WHEN THE DARKNESS COMES

One Man’s Journey Through the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 23

Stop Trying to Kill the Dog

There are mornings when the first useful thing I can do is get out of bed. That sounds ridiculously simple when the distance involved is measured in feet rather than kilometres, but depression has never shown much respect for conventional units of measurement, and there are days when removing the CPAP mask, putting my feet on the floor and starting whatever comes next provides enough distraction to stop me examining too closely what is already going on inside my head.

The difficulty is that distraction has never been an entirely reliable ally. Sometimes getting up, finding something to do and pushing myself into the day works perfectly well, while on other occasions the thing I choose as the distraction becomes the next trigger and I find myself carrying the same weight into an activity I had expected to relieve it. I can ride ten kilometres on the exercise bike, disappear into the garden, go into the Man Cave, play golf, write a few thousand words or find somebody who needs something done, but none of those activities comes with a guarantee stamped on the side.

At sixty-six, I might reasonably be expected to have learned something more sophisticated than that. After all these years, all those swings of the pendulum and all the time I have spent examining the bastard closely enough to write an entire book about him, perhaps I should have developed a better strategy than getting up and continuing to move, but I haven’t. Even that observation requires some qualification because there is more to it than stubbornness; if forty-five-year-old Jeff were standing beside the bed asking sixty-six-year-old Jeff what he should do differently, I am not sure I could offer him very much beyond some better words for what he was experiencing and the suggestion that, if those words resonated, he might change direction occasionally without stopping altogether.

That is one of the problems with calling this chapter Stop Trying to Kill the Dog. It assumes I spent years trying to kill him, when for much of my life I didn’t even know there was a dog. Until I walked into a doctor’s surgery in about 2012, depression was not the explanation I carried around for what was happening to me.

I knew about the anger, the boiling point, the pit and the weight, although I would not necessarily have used all those words then, and I knew there was something about the way I was feeling that had become difficult enough to require help. Then came the damned test: twelve questions, answers running from something like all of the time to none of the time, and suddenly a word that had never featured prominently in my explanation of myself was sitting in the room with me.

Depression became a reality of sorts, not because everything before that moment had suddenly changed, but because somebody had attached a word to something I had previously experienced without the benefit, or perhaps the inconvenience, of a label. I didn’t leave the surgery declaring war on depression, and I wasn’t Rocky heading up the steps with a training montage involving antidepressants, an exercise bike and a particularly determined accountant preparing for the final-round knockout of the Black Dog.

What I wanted was considerably less cinematic. I wanted the pendulum to stop swinging so violently, the anger that seemed to be boiling more readily to be tempered, the pit to become shallower and the weight to become lighter, while somewhere beyond all of that I wanted to discover whatever this thing called “happy” was supposed to feel like.

That distinction matters to me now because I don’t think I was ever trying to defeat depression in the way we like to describe defeating things. The objective was mitigation, although I doubt I used that word either, and if the medical process could reduce the extremes enough to keep me moving down the tunnel towards whatever waited at the other end, that seemed a reasonable proposition.

For a while the medication did reduce the swinging of the pendulum. Unfortunately, reducing the swing was accompanied by a numbness of its own, and the side effects eventually brought the whole exercise back to roost because the treatment had effectively created a second set of symptoms sitting beside the ones we had originally set out to treat.

There was something almost accountant-like about the failure of the equation. We had reduced one liability only to discover another appearing elsewhere in the accounts, and the emotional balance sheet stubbornly refused to produce the result I had expected. Depression had not disappeared; instead I had depression, the treatment of depression and the consequences of treating depression all demanding space in the same ledger.

That experience is one reason I find it difficult to identify some great moment when I accepted that the Dog would always be there. There wasn’t a wonderful morning when I looked across Smiths Lake, contemplated the accumulated wisdom of my years and announced that I had finally learned to coexist peacefully with depression, and I am not sure I coexist peacefully with anything. I manage it, which is a substantially different proposition.

