why a result that might look like progress from outside did not entirely feel like progress from inside.

Reducing the depth of a trough may quite properly be regarded as improvement, and Logical Jeff can understand the clinical reasoning behind trying to make the pendulum swing through a smaller arc. He can appreciate that less volatility might be measurable, desirable and evidence that something is working. The other Jeff is the bloke actually riding the bloody pendulum, and his assessment is considerably less scientific: Yes, perhaps I don’t go as far down anymore, but I don’t seem to go as far up either.

That is where being a sentient participant rather than a passive subject complicates the experiment. I can experience the treatment, observe its effects, compare the person taking it with the person I remember being before it and form an opinion about whether I like the difference. Unfortunately, forming that opinion and being able to express it in terminology useful to the person sitting opposite me are not necessarily the same skill.

Perhaps that is why the Two Jeffs become particularly difficult to separate at this point. Logical Jeff understands what the professionals are trying to achieve and can even concede that, according to the measures available to them, they may be achieving some of it. The other Jeff doesn’t have to dispute any of that; he only has to live inside the result and know that whatever word everyone else might use for better, it isn’t quite the word he was looking for.

There is no contradiction in acknowledging that a treatment did something useful while questioning whether what it did was enough, or whether some of what disappeared along with the darkness was something I would rather have kept. Sentience gives me the irritating capacity to observe the treatment, observe myself under the treatment and then form an opinion about the difference. The laboratory subject, in this particular experiment, keeps submitting his own report.

Perhaps that is why better has always been such a troublesome word. Better according to the measurement, better according to the doctor and better according to the sentient bloke who has to wake up tomorrow morning and inhabit the result are not necessarily the same thing. Somewhere among those definitions sits the outcome I was actually looking for, and after all these years I am still not convinced anyone, including Logical Jeff, could precisely define what it was.

Logical Jeff understands all of that considerably better now. He understands that treatment can work to a point without delivering everything I wanted from it, that there may not be a single intervention capable of turning the equation into the answer I prefer and that expecting depression to behave according to the rules of bookkeeping is probably unreasonable. Unfortunately, Depressed Jeff apparently wasn’t copied into the memo, and even if he was, I doubt he bothered reading it.

He simply feels what he feels, and there are days when no amount of reasoning alters that. That is perhaps the strangest part of the arrangement because there does not need to be a competing argument inside my head telling me that everything is terrible. Sometimes there isn’t an argument at all. There is simply the pit in the stomach, the weight across the chest and the knowledge that today is going to require more effort than yesterday did.

Logical Jeff can point out that nothing has happened, and Depressed Jeff can agree with him. Logical Jeff can point out that this has happened before and eventually passed, and Depressed Jeff can agree with that as well. The absurdity is that complete agreement between the two of them doesn’t necessarily change a bloody thing, and the Black Dog simply sits in the corner and continues to feed.

The conversation therefore becomes almost superfluous. I can know perfectly well that there is no identifiable reason to feel the way I do and still feel exactly that way. The contradiction would be fascinating if I weren’t required to live inside it, although viewed from a sufficiently safe distance it probably has considerable comic potential.

Robyn has lived beside it for long enough to know that there is not necessarily much point interrogating me about it. From time to time she will suggest that I simply go out and do something, and I will invariably agree because there is no good reason not to. We might go somewhere, I might disappear into the shed or the garden, and whatever activity has been proposed can occupy the time perfectly successfully without necessarily changing what is happening underneath.

That doesn’t mean the activity was pointless. It means I did something while feeling miserable rather than sitting somewhere feeling miserable, and on some days that distinction is sufficient. I have never wanted my misery to become somebody else’s burden, so there is a tendency to regard it as mine to manage and to leave other people outside the worst of the internal conversation.

Whether that is always fair to them is another question, and I am not sure I know the answer. Keeping the cards close to my chest may prevent me from deliberately handing the problem to somebody else, but it doesn’t make the problem invisible. Silence has a presence of its own, as does withdrawal, and there are probably occasions when my determination to carry something privately has simply required the people around me to work out for themselves what I have refused to explain.

The public version of Jeff is considerably easier to maintain. He has had decades of practice, and the veneer has received so many additional coats over the years that it would probably survive a cyclone. Whatever might be happening underneath, the telephone can still be answered, the client’s problem can still be discussed and the bloke everybody expects to be the rock can continue looking remarkably rock-like.

