WHEN THE DARKNESS COMES

One Man’s Journey Through the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 22

What I Have Learned

If I could somehow arrange to sit beside the Jeff Banks who walked into the doctor’s surgery in about 2012, I suspect he would expect me to have something useful to tell him. After all, I have had another fourteen years to work on the problem, and fourteen years is a respectable amount of time for an accountant to investigate almost anything. Surely the older bloke could arrive carrying the answer sheet, or at least enough working papers to explain where the younger bloke had gone wrong.

I don’t think I would give it to him, because I don’t have one. What I would probably tell him is to go home again for a while and think about the question, which sounds ridiculous considering he had presumably gone to the doctor precisely because he wanted an answer. What I understand now, though, is that I walked into that surgery without having properly formulated the question, and perhaps the greater problem was that I didn’t possess the words from which the question could be constructed.

I knew something was wrong and I knew I didn’t want to feel the way I felt. Those two propositions were clear enough inside my head, but neither of them came close to describing what was actually happening there. The difficulty was transferring a feeling into words when the feeling itself did not arrive conveniently labelled, and every attempt to describe it seemed to lose something important between what I experienced and what eventually came out of my mouth.

That is an odd problem for somebody who has rarely regarded words as particularly difficult things to find. I could explain tax law to a client, argue a business proposition, write a letter, make a presentation, negotiate a position and generally produce enough words to fill whatever space was available. Ask me to describe what was happening inside me, however, and suddenly the bloke who could speak confidently about almost anything was trying to translate from a language he had never been taught.

Perhaps that was why the question became something much simpler by the time it reached the doctor. I don’t want to feel like this is certainly a statement of a problem, but it isn’t necessarily a description of what this is, and it says almost nothing about what I wanted in its place. Sadness, anger, emptiness, agitation, frustration, hopelessness, the pit in the stomach, the weight on the chest and the inability to find pleasure are not interchangeable simply because they can all inhabit the same bloke. If I couldn’t separate them for myself, expecting somebody sitting on the other side of a desk to do it from the words I supplied was asking quite a lot.

That becomes even more important when I think about what I was actually seeking. I can say now that I wasn’t merely asking to be less sad; I was trying to find happy, but I doubt I could have expressed the distinction properly then. Even now happy is a hopelessly inadequate word for something I apparently expected a doctor to help me recover, because I am not sure I could have told him what happy felt like, how I would recognise it when it arrived or even whether what I was missing was happiness at all.

Perhaps I should have sat down with Robyn somewhere quiet beforehand and tried to make the words agree with the feelings. Not so that she could diagnose me or find the answer, but because trying to explain something to the person who knew me best might have exposed the enormous gap between what I was experiencing and what I was capable of saying about it. She might have asked a question I couldn’t answer, I might have rejected a word because it wasn’t quite right, and somewhere in that clumsy process we might at least have discovered what I was actually trying to take into the doctor’s room.

There is, of course, an obvious flaw in that magnificent piece of retrospective wisdom. The anger that was part of what we were trying to describe would probably have come bubbling to the surface while we were trying to describe it, leaving us attempting to have a calm conversation about why I couldn’t have a calm conversation. Finding the words might have required exactly the sort of patient examination that the feelings themselves were making difficult.

That may be one of the more important things I have learned since 2012. There is a difference between being unwilling to talk about something and being genuinely unable to translate it, and I am no longer certain how much of my silence belonged to each. I may have appeared reluctant to say what was happening when the more accurate explanation was that I could feel it far more precisely than I could describe it.

The doctor could only hear the question I managed to ask. The question I actually needed answered was still somewhere inside me, trapped between a feeling I understood only by experiencing it and a vocabulary that, for once in my life, wasn’t nearly big enough.

Still, I think I would have been better equipped if I had understood the question before asking somebody else to answer it. That is probably the accountant in me again, although it also takes me back to university and the people who had the extraordinary ability to read an assignment question and then answer what they perceived the lecturer must really have meant instead. I could never understand that approach because my instinct was much simpler: read the bloody question.

Perhaps that is unfair to medicine, because I don’t doubt the professionalism or training of the doctors I dealt with. I certainly don’t doubt that the medication worked within the parameters for which it was prescribed, and I don’t now need to rewrite history to turn the doctors into villains simply because the result wasn’t what I had hoped to find. The medication did something measurable to the pendulum, and that deserves to be acknowledged.