Management does not require me to approve of the condition being managed. I can recognise the weight when it arrives, understand the pit when I am in it, know that the pendulum has swung into familiar territory and still wish the whole bloody thing would disappear.

Perhaps that is what killing the Dog has always meant to me. It isn’t the destruction of a psychiatric diagnosis or some heroic victory over mental illness; it is simply crossing a line into something I would recognise as happy. The problem is that I still don’t know precisely where that line is.

Perhaps that is what killing the Dog has always meant to me. It isn’t the destruction of a psychiatric diagnosis or some heroic victory over mental illness; it is simply crossing a line into something I would recognise as happy. The problem is that I still don’t know precisely where that line is, and for much of my life I dealt with that uncertainty in the same way I dealt with almost everything else: I pushed.

There was always another external destination available. Build the practice, look after the clients, provide for the family, solve the next problem, finish the next project, prove somebody wrong, make enough money, sell the business and eventually reach the wonderful promised land called retirement. There was always another marker somewhere down the tunnel that could plausibly be mistaken for the light, and pushing towards it gave me something wonderfully tangible to do instead of wondering why I needed to keep pushing in the first place.

That is where the argument about there being no such thing as stress becomes considerably less comfortable. I still understand what I meant by it, and there remains a part of me that believes it: read the question, work out what is required, do what is sitting in front of you and stop exhausting yourself dealing with your perception of what might eventually be required. It worked professionally because there was nearly always another question to read, another problem to solve, another deadline to meet and another person waiting for me to do something.

What I am less certain about now is whether denying stress sometimes amounted to holding the lid on a pot and congratulating myself because nothing had boiled over. The lid was never particularly secure, and steam escaped around the edges in anger, irritability, the pit, the weight and those occasions when something apparently insignificant produced a response completely disproportionate to whatever had actually happened. I could still point to the pot and say it hadn’t boiled over, but perhaps that was because I had become extraordinarily good at keeping one hand pressed firmly on the lid.

The push became both the remedy and part of the cause. When I felt the pressure building, I pushed harder because pushing gave me direction, usefulness and somewhere to put the energy, but pushing harder also meant there was rarely an opportunity to discover what happened if I stopped. The next client, the next deadline, the next business idea and the next problem requiring Jeff Banks could relieve the immediate pressure while simultaneously adding another log beneath the pot.

That does not mean work caused my depression, because the evidence of my own life won’t support such a convenient conclusion. I was depressed while working extraordinarily hard, I have been depressed in retirement, and I have had perfectly content periods in both circumstances, so there is no neat causal line available simply because it would make the chapter easier to write. What I can see more clearly is that relentless forward motion could disguise what was happening because the same behaviour that may have contributed to the pressure was also remarkably effective at distracting me from it.

Perhaps that was why the philosophy lasted so well. If pushing harder makes you feel temporarily better, it is difficult to recognise that pushing might also be part of what keeps bringing you back to the same place, particularly when the outside evidence keeps rewarding the behaviour. The practice grows, clients thank you, problems are solved, bills are paid, businesses are built and people continue asking for your help, so there is precious little in that feedback loop suggesting that perhaps the bloke doing all the pushing should occasionally take his hand off the lid.

Even the explosions could be rationalised because there was always something immediately available to explain them. A client hadn’t done what was required, somebody hadn’t kept up, a deadline was approaching, an employee had made the same mistake again or some other obstacle had appeared between me and whatever goal I was dragging everybody towards. Each incident could be dealt with on its own merits without requiring me to ask whether the common denominator might be the bloke whose temperature was already sitting just below boiling point.

By the time I walked into the doctor’s surgery in 2012, perhaps the important thing was not that the pot had suddenly begun to boil. It may simply have been that holding the lid down had become too difficult, the anger was escaping more frequently around the edges and the strategy that had allowed me to keep moving was no longer strong enough to disguise the pressure underneath it.

