So this isn't a book about what depression is supposed to feel like. It is a book about what mine felt like, what it did to me, what I did in response and what I now wonder about the bloke who spent so many years insisting he could deal with whatever was sitting in front of him.
This is not anybody else's story, and I don't want anybody reading it to mistake it for theirs. It is simply the story of one bloke trying to understand his own rabbit hole, and that bloke happens to be me.
The words truly fail me. I appreciate there is a certain contradiction in beginning a book of this length with that admission, because clearly quite a few words have managed to find their way onto the pages that follow. The problem is not that I cannot find words at all; it is that I am still not convinced they adequately describe what I have been trying to write about.
I have called it darkness, a rut, a spiral, a pit in my stomach and a weight on my chest. I have talked about the pendulum and spent a considerable amount of time talking about the Black Dog, an animal I didn’t invent but have borrowed because somebody else apparently had the same difficulty finding a better description. Somewhere along the way I also started talking about the rabbit hole, and perhaps that comes as close as anything to explaining what depression has sometimes felt like to me.
The difficulty with a rabbit hole is that you don’t necessarily see yourself falling into it. There isn’t always a moment when something terrible happens and you can point to it afterwards and say that was where the descent began, because sometimes absolutely nothing happens and you find yourself down there anyway. That is one of the things I have struggled with throughout this book, because my natural inclination has always been to look for the cause before deciding what to do about the problem.
That approach has served me reasonably well for most of my life. If a client came into my office with a problem, I wanted to know what had happened, what caused it, what could be done about it and what needed to happen next. Read the question, work out what is required, deal with what is in front of you and move on, because worrying about what might be required has never seemed particularly useful to me.
Depression has never been sufficiently considerate to operate that way. It has rarely presented me with the question first and then waited patiently while I worked through the answer.
There have been times when I have been able to identify something that pushed me towards the rabbit hole, and there have been plenty of other times when I haven’t. I can wake in the same bed, beside the same woman, in the same house and with exactly the same life I had when I went to sleep, yet something can be different before my feet have even reached the floor. Nothing happened overnight to explain it, nobody stole anything from me and there was no catastrophe waiting on the other side of the bedroom door, but somehow the bloke waking up was not quite the bloke who went to bed.
That is probably where the rabbit hole starts to make sense to me, because falling does not require my permission. I don’t have to decide to enter it, and I certainly don’t stand at the edge weighing up the advantages and disadvantages before climbing down. Sometimes I seem simply to discover that the ground I thought I was standing on is no longer underneath me.
Once down there, the view becomes strange because I can often still see everything that ought to matter. Robyn is still there, the family is still there, Smiths Lake is still outside the window and there is still a life which, viewed objectively, gives me very little justification for feeling the way I do. I can know all of that with absolute certainty while remaining completely unable to convert the knowledge into the feeling I reckon should accompany it.
That has always been one of the hardest parts to reconcile. Logical Jeff can conduct a perfectly competent stocktake of my life and conclude that there is nothing sufficiently wrong to explain what is happening, while the other Jeff sits somewhere down the rabbit hole apparently unimpressed by the audit. Both can exist at exactly the same time, which is particularly irritating when you have spent a lifetime believing that logic ought to have the casting vote.
Life above the rabbit hole continues regardless. I can shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, ride the exercise bike, sit at the computer, answer the telephone and do most of the things expected of me while at the same time knowing that something isn’t right. I have probably spent much of my life believing that if I remained functional then I couldn’t be doing too badly, and I suspect the people around me could reasonably have reached the same conclusion.
Functionality, I have discovered, can be a bloody good disguise. It can fool the people around you, but more importantly it can allow you to fool yourself because there is always another completed task available as evidence that everything must be all right. If I can still do what needs to be done, then perhaps whatever is happening inside me cannot be particularly serious, although experience has taught me that conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow.
There were times when it was serious, despite all the evidence of functionality I was producing to the contrary. There were times when getting through the day and looking as though I was getting through the day were two quite different things.
The rabbit hole works for me as a description because I can picture myself somewhere below ground level, still able to see what is happening above me and still knowing perfectly well that the world is there. What I cannot always understand is why I cannot simply climb back up and join it, particularly when I am capable of explaining to myself all the reasons I should.
Perhaps that is why I have spent so much of this book trying to understand rather than simply describe what happened. I want there to be a reason because reasons can be examined, and once something can be examined there is at least the possibility that it can be fixed. I have spent a lifetime believing in solutions, so accepting something that doesn’t always present a problem capable of being solved has never sat particularly comfortably with me.
I need to make something very clear before anybody reads further, because I don’t want this book mistaken for something it was never intended to be. This is my story of depression, and the word my probably matters more than any other word in that sentence. I am not attempting to describe depression for anybody else, and I am certainly not suggesting that what happened to me provides some sort of template against which another person’s experience should be measured.