The troughs became shallower and the peaks also became lower, at least as I experienced them. The whole bloody thing swung through a smaller arc, and from a particular medical perspective that could reasonably be called success. From where I was sitting on the pendulum, however, I wasn’t entirely sure that reducing the distance travelled was the same thing as arriving where I wanted to go.

That distinction has become clearer to me over the years. I wasn’t walking into that surgery asking merely to become less sad, although I doubt I had the words to explain that at the time. I was looking for happy, which is a far more troublesome thing to put on a prescription.

There is a line of thought in The American President that keeps bringing me back to Andrew Shepherd and the problem of being able to sell an explanation. Something does not become the right answer merely because somebody can explain it convincingly, and an answer can be perfectly correct while still belonging to a slightly different question.

Perhaps that is part of what happened to me. The medical profession may have been answering, quite professionally, the question it understood me to be asking while I was sitting on the other side of the desk unable to sell them a different question because I hadn’t yet found the words for it myself.

Fourteen years later I have plenty of words, and I have written a book full of them. Whether that means I understand the question is another matter entirely.

I have certainly acquired labels. Depression was one of them, and the Black Dog eventually became another useful way of describing something that had been sitting in the corner of my life for far longer than I had recognised. The accountant in me likes labels because labels suggest that something has been identified, and once something has been identified there is a comforting implication that it can be placed into the correct column.

The scientist probably likes labels for much the same reason. Name it, classify it, measure it, observe what it does and eventually somebody should be able to tell you why it does it. Unfortunately, the Black Dog appears to have very little respect for either accountants or scientists.

I can put him in the corner, describe him as snarling and recognise his footsteps. I can sometimes notice that he has arrived earlier than I might once have done, but none of that provides Logical Jeff with the operating instructions he would really like. That is where I keep returning to the pendulum, because the Black Dog is a description while the pendulum is closer to my perception of how the thing actually feels.

Sometimes it swings towards the light and sometimes it moves back towards the darkness. Sometimes there is a recognisable reason for the movement and sometimes the accountant can spend as long as he likes examining the transactions without finding anything that explains why the closing balance bears so little resemblance to the opening one.

The pit in my stomach can simply turn up, and the weight on my chest can simply turn up as well. Recognising either of them doesn’t necessarily give me some wonderful opportunity to intercept the pendulum before it travels any further, and that is an important thing I have learned because it is also an important thing I haven’t learned.

I cannot point to a morning when I recognised the warning signs, implemented the appropriate Jeff Banks Depression Management Protocol and triumphantly stopped the pendulum in its tracks. There is no laminated flowchart hanging beside the computer telling me that if the pit in the stomach is accompanied by irritation and a particular song, I should immediately complete ten kilometres on the exercise bike, spend twenty minutes in the garden, annoy Robyn, go fishing and report back for reassessment at 3.30. Knowing me, if there were such a flowchart I would probably laminate the bloody thing and then spend half an hour deciding whether it needed colour coding.

The radio in my head hasn’t been much more cooperative as a diagnostic tool. I have spent quite a bit of time wondering whether the songs appearing uninvited each morning are telling me something about what is happening underneath, and there are occasions when the words seem sufficiently appropriate to make the theory attractive. Then the internal DJ serves up Saturday Night at the Movies on a Thursday morning, which should probably be enough to have his broadcasting licence reviewed.

Even then, however, a line can lodge itself somewhere and start another argument. “Who cares what picture you see?” nags at me, not necessarily because the song has diagnosed anything but because the words brush against something I have struggled with for much of my life.

Of course it matters what I think, and it matters enormously. There has always been another layer, though, involving what other people think I should be thinking, what they perceive I must be feeling and what the accepted interpretation of my behaviour is supposed to be.

That has been one of the difficulties with this entire exercise. Finding a name for something does not necessarily mean the name describes my experience of it, and finding a treatment that changes something does not necessarily mean it changes the thing I was hoping to change.

Exercise provides another example, although considerably less complicated than medication. I get on the exercise bike and do my ten kilometres because somewhere along the way it became one of the things I do, and there is no particular need for me to turn that into a philosophy. I tried it, it seemed worth continuing, so I continued.