Even then, my instinct was not to stop pushing. I wanted the doctor to help me manage whatever was interfering with my ability to continue down the tunnel, because the tunnel itself still looked like the answer. Temper the anger, reduce the swing of the pendulum, lighten the weight and get me functioning properly again so I could keep moving towards the goal.

There is a certain irony in recognising that now. The thing I instinctively reached for whenever the darkness came was movement, work, usefulness and another destination, while some of those same things may have helped keep the lid rattling on the pot. I was using the push to survive the consequences of pushing, and because it frequently worked in the short term, there was no obvious reason to question the arrangement.

Retirement was supposed to change the equation because one of the largest destinations had finally been reached. The practice had been built and sold, the financial question had largely been answered and there was no longer any professional necessity to keep charging down the tunnel at the same speed, yet removing the need to push did not remove the bloke who had spent decades learning that pushing was what he did whenever something felt wrong.

Perhaps that is why retirement has occasionally been more confronting than I expected. Taking the pot off the stove does not necessarily mean the bloke who has spent decades holding the lid knows what to do with his hands, and discovering that there is no urgent problem requiring them can leave an uncomfortable amount of room to notice what was underneath the lid all along.

I have reached enough of those destinations now to know that none of them was the light at the end of this particular tunnel. Retirement has provided perhaps the clearest example because, from the purely financial perspective that occupied so much of my professional life, Robyn and I have enough, and yet there are still occasions when I need to disappear and times when the weight and the pit become almost unbearable. The financial destination turned out not to be the emotional destination.

Logical Jeff can have a field day with that information. The bloke who spent a career dealing with numbers can look at the financial position, the family, the house at Smiths Lake, the books, golf, fishing, friends, the garden and all the other assets on the personal balance sheet and produce a perfectly respectable argument that there is no bloody reason for the darkness to be there. Depressed Jeff apparently doesn’t subscribe to his newsletter, and no amount of sending him another copy seems likely to improve circulation.

That is where my old argument that there is no such thing as stress starts to become interesting. I have spent years arguing that much of what people call stress comes from dealing with their perception of what might eventually be required rather than reading the question, working out what is actually required and doing what is sitting in front of them.

Banks Consultancy even built part of its personality around that approach. We would speak in your language, reduce tax legally and, where necessary, drag you kicking and screaming to compliance because worrying about the BAS did not lodge the BAS, worrying about the tax return did not prepare the tax return and worrying about what the Tax Office might eventually do did not answer the letter sitting on the desk today.

Try applying that logic to the Black Dog and the wheels begin to wobble. I cannot simply decide that depression is a perception of something that might be required and therefore dismiss it by doing the next job, because if I think I am not depressed while the weight is sitting there and the pit is opening underneath me, I suspect I am simply wrong. The Black Dog and depression have become different names for the same presence in this story, and neither disappears because Logical Jeff has prepared a particularly persuasive submission.

Doing what is in front of me still has value, though. The distinction is that doing it is management rather than cure, and getting on the exercise bike, going into the garden or sitting down to write can give me somewhere to put the next hour without requiring me to pretend that the Dog has disappeared.

Writing has become particularly interesting in that respect. The A4 financial-year diary Justin gave me provided somewhere to make notes, record anecdotes, admonish the Dog, write about things that appeared to trigger an episode and occasionally just unleash whatever was going on in my head until some of it ended up on paper instead of continuing to bounce around inside me.

That diary eventually became the beginning of something approaching two million words. It is far too long ever to publish as a diary, which is probably a relief to humanity, but those words have fed books, memories, anecdotes and the attempt to make some sense of a period of my life when writing itself became part enjoyment, part occupation and occasionally part pressure-release valve.

I have now written more than thirty books, and most of them have bugger-all to do with depression. There are business books, travel books and stories arising from the ridiculous assortment of things I have done or become interested in, and I have finally had to admit that I enjoy writing, particularly now that technology makes the process of turning what is in my head into words on a page so much easier.