I am not a doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist or counsellor. I am an accountant who has spent a fair portion of his life trying to understand why there were times when everything added up on the outside and the answer still seemed wrong on the inside. That doesn’t qualify me to explain anybody else’s depression, but I reckon it gives me reasonable standing to talk about my own.
Your rabbit hole may look nothing like mine. You may not have a rabbit hole at all, and the Black Dog may be an expression that means absolutely nothing to you, while something I have never experienced may describe your depression perfectly. I don’t know, because I have never been inside your head any more than you have been inside mine.
That distinction became increasingly important as I wrote this book. There is a temptation when writing about something like depression to move from this is what happened to me to this is what depression does, and I have tried very hard not to cross that line. Even where I have occasionally used the broader language, what I am really talking about is the only depression I have ever personally known, and that is mine.
Even my own story isn’t as straightforward as I would like it to be. Memory is not an audited set of accounts and I cannot produce documentary evidence for every feeling I have described, despite the accountant in me probably preferring that I could. Some things I remember clearly, some have been reconstructed from events around them and others have only become apparent after I started writing and found myself asking questions I had never previously bothered to ask.
There are probably conclusions in these pages that I will look at differently in another five years. I am comfortable with that because this is a record of what I understand now rather than a declaration that I have finally worked everything out, and pretending otherwise would defeat much of the purpose of writing it.
There are other people in this story as well, particularly Robyn and the boys, and their presence creates another difficulty. Depression might have been happening inside me, but that doesn’t mean I was the only person affected by it, because whatever was happening inside eventually found ways of leaking into the world around me. Anger, withdrawal, impatience, silence and the constant need to keep moving didn’t politely stop at the boundary of my skin.
I can write about what I think that cost them, but I cannot write their story for them either. I can remember events, conversations and reactions, and I can look back now with a different understanding of what may have been happening, but their experience belongs to them just as this one belongs to me. That seems particularly important in a book where I am insisting from the outset that one person’s experience should never be allowed to become everybody’s explanation.
The rabbit hole was mine, but people I loved occasionally had to stand around the edge of it. Sometimes they probably tried to reach down, sometimes they may not have known I was in there and there were undoubtedly occasions when I was busy insisting there wasn’t a hole at all. Looking back, I suspect that last version of me was particularly difficult to deal with, because it is hard to help somebody who remains determined to prove there is nothing requiring help.
There is another reason the rabbit hole appeals to me as a description. It suggests movement downwards, but it also suggests there must be an upwards somewhere, and I have spent a lot of years looking for it. Work was sometimes upwards, usefulness was upwards, family was upwards, humour was upwards and being needed could certainly feel like upwards, although one of the uncomfortable discoveries in writing this book has been that some of the things I used to climb out may also have helped me fall back in.
That is where the neat explanations start to disappear. Work could make me feel useful and give structure to my day, but I was also depressed while working ridiculous hours, so work cannot simply be entered in the cure column. Retirement removed some of the pressure I had spent years complaining about, yet it also removed much of the structure and usefulness that had apparently been holding other things together.
Even pushing has become harder to classify than I once thought it was. Pushing was how I got things done, how I built a practice, how I dealt with deadlines and how I responded when life put something inconvenient in front of me. Pushing can also become a habit long after there is anything worth pushing against, and there is a possibility that some of the machinery I regarded as the remedy was occasionally feeding the Dog.
That is not an especially comfortable possibility for somebody who spent most of his life being rather proud of the machinery. It raises the awkward prospect that the same drive could have been both part of the rescue operation and part of the reason I kept needing to be rescued.
Perhaps that is the real reason I started writing all of this down. I thought I was trying to describe depression, but somewhere along the way I realised I was trying to understand Jeff, which turned out to be a much larger assignment. Depression became a thread running through work, childhood, marriage, fatherhood, anger, usefulness, medication, retirement and even the ridiculous collection of songs that continue to turn up uninvited on the radio in my head.
I don’t know whether writing has provided any answers. It has certainly provided more questions, and perhaps that is as useful as I am entitled to expect because I began this exercise without even knowing what all the questions were. There have been moments when something I wrote caused another piece to make sense, only for that explanation to create another question a few pages later.
That feels much closer to the truth of my experience than pretending I eventually discovered the answer. I haven’t discovered it, and perhaps part of this exercise has been accepting that there may never be a single answer sitting at the bottom of the rabbit hole waiting for me to find it.
I haven’t killed the Black Dog, filled in the rabbit hole or found some wonderful switch that turns on the light whenever the darkness comes. I have learned to recognise some things earlier, questioned some beliefs I had carried for decades and become a little more suspicious of my old habit of assuming that being functional and being all right were necessarily the same thing.
There are still days when the rabbit hole is nowhere to be seen, and on those days it can be difficult to understand why I ever found it so threatening. There are other days when I can see it somewhere in the distance, days when I appear to be walking around its edge and days when I suddenly realise I am looking upwards again and wondering how the hell I got down there.