There is probably a useful principle buried in there somewhere, but I am becoming increasingly suspicious of useful principles. The moment I turn one into a recommendation for somebody else, I have crossed the line between telling my story and pretending that my square hole is exactly the same shape as theirs.

Exercise belongs in my story because I do it. The garden belongs because I disappear into it, the Man Cave belongs because I make things in it, golf belongs because I play it, and fishing belongs because there are few problems in life that cannot at least be temporarily ignored while wondering whether something considerably stupider than you is going to bite a piece of bait attached to a hook. None of those things has cured me, and I have stopped requiring them to.

Work didn’t cure me either, although for decades it gave me something extraordinarily powerful: the next thing. There was nearly always something that needed doing, and a client required an answer, a tax return needed completing, a business problem had to be solved, a staff member needed something, the telephone rang or another deadline arrived before I had finished complaining about the previous one. Work did more than occupy the hours, though; it gave the drive somewhere to go.

That drive had been there for a very long time, and I don’t think it can be separated entirely from where I came from or from the people who doubted what I might eventually become. There is considerable propulsion available in being underestimated, particularly when you are young enough, stubborn enough and probably insecure enough to decide that the appropriate response is not to argue with the doubters but to spend the next several decades proving the bastards wrong. I didn’t need to wake every morning consciously thinking about any particular person who had doubted me, because eventually the response had become part of the machinery.

The difficulty with that sort of drive is that it needs something to push against. Give me a problem, a deadline, a client who has been told something cannot be done, a business that needs building or even somebody suggesting that I probably won’t manage something, and suddenly there is resistance against which all that energy can be applied. It is a little like trying to push a car that isn’t there: the strength might still exist, but without resistance there is nowhere useful for it to go.

Banks Consultancy provided resistance in abundance. There was always another client, another problem, another deadline, another opportunity and, occasionally, another person whose expectations were sufficiently low to be almost motivational. Success didn’t necessarily quieten the drive either, because proving somebody wrong once is apparently not enough when you have built part of your identity around the proposition that they were wrong in the first place.

Looking back, I wonder whether that was one reason work could coexist so comfortably with the darkness. The darkness could be there and the drive could still operate because work did not require me to decide how I felt before I started doing it. Something was sitting in front of me, something needed to be solved, and there was usually somebody depending upon me to solve it. The pendulum could be doing whatever the bloody pendulum wanted in the background while the part of Jeff Banks that knew how to push still had something solid to push against.

That may also explain why usefulness became such powerful currency for me. Being needed did not merely fill the diary; it validated the drive that had carried me such a long way from where I started, because every person asking for my help provided another small piece of evidence that the doubters had been wrong. The irony, which has become much easier to see from this end of the journey, is that I may have continued trying to prove them wrong long after most of them had stopped watching.

Perhaps some of them had even forgotten they ever doubted me. I hadn’t, and the drive they helped create still needed somewhere to go.

I have said often enough that there was no such thing as stress, and I can still defend the underlying argument because much of what people call stress is really their response to something that needs to be done. Read the question, work out what is required and do what is sitting in front of you, rather than exhausting yourself dealing with a perception of what might eventually be required. A deadline was not particularly frightening if I knew what had to be done before it arrived, and a problem was generally more manageable once it had been reduced to the next action required to solve it.

One of the Four Pillars of Banks Consultancy probably said more about that philosophy than I realised when we wrote it: we will drag you kicking and screaming to compliance. It was deliberately blunt and slightly ridiculous, but the humour disguised something I believed absolutely. Compliance was rarely improved by worrying about it, avoiding it, imagining how unpleasant it might eventually become or spending six months feeling guilty because the BAS, tax return, accounts or whatever else was required had not been done. Eventually somebody still had to do the bloody thing.

That Pillar was not negotiable at Banks Consultancy because I had seen too often what happened when something straightforward was allowed to become psychologically enormous. A client could spend months frightened of opening a letter from the Tax Office while the unopened envelope acquired powers that no piece of paper had any right to possess. The answer was not necessarily to make the client feel better about the envelope first; sometimes the answer was to open the bloody envelope, find out what it said and then deal with what was actually required rather than everything the client had imagined might be inside it.