Even writing can turn on me if I am not careful. Create a format requiring a certain number of chapters, discover there are holes still waiting to be filled and suddenly something I enjoy has acquired a production schedule, with Jeff Banks once again dragging Jeff Banks kicking and screaming to compliance. Perhaps that is another reason I need to be careful about turning remedies into rules, because the moment something becomes a requirement, the bloke who spent his life pushing towards goals can turn it into another tunnel, another target and another opportunity to decide he has failed if today’s output does not match yesterday’s.

The radio in my head offers no such discipline. I wake up and there is a song playing, apparently selected by an internal disc jockey with no discernible interest in my psychological welfare, and it might be Mah Nà Mah Nà, Saturday Night at the Movies or something that would struggle to make my list of favourite songs even if the list extended to several thousand entries.

I have occasionally wondered whether the radio is telling me something about my mood before I have consciously recognised it myself. The evidence for that proposition becomes somewhat difficult to defend when the soundtrack for a Thursday morning is Saturday Night at the Movies, so perhaps the most psychologically significant thing about the radio is its complete lack of psychological significance. It happens, and so does the Dog, without either one necessarily explaining the other.

Robyn happens too, although putting it that way risks making my wife sound like another unexplained medical phenomenon. What I mean is that throughout all the changes in my understanding of depression, there has not been some corresponding transformation in our relationship where I now announce that the Dog has arrived and Robyn reaches for the jointly prepared emergency procedure.

I don’t tell her when I am falling into the pit, and that has not changed simply because I have become better at writing about it afterwards. She deals with what she has to deal with, whether she knows precisely what is happening or not, and that is one of the uncomfortable truths I have had to acknowledge elsewhere in this book.

Her rockness has allowed me to bounce around inside my tunnel knowing there is another tunnel running alongside it, with Robyn moving towards the same broad destination even when I have made the journey considerably harder than it needed to be. That isn’t a treatment plan and I don’t want to turn it into one now; it is simply part of the life that has existed around the depression, just as the children, businesses, clients, friends, golf, fishing, arguments, mistakes, laughter and all the other things I have written about existed while the Dog was somewhere in the picture.

Perhaps that is where the title of this chapter finally starts making some sense. Stopping trying to kill the Dog does not mean I have decided I want him around, and if somebody could genuinely offer me a way tomorrow to remove the weight, fill in the pit, stop the darker swing of the pendulum and take me across whatever line separates this from happy, I would not reject it because I had developed some noble philosophical attachment to living with depression.

I would take happy, assuming somebody could first show me where the damn thing is. That remains the problem because, after everything I have learned about depression and everything I have learned about myself, I still don’t know what happy is if we are talking about something more permanent than moments of happiness.

That has probably been one of the strangest discoveries in writing this book because I can identify many things that make me happy in the ordinary use of the word. I can laugh, enjoy a fishing trip, play golf, disappear into a piece of wood in the Man Cave, become absorbed in writing, enjoy my family, sit with Robyn, create something, solve a problem and have days when the Dog seems to have found somebody else’s yard to shit in.

Yet if happy is supposed to be the permanent light at the end of the tunnel, I haven’t found it. The light is still there, although perhaps it seems dimmer than it once did, and I continue moving towards it because pushing towards a goal is so deeply embedded in me that telling myself simply to stop would probably create an entirely new problem requiring another book.

There is something of the Cub Scout leader in that as well. Keep moving, keep pushing and, if necessary, keep dragging everybody up the bloody hill because standing at the bottom contemplating the gradient has never struck me as particularly useful. I have spent too much of my life believing that movement is preferable to contemplation when there is something in front of me that can actually be done.

I have occasionally joked about hoping the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a freight train. I know it isn’t a freight train now, because I have done enough in the back of my mind to recognise that, by most of the measures I spent my life pursuing, we have effectively won. The only thing missing is the happy part, which is a rather substantial qualification to attach to victory.

