Depression
Because the world ain’t all sunshine and roses
And so I found myself, at around one in the morning, a full bottle of red wine deep, music just barely trickling into the front room through the kitchen door, after my umpteenth viewing of The Big Lebowski, my underwear round my ankles, masturbating rather fruitlessly to a twenty-year-old still of Carrie Fisher from Return of the Jedi, wondering how the fuck this mess came to be. It makes for a rather pleasing opening in hindsight; indeed, the tragicomic nature of depression generally reveals itself after the fact. From my current position in the present, it seems laughable I thought a cult comedy film and a £4.75 bottle of Sainsbury’s Shiraz would cure my blues; at the time, though, it felt perfectly reasonable.
The above is an introduction I wrote many years ago to a book I was planning about the relationship between music and depression. Depression perhaps isn’t the most cheery entry for the second essay in my project of writing one blog post a week for one year, but it’s my blog, so sod off.
I’ve suffered from depression since the age of about fifteen. Of course, when I was fifteen, I didn’t know what it was. I just thought I was upset about my then-girlfriend breaking up with me, unable to realise that drinking two litres of Sainsbury’s Own Dry Cider and smoking several joints on the weekend wasn’t making matters better, nor that there were problems going on in my head and with my chemistry that weren’t necessarily linked to the experiences I was having in life. Regardless, it’s now been ten years — a full decade — since I first felt the initial pangs of an illness that, not long ago, nearly killed me.
Depression is hardly a recent topic of discussion, as much as it seems that mental illness has only ceased to be taboo in the 21st Century. Shakespeare’s Hamlet does an astoundingly good job at describing what it feels like to contemplate one’s own demise, particularly during the most famous Hamlet soliloquy and when Ophelia ostensibly commits suicide, as well as the psychological confusion Hamlet faces when he hesitates over killing his uncle, which some scholars have referred to as symptoms of depression. Sylvia Plath’s 1963 semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar documents her own descent into what was probably clinical depression, and is arguably the greyest, most depressing (pun intended) novel ever written. Another illness common among those among depression — and vice versa — , anxiety, is excellently represented, albeit unwittingly, in Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 Rebecca, the main character being described as ‘timid’ but her actions and narration suggestive of the wild, racing thoughts by which the ailment is characterised.
Since the turn of the century, popular culture has stopped, or has started to stop, getting sweaty palms and looking towards its feet whenever mental illness is discussed. Indeed, cliches have even come into use. One such cliche is the Black Dog, as some describe it feeling as though a large black dog is sitting on your chest, making it hard to breathe. Black dogs have been an integral part of British folklore for centuries; Samuel Johnson and, later, Winston Churchill referred to their respective depressions with this moniker, and perhaps they were thinking of the folkloric beast of the moors when they used the term. (Dogs, though, have been used as an effective cure for stress and bad moods, so I don’t find the term totally fitting, colour notwithstanding.) Another common way of describing the illness is likening it to drowning, which is close, but there’s still something peaceful about the image of slowly drifting away underwater. More accurate is perhaps suffocating without being able to find the cause; a feeling of visceral panic, combined with the dark cloud (another cliche) that doesn’t just sit over your head, but seems to smother your whole body, leaving the world a dreadful grey.
If depression is a horrific, all-consuming illness, its corollary (though, again, it doesn’t always happen that way round), anxiety, is aggravatingly narcissistic. You’re constantly stuck in your own head, worrying whether the decisions made were the right ones, whether what is coming up in the future could cause further pain and anxiety, whether what was said to that person upset them or made them hate you, but it doesn’t matter, because everyone hates you anyway. Anxiety makes you think people care significantly more about you than they actually do — and yet this inflated sense of self-importance is drastically offset by the feeling that they are only thinking about you because they don’t like you. This is a feeling with which I am intimately familiar: some days, I’m convinced my girlfriend doesn’t care one iota about me, which is not only unfair on myself (I’m great, how couldn’t she care about me?) but isn’t a particularly nice thing to think about someone else, either. And it’s so selfish— the constant opinion that how I feel is the most important thing. That’s something that kills relationships, particularly those of a romantic persuasion; it’s easy to push people away when you act on those irrational thoughts.
Most tragically, these symptoms — these feelings of inadequacy, the anxiety, losing interest in things that used to bring you so much joy, the inimitable feeling of suffocating that only people who have suffered depression are familiar with— literally kills people. It nearly killed me. One day, listening to Nikes by Frank Ocean (which definitely didn’t help matters), on my morning walk to work at around quarter past eight in the morning, I very nearly threw myself off Waterloo Bridge. I’d thought about killing myself on multiple occasions before, coming close perhaps once or twice to giving it a go. This, however, was the first time I’d thought ‘I’m actually going to do this.’ My decision was made, or so it felt; it was final. It was simply too painful to carry on, and shuffling off this mortal coil felt like the best solution. Oblivion, like that bit in American Gods. Simply nothingness. Total peace, a peace so peaceful I wouldn’t even realise I was experiencing it. I stood on the bridge for a very long time, making myself late for work in the process. No turning back.
But there was a chance to turn back, of course. The authorities didn’t have to fish me out of the Thames, and I’m still here, listening to number 96 on the Guardian’s 100 Best Albums of the 21st Century (of which more later). (It’s not a very good album.) The realisation that I was this close — and if you can’t tell, I’m holding my thumb and forefinger a mere whisker’s breadth apart— to ‘taking my own life’, as they so euphemistically call it, led me to the epiphany that I couldn’t do it. Partly it was cowardice — I was not brave enough to jump off that bridge, a feeling that, ridiculous as it is, made me feel even more pathetic. Partly it was the thought of the people I’d be leaving behind, of the people I’d hurt who would remain alive, of whom there were at least two. (Here’s looking at you, Mum.) Partly it was that I knew, in those fleeting moments when my body allowed me to experience it, what it felt like to be happy, to have the relief of not being depressed, even if, then, it was only for a few moments at a time — and I decided I wanted to have that feeling back again, because I knew it was worth suffering a little longer to be in with a chance of getting better.
I don’t like the phrase ‘taking one’s own life’. The expression doesn’t really make sense. Where is one taking it? Now I’m no longer as depressed as I was before — and my, often I don’t feel depressed at all. Isn’t it wonderful? — I have the feeling that I’m only just now ‘taking’ my life, or taking control of it, at least. To an extent, depression does change who you are, and therefore is a ‘part’ of you, despite all the people who say you shouldn’t let it define who you are as a person. How you act, the things you do or, more likely, don’t do, what you say — depression has a lot of power when it comes to all of these things, and if they aren’t you, what is? But it is true that lots of these changes are temporary, even though depression actually alters your brain chemistry even after you no longer experience symptoms. It saps you of all your motivation, of all of your joy for the things you used to love; it steals that which was once important to you, and pushes away those who are trying to help; it makes the world a lot less colourful and a lot less welcoming; it makes people obsessive, narcissistic, and frankly, a fucking pain in the arse to be around. It gets its clammy mitts around your neck and squeezes; that crushing sensation is the last sensation many sufferers of depression feel. It was almost the last sensation I felt. But not quite. I’m a different person to who I was before I was depressed, but I would be a different person now whether I had had the illness or not. Mostly, I’m grateful that, now it’s released its grasp on me, just a little bit, I feel like I can breathe again.
A few pictures and videos that remind me not to take life too seriously