Dragging somebody kicking and screaming to compliance was therefore about more than lodgement dates. It was a practical expression of the way I dealt with much of life: replace anticipation with action. If the return was overdue, prepare it; if the BAS had to be lodged, lodge it; if there was a debt, establish the amount and work out what could be done about it. Once the actual problem was sitting on the desk, it was generally smaller than the collection of possible problems that had been allowed to occupy somebody’s head.

Perhaps that is why I was so comfortable insisting that stress did not exist. For most of my professional life I had evidence arriving through the front door that appeared to support the proposition, because I watched people become overwhelmed by what they thought might happen and then watched much of that anxiety diminish once we established what actually had to happen. The Banks Consultancy response was not to join them in contemplating every possible disaster; it was to find the next required action and start there.

There was another side to that Pillar, though, which I understand better now. Dragging somebody kicking and screaming to compliance gave my own drive something very solid to push against. Here was a client who could not or would not move, an immovable deadline, a problem requiring an answer and occasionally a government department sitting at the other end of it all. For a bloke who had spent much of his life responding to resistance by pushing harder, it was almost the perfect professional environment.

The client might arrive carrying procrastination, fear, embarrassment, a shoebox full of records or several years of determined avoidance. I supplied momentum, and there was enormous satisfaction in taking something that had become impossible in somebody else’s mind and reducing it to a sequence of things that could actually be done. The greater their reluctance, in some respects, the more resistance there was for the drive to work against.

That may be one reason the Four Pillars were never merely marketing lines to me. “We will drag you kicking and screaming to compliance” described something fundamental about how Banks Consultancy operated, but it also described something fundamental about Jeff Banks. Put something necessary in front of me, particularly if somebody else believed it was too difficult, too late or too uncomfortable to confront, and my instinct was not to stand beside it discussing how stressful it looked. My instinct was to grab hold of the bloody thing and start dragging.

Perhaps what I didn’t understand was how well that philosophy suited the drive already inside me. Something that needed doing was not merely a demand upon my time; it was something to push against, and I had spent much of my life pushing. The boy who had been doubted, the bloke who had been underestimated and the businessman who had discovered that achievement was a particularly satisfying response to both had accumulated an enormous amount of forward momentum. Give that momentum resistance and it became useful.

That may be why what somebody else experienced as pressure could sometimes work differently for me. A deadline gave the drive a direction, a difficult client gave it a problem, a business challenge gave it resistance and somebody suggesting that something couldn’t be done occasionally supplied enough fuel to keep the engine running for considerably longer than was sensible. None of that meant I was immune to pressure or that my insistence that stress did not exist was necessarily as watertight as I liked to pretend, but it does make me wonder whether I had confused my ability to use pressure with evidence that pressure wasn’t there.

There is an important difference between the two. I had become very good at converting demands into action, and because action felt infinitely preferable to sitting around contemplating what might happen, I could regard the whole process as proof of my theory. Do what is in front of you, finish it, find the next thing and keep moving; there was very little room in that sequence for asking what all that movement might also have been doing for the bloke who needed something to push against.

Retirement was supposed to remove some of that pressure, but perhaps that description misses the more interesting change. Removing pressure from somebody who has spent much of his life complaining about it sounds like a reward; removing resistance from somebody whose drive has always required something to push against may be an entirely different proposition.

Even then, retirement did not leave me sitting in an empty house wondering how I might fill the hours. At one stage I managed to run five businesses from home, which is perhaps not the strongest evidence available for my ability to embrace retirement and certainly suggests that the drive had not received the retirement memorandum. I could manufacture activity perfectly well, and if the world failed to provide enough things requiring my attention, I had demonstrated a fairly impressive capacity to create some.

The more interesting change was not that there was suddenly nothing to do. It was that some of the things I had spent decades pushing against were disappearing, while the drive they had helped create showed remarkably little interest in disappearing with them. The deadlines could reduce, the staff could disappear, the practice could belong to somebody else and the telephone could ring less often, but none of those things automatically told the engine that had powered Jeff Banks for decades that it was now permitted to idle.

Perhaps that is one of the contradictions I had missed when I imagined retirement from the other side of it. I had thought primarily about what I would be retiring from and considerably less about what all those pressures, deadlines, clients, doubters and problems had been providing while I was busy pushing against them. The pressure may not have been something I needed to escape nearly as much as the drive needed something meaningful to meet.

That is why the more interesting change came from somewhere else. The problem was never simply whether retirement left enough hours to fill; it was what happened when the things filling those hours no longer carried quite the same requirement to prove, solve, provide, rescue or be needed.