Even that sounds more miserable than I intend it to because this has never been a book about a life without happiness. There has been an extraordinary amount of light in my life, and the existence of darkness does not retrospectively extinguish the businesses, marriage, family, friendships, travel, fishing trips, golf games, ridiculous ideas, laughter or the many perfectly ordinary days when nothing particularly good or bad happened. The Dog doesn’t get ownership of those merely because he happened to be somewhere around at the time.

Perhaps that is the closest I can come to explaining what has changed. I don’t measure success by producing something called a successful depressive episode because the phrase itself is ridiculous; if the feeling passes quickly, I am grateful, and if it disappears as quickly as it arrived, I will happily put that in the win column.

I cannot make it disappear simply by recognising it, though, and there are still days when everything I have learned about depression becomes almost useless while I am actually experiencing it. Logical Jeff can arrive carrying the complete instruction manual, supported by years of evidence, a diary containing more words than anybody should reasonably have written, twenty-odd chapters of a book devoted to the subject and a detailed understanding of the pendulum, and the other Jeff can effectively tell him where to stick the lot.

Sometimes getting up provides the distraction, while sometimes the distraction becomes the trigger. Sometimes there is a trigger I can identify, sometimes I can find one afterwards because accountants are particularly talented at reconstructing explanations once all the numbers are available, and sometimes nothing happened at all. The emotional ledger still refuses to balance merely because I have become better at reading it.

That may be the part of living with depression I resisted understanding for the longest time. Knowledge is useful, recognition is useful and having words for the weight, the pit, the pendulum and the Dog is useful, but none of those things comes with an obligation upon depression to respond logically.

There is no comfort in the pendulum, but there is familiarity. I know it will move from light towards darkness again and I cannot pretend that knowledge comforts me, yet on the other side of that knowledge sits the experience that when it moves into darkness it will also eventually move back. Knowing that while sitting in the pit and feeling it while sitting in the pit remain two entirely different propositions.

Maybe that is why I no longer think very much about beating depression. I don’t think anybody simply beats it in the sense I once understood winning, although this book contains only my experience and I have no intention of converting that experience into a rule for anybody else.

Science may eventually understand far more about what creates these states of mind than we do now. Perhaps there is something embedded long before we become conscious of it, perhaps one day there will be treatments capable of doing things that the medications I encountered could not do, and perhaps somebody will eventually find a way of shifting the pendulum without flattening everything else around it. I don’t know, and pretending that I do would be inconsistent with almost everything this book has taught me about my ability to understand my own depression.

None of those possibilities answers my question today. If killing the Dog means making sure depression never visits again, I have stopped expecting that victory, while if killing him means continuing to move towards the light, reducing the time I spend in the pit where I can, recognising some of his footsteps and refusing to hand him ownership of everything else in my life, then perhaps I have been doing that for years without ever thinking to give it a name.

I still get out of bed, put my feet on the floor, take off the CPAP mask and begin whatever comes next because that is what I have always done. Some mornings there is a ridiculous song already playing in my head, some mornings there is a weight sitting in my stomach, and occasionally both arrive together as though the internal disc jockey and the Black Dog have entered into some particularly stupid collaboration.

Then the pendulum moves, because apparently that is what the pendulum does regardless of whether I approve of its itinerary. It moves towards the dark and eventually it moves away from it, while I continue trying to extend the time it spends on the side of the axis where life feels lighter.

I would still happily stop the bloody thing on that side if somebody could show me how. Acceptance has never required me to pretend that darkness is something I should welcome, just as recognising that the Dog may return does not require me to put out a bowl of food for him.

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

Where is happy? I still don’t know, and perhaps the important difference now is that I can admit that without deciding the entire journey has therefore been a failure.

The Dog can sit somewhere in the story without becoming the story, although I would still prefer the bastard wasn’t there at all. Tomorrow morning, whatever song is playing and wherever the pendulum happens to be, I will take off the CPAP mask, put my feet on the floor and find out what the day has brought with it.