Simon and Garfunkel gave me the imagery years ago with I Am a Rock, although I probably didn’t need them to teach me how to behave like one. I have spent a considerable part of my life being the person who can be leaned upon, and there is something convenient about a rock because nobody spends much time asking how the rock is travelling. Its principal qualification for the job is that it remains where everybody expects it to be.

The graceful swan might actually be a better description. Above the water there is a bloke apparently gliding along with reasonable competence, conducting meetings, talking to clients, writing books, playing golf, making jokes and doing all the things that constitute the visible version of my life. Underneath, the feet can be going at a million miles an hour trying to keep the bloody thing moving in a straight line.

There is considerable comedy in that when viewed from far enough away. My life has contained success, businesses, family, friends, travel, fishing trips, ridiculous projects and enough stories to fill more books than any sensible person would contemplate writing, while somewhere underneath all of it there has been this other conversation going on. If the Two Jeffs could somehow be separated and placed opposite one another, the result might have less in common with Freud than Abbott and Costello.

I have actually experienced versions of that exercise in therapy. There have been sessions involving relaxation or hypnosis where I was taken back to the young Jeff and invited to consider what the older Jeff might say to him, or perhaps what the younger Jeff might say to the older one. I can’t remember the detail now, which probably tells its own story about how significant the exercise ultimately became to me.

If the two of them were placed opposite each other today, I suspect they might simply laugh. Logical Jeff has accumulated an extraordinary amount of evidence, while Depressed Jeff has spent a lifetime demonstrating that possession of evidence and the ability to act upon it emotionally are two very different things.

Logical Jeff knows far more about depression than the younger bloke ever did. He has sat opposite doctors and psychologists, swallowed the tablets, considered the theories, watched the pendulum and survived enough troughs to know that the bottom of one is not necessarily a permanent address. He can recognise some of the footsteps now, even if he doesn’t always hear them before the Black Dog gets through the door.

The problem is that Depressed Jeff knows all of that too, and that is where the absurdity really begins. If they were allowed their Abbott and Costello moment, Logical Jeff could point out that there is nothing actually wrong and the other Jeff could readily agree. They could agree that this has happened before, agree that it passed last time and agree that there is every reason to expect it will eventually pass again, while still sitting there together feeling exactly as they did before the conversation began.

Eventually Logical Jeff would have to ask the obvious question: if you know there is nothing actually wrong, you know you have felt like this before and you know it eventually passed, why do you still feel like this? Depressed Jeff’s answer would probably be the only sensible contribution either of them had made to the discussion: if I knew that, we wouldn’t still be having this bloody conversation.

Neither Jeff wins because winning assumes there is some final contest to be decided. Logical Jeff cannot reason the depression out of existence, while Depressed Jeff has never managed to persuade the other bloke that there is no point continuing towards whatever light might be visible in the distance. They remain locked together, neither apparently capable of getting rid of the other and neither possessing the casting vote.

That does not mean Logical Jeff ever stops arguing. I reacted strongly even to the suggestion that he might because, when I think about it, the evidence that he hasn’t is sitting in front of me. If I had stopped arguing, there would be no reason to write this book, no reason to continue examining what has happened and certainly no reason to wonder whether tomorrow might be different.

There must always be some form of tomorrow. It doesn’t have to contain nirvana, permanent happiness or the miraculous disappearance of the Black Dog. Sometimes tomorrow is interesting simply because I want to see what the children do next, what ridiculous turn life might take or whether I might wake without that bloody pit sitting in my stomach.

That is enough to keep the binoculars pointed forward, even when I cannot see very far through them. It is also why endurance is not the same thing as surrender, because continuing to argue does not require me to believe that one day Logical Jeff will finally win and Depressed Jeff will disappear.

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.

On one of the bad days it might amount to nothing more impressive than walking into the garden and pulling weeds. There will be no revelation among the tomatoes, no sudden shaft of sunlight through the trees and no moment when I stand beside the green bin and realise that everything is wonderful again. The garden has never made such extravagant promises, and I have learned not to demand them from it.

Eventually, though, the bin becomes full. The pit may still be there and the pendulum may not yet have started its return journey, but several hours have gone past and I am several hours further along whatever tunnel I found myself in when I woke. Logical Jeff can look at that and call it progress, while the other Jeff is perfectly entitled to remain unconvinced.

Tomorrow they can argue about it again because neither one ever wins. There are simply better days than others, and somewhere beyond the hands held like binoculars there will still be something worth walking towards. I just hope, as I keep heading towards the light, that it isn’t the bloody freight train.