When former clients began appearing again and telling me that they still wanted Jeff Banks, the armour became horribly thin. It was very easy for me to construct a story in which the people who had bought Banks Consultancy had failed these clients and I therefore had an obligation not to leave them in the lurch. The important word in that sentence is obligation, because nobody needed to chain me to the desk when I could manufacture the chain perfectly well myself.

Perhaps that is something else I have learned about usefulness. Being needed has been a powerful currency in my life, and being told that somebody still needs me can make a request extraordinarily difficult to refuse, particularly if I can persuade myself that refusing it would amount to abandoning somebody. There is an immediate feel-good component to that, of course, because somebody coming back and saying they still wanted Jeff Banks was confirmation that all those years of trying to be useful had produced something that survived the sale of the practice.

There was another transaction taking place at exactly the same time, though, and I am not sure I recognised it then. Every former client who returned because they still wanted Jeff Banks gave me evidence that I mattered, but they could also give the Black Dog something particularly nutritious to chew on. If they needed me, then I could help them, but once I accepted that proposition it was remarkably easy for Logical Jeff to turn I can help into I should help, and then turn I should help into I have an obligation to help.

That progression could happen almost unnoticed because every step sounded perfectly reasonable. These were people I had looked after for years, some of them had become friends, they believed the new arrangements had failed them and I possessed the knowledge required to fix the problem. Somewhere in there, however, usefulness could stop being something that made me feel good and become another standard against which I could judge myself.

That was excellent food for the Dog. If I helped the client, there was the satisfaction of still being needed and still being capable of solving the problem; if I couldn’t help, didn’t have time, wanted to say no or simply believed the problem was no longer mine, there was an entirely different meal available. Had I let them down? Was I abandoning somebody who had trusted me? Had I sold the practice and walked away from people who had believed that Jeff Banks would always be there when things went wrong?

The objective facts did not necessarily support any of those questions, but the Black Dog has never required particularly strong supporting documentation. Give him responsibility and he can turn it into obligation; give him obligation and he can turn it into guilt; give him guilt and he has enough material to start constructing a case that Logical Jeff can recognise as unreasonable while the other Jeff still feels every bloody word of it.

That is the contradiction in usefulness that I understand better now. Being needed could lift me because it confirmed that I still had value, while the very same need could create another opportunity to believe that somebody else’s outcome had somehow become my responsibility. The thing feeding the sense of worth could therefore be feeding the Dog at exactly the same time.

Perhaps that is why there is no neat graph available to rescue the theory. Retirement did not cause depression, just as work did not cure it, because I was depressed while working extraordinarily hard and I have been perfectly content while doing bugger-all of any measurable economic value. Even usefulness refuses to stay obediently on one side of the ledger: sometimes it has been an asset, sometimes a liability, and on some particularly interesting days it has apparently managed to be both at once.

Writing may occupy some of the space that work once occupied, but I am not convinced I started writing because there was a hole desperately requiring filling. If anything, I seem to have demonstrated a remarkable ability to find things to put into every available hole without first checking whether it wanted to be filled.

Writing this particular book has been different because at times it has hurt like hell. The Thinking Rock hurt and the circus hurt, while there have been memories I knew were going to be uncomfortable before I went looking for them and others that surprised me by retaining considerably sharper teeth than I expected.

Then there have been the questions I couldn’t answer, and that has sometimes been almost as disturbing as the memories I could retrieve. I used to believe I remembered practically everything I read and a fair proportion of everything that happened around me, and there is enough evidence from test results and other parts of my life to suggest that belief wasn’t entirely fanciful. Yet during the writing of this book I have sometimes gone looking for a memory and found an empty shelf.

At other times the memory has been there but the words haven’t. I know what happened, I know there was a feeling attached to it, and then somebody asks me to describe that feeling and I discover that the vocabulary I have spent a lifetime accumulating has apparently taken the afternoon off. That brings me back to the bloke in the doctor’s surgery in 2012, because perhaps he wasn’t withholding the right words at all; perhaps he simply didn’t have them.

Writing this book has forced me to look for some of those words. I hesitate to describe the process as fulfilling because that would make it sound far more pleasant than it has occasionally been, but there is something about taking a memory out of my head and putting it somewhere else that has altered my relationship with it.