Maybe that is why the words truly fail me, because every description seems to require another description before it makes sense. I can tell you what the rabbit hole feels like when I am in it, but I still cannot properly explain how a perfectly ordinary morning becomes the entrance to one.
I can describe the view from inside my rabbit hole, and through the pages that follow I can tell you what I remember about falling into it and what I have tried when attempting to climb back out. I can tell you about the people standing around the edge, the things I mistook for ropes and the occasions when something I thought was dragging me down may actually have been holding me up.
What I cannot do is tell you what your rabbit hole looks like, why you might fall into it or how you should climb out of it. I don’t have that answer, and after writing this book I am probably more certain than ever that anybody claiming to have one answer for everybody is answering a question that was never asked.
So this isn’t a book about what depression is supposed to feel like. It is a book about what mine felt like, what it did to me, what I did in response and what I now wonder about the bloke who spent so many years insisting he could deal with whatever was sitting in front of him.
This is not anybody else’s story, and I don’t want anybody reading it to mistake it for theirs. It is simply the story of one bloke trying to understand his own rabbit hole, and that bloke happens to be me.
Jeff Banks spent most of his working life as an accountant, tax adviser and business owner, occupations that suited a man who liked problems to have answers and believed most things could be dealt with if you first worked out what was actually being asked. His approach was generally uncomplicated: identify the problem, determine what needed to be done, do what was sitting in front of you and then move on to whatever came next.
That philosophy served him reasonably well through decades of business, deadlines, clients and the responsibilities that came with raising a family and building a life. Depression proved rather less cooperative because it did not always arrive with an identifiable problem, and it certainly did not provide a convenient list of steps that could be followed until the job was finished.
For much of his career Jeff built businesses, advised clients, raised three children with his wife Robyn and maintained the outward appearance of somebody who was getting on with life reasonably successfully. He could solve somebody else’s problem in the morning, make decisions throughout the afternoon, come home to his family and still find himself unable to explain why something inside him didn’t feel the way logic suggested it should.
That contradiction sits at the heart of When the Darkness Comes, but this is not a book written by somebody claiming any professional expertise in depression. Jeff is not a psychologist, psychiatrist, counsellor or mental-health researcher; he is simply a bloke who has experienced his own version of depression and eventually became curious enough, or perhaps frustrated enough, to start asking himself why.
The accountant in him probably made that investigation inevitable once it began. He had spent much of his professional life looking behind numbers to find the real problem, questioning explanations that did not make sense and refusing to accept that something was correct merely because somebody presented it confidently, so eventually some of that scrutiny was turned towards himself.
Retirement gave him considerably more opportunity to do that than he had anticipated. When the telephone stopped ringing quite so often, the deadlines became less demanding and the structures that had organised most of his adult life began disappearing, there was suddenly more room to examine what might previously have been hidden behind work, responsibility, usefulness and the simple requirement to keep going.
Writing gradually occupied some of that space, although Jeff would probably argue that it created a few rabbit holes of its own. What began as recording events and memories increasingly became a way of returning to them, turning them around and asking whether the explanation he had carried for years was actually the right one.
His books have grown from that curiosity and from a lifetime containing enough different experiences to keep supplying material. Business, family, travel, retirement, relationships, mistakes, successes and the occasional complete bloody disaster have all found their way onto the page, usually accompanied by the suspicion that the most interesting part of a story is not necessarily what happened but what you understand differently when you look back at it years later.
When the Darkness Comes takes that process somewhere considerably more personal because the subject under examination is Jeff himself. It looks at the Black Dog, the rabbit hole, anger, usefulness, work, medication, retirement, the strange radio that seems permanently switched on inside his head and the people who lived beside him while he was busy convincing himself that functionality was reasonable evidence that everything must be all right.
Jeff makes no claim that his experience of depression represents anybody else’s, and that distinction is fundamental to the book. He can describe his rabbit hole because he has been in it, but he cannot describe yours, and he has become increasingly wary of anybody who believes one person’s explanation can comfortably be stretched across everybody else’s experience.
He lives at Smiths Lake on the New South Wales Mid North Coast with Robyn, who has shared much of the life from which these stories have emerged and has probably endured more of Jeff’s relentless problem-solving than anybody else. Their three children and their wider family remain central to his life, while retirement is increasingly filled with writing, golf, fishing, woodworking, gardening, community involvement and a continuing ability to find something that needs doing whenever the alternative appears to involve sitting still.
There is an irony in Jeff becoming a writer because this book begins with an admission that the words truly fail him. After spending much of his working life using numbers to help other people understand where they were, he has discovered that words are considerably less obedient when the subject is himself.
Perhaps that is why he continues to write, because every answer seems capable of producing another question and every memory looks slightly different when examined from another direction. After a lifetime spent trying to make things add up, Jeff is becoming increasingly comfortable with the possibility that understanding himself may be one set of accounts that never completely balances.
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