The image that keeps occurring to me comes from Harry Potter: the Pensieve, where memories can be taken from the mind and placed somewhere they can be examined. I haven’t extracted mine with a wand, which is unfortunate because it would have saved a considerable amount of typing, but there have been moments when getting something onto the page has seemed to take some of its hurt away. It hasn’t taken all of it away and sometimes it hasn’t taken very much, but some has been enough to make the exercise worthwhile.

Robyn has been there through all of this, which feels like an inadequate description of something much larger. My wife has been an absolute rock, although even that description risks turning her into another metaphor when the important point is considerably simpler: she has stayed beside me.

She has listened when I have found words and lived beside me when I haven’t. She has dealt with anger that wasn’t hers, moods she didn’t create and problems she couldn’t possibly solve, and there have been times when simply knowing she was there was more useful than any expectation that she should somehow know what to do.

I don’t need to make her my therapist to understand what that means, and I don’t need to turn her presence into another treatment either. She is Robyn, and after everything else I have tried to label in this book, perhaps I can leave at least one thing alone.

Humour is harder to leave alone because the village idiot keeps demanding a speaking part. I have been asked repeatedly through this writing process where I fit, and the village idiot seems to appear most often in the places that are not directly professional.

Put me in front of a client with a technical problem and there is a role to play, an answer to find and a reason for being in the room. Take away the role and the question becomes more interesting, because usefulness has so often provided me with an identity before I have had to work out whether I actually belonged.

John Denver managed to describe something close to it in Rocky Mountain High, with the idea of coming home to a place he had never been before. I have used that thought about Smiths Lake because it captures something I have found difficult to explain, and there is warmth in the idea of discovering somewhere that feels like home immediately. There is also, if I look at it from the other direction, something slightly uncomfortable about a bloke being so struck by the feeling of coming home to somewhere new, because it leaves the rather obvious question of where he thought home was before.

Perhaps that is why the village idiot matters more than I have given him credit for. Humour has often been one of the places where I don’t have to establish my usefulness before I am allowed into the room.

I can say something ridiculous because it amuses me. I can stir somebody, tell a story, take the piss out of myself or occasionally achieve the considerable intellectual feat of making Robyn shake her head at me without first producing a measurable outcome. There is no invoice attached to any of it, which might be as close to a breakthrough as this chapter is going to get and therefore something I should probably become suspicious of immediately.

I have learned to be suspicious of breakthroughs because for years I have wanted the ledger to reconcile. That is what accountants do, and it is what anybody with a mathematical or analytical mind expects when presented with a problem. There should be an answer to the conundrum, except there isn’t, or more accurately, I haven’t found one.

I can call the thing depression. I can put the Black Dog in the corner, watch the pendulum, describe the rut, look down the tunnel for the light, listen to the radio in my head and inspect every bloody transaction that occurred in the preceding forty-eight hours. Sometimes none of it tells me why I woke up feeling the way I did.

There is an unexpected freedom beginning to appear in admitting that, although I don’t mean the inspirational sort of freedom where I finally accept myself, gaze meaningfully across Smiths Lake and discover that the answer was inside me all along. If the answer has been inside me all along, it has done an exceptionally good job of hiding and should probably be congratulated on its commitment.

I mean something much more mundane: perhaps I don’t have to solve it every time. That doesn’t mean I ignore it, stop doing the things that seem to help, stop listening to Robyn, stop exercising, stop writing, stop watching for the rut or refuse medical help because I have decided that sixty-six years of being Jeff Banks qualifies me to open a psychiatric practice.

It simply means that I have become less convinced that every movement of the pendulum must have an identifiable cause and therefore an identifiable correction. That is difficult for Logical Jeff because he wants the cause and the answer, preferably supported by a spreadsheet with clearly identified assumptions and a total at the bottom that agrees with something. Depression keeps handing him an unreconciled balance, and perhaps one of the more useful things I have learned is that he can survive that.

There is a temptation at this point to start writing down everything I have discovered as though twenty-two chapters have finally qualified me to produce The Jeff Banks Four-Step Guide to Depression. It would probably begin with recognising the problem, progress to doing something useful, insist upon getting on with life and finish with finding some fun in it. I could laminate that too, perhaps placing it beside the other imaginary flowchart in the office.

The problem is that I have spent a fair portion of this book objecting to people answering questions I didn’t ask, and it would be spectacularly hypocritical to finish by answering questions the reader hasn’t asked me. I don’t know what somebody else should do, but I do know some of what I do and, increasingly, what I don’t expect those things to accomplish.

I seek answers even when I suspect there may not be one. I try things and, if they seem to help, I tend to keep doing them; if they don’t, eventually I move on, although the word eventually is doing some fairly heroic work in that sentence.

I exercise, write, work when there is work worth doing and occasionally when there probably isn’t. I garden, make things, play golf, go fishing, listen to whatever ridiculous song has been programmed by the radio station nobody remembers installing in my head, and continue trying to find amusement in a world that frequently provides plenty of material.

Sometimes the pit still arrives and sometimes the weight on the chest comes with it. Sometimes I can identify something that may have pushed the pendulum and sometimes I can’t find a bloody thing, and I have learned that knowing the difference does not necessarily change the feeling.

That may be the hardest lesson for Logical Jeff because knowledge is supposed to be useful. If I understand something, surely I should be better able to control it, and if I can recognise an irrational thought as irrational, surely the rational part of me should be able to dismiss it.

Except we have met those two Jeffs before, and they have never operated quite that neatly. One understands while the other still feels, and neither has managed to evict the other. Maybe they don’t need to, although I reserve the right to change my mind about that the next time they start arguing at three in the morning.

I have spent years looking for ways to stop the pendulum when perhaps much of my life has actually been spent learning how to continue while it swings. That is not the same as surrendering to it, and it certainly isn’t a claim that I have finally accepted depression as some wonderful gift that has made me the person I am. I would have been perfectly happy to develop character some other way, preferably one involving less effort and considerably more fishing.

It is simply an observation about what happened. There has been darkness and there has been an extraordinary amount of light, with businesses and clients, Robyn, children and grandchildren, friends, golf courses, fishing boats, ridiculous adventures, arguments, gardens, workshops, books, music and enough stupid ideas to keep the village idiot gainfully employed well beyond normal retirement age.

Depression was there for some of it, but it wasn’t all of it. Perhaps that is what I mean now when I think about simply getting on with it, because I don’t mean gritting my teeth, ignoring what is happening or pretending that somebody suffering more profoundly should pull their socks up and adopt the magnificent Banks methodology.

There isn’t a Banks methodology, and if somebody discovers one in these pages I would like to see the supporting working papers. What there is instead is one bloke’s collection of things tried, things retained, things discarded, things misunderstood and things that occasionally appeared to work until the pendulum decided otherwise.

My life has continued while I have been trying to understand it. The pendulum has swung while children grew up, businesses succeeded and failed, Robyn and I built a life together, clients became friends, books appeared on my computer and fish occasionally demonstrated the good judgement required not to attach themselves to my line.

There were dark days inside good years and good days inside dark periods. There were also an enormous number of ordinary Tuesdays that did not require interpretation at all, and perhaps I have spent too much time trying to make some of them explain themselves.

At sixty-six I am probably better at recognising some of the scenery. I know the rut and the tunnel, recognise the weight on my chest and the pit in my stomach, and know that the Black Dog can wander in without presenting either an appointment card or a satisfactory explanation.

I know that medication changed the arc of my pendulum. I know exercise has remained part of my routine, writing can sometimes take a little of the hurt out of a memory, usefulness is more important to me than I once understood, and Robyn has been standing beside me for an extraordinary part of the journey. I also know that none of those observations adds up to a formula.

Perhaps that is why this chapter can afford to smile more than some of the others. There is something inherently funny about an accountant spending decades trying to reconcile a set of accounts that refuses to balance, and there is something even funnier about him eventually discovering that his response to the reconciliation problem is to write another book about it.

I can imagine Logical Jeff objecting that twenty-two chapters ought to have produced something more definitive. The village idiot thinks twenty-two chapters is already excessive, and for once he may have the stronger argument.

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.

It even survived this book, despite the number of words I have thrown at it. After all those words, I can finally state the question quite simply, although the bloke who walked into that surgery couldn’t.

I still don’t know how to be happy, and perhaps that is the most honest thing I have learned from all of this. The difference is that I no longer expect myself to pretend that I know the answer, and I have a pretty good life to be getting on with while I continue trying to find out.