Our shared condition

Surviving depression, if only just.

It isn’t as though I’ve been actively contemplating suicide, but I must confess that the thought, “Well now if you were hit by a bus, then would that be so bad?” has skipped through my head more than once this past month. More than once this past week, if I’m honest.

I don’t think that’s surprising, is it? When you look at, well, everything. Daily updates on a genocide funded by taxes squeezed out of people who can barely afford to pay the rent, a political rhetoric so unhinged that it translates into the real world murders of trans school children, Alexei Navalny’s death, climate collapse, 15% of UK households in food poverty. I should feel bad, and I do. I should also be able to find it within myself to use that which I have at my disposal to do something about it all, however small, however short of the mark, but I can’t. I can barely manage to get dressed before 4pm, it takes everything I have to buy a bunch of bananas, to return a text. I stand up and the imponderous weight of the malign cotton wool cocooning my head crushes me; everything is impossible, everything hopeless, nothing available, nothing viable. I feel like one of the lost souls I used to see nodding off whilst standing up on the corner of Avenue B.

I’m infested with a dry rot and it’s silently eating away at my timbers, at my desires, it has swallowed up all my interests and appetite. I can’t focus to read, I have no energy to work, sex seems a ludicrous proposition, the only thing I really want to eat is Oatibix. I take a lot of baths and feel disgraced for the water I waste, scroll through six hours of paleo muffins I’ll never bake and BTS footage of non-surgical facelifts and watch with dread as the sun sinks over another day squandered, untouched by the redemptive power of pleasure.

If I do make it outside it so overwhelms me that I lose the power to communicate in full comprehensible sentences. I’ve found myself speaking slow and slurred, with my words out of order as though grappling with a second language. Even my more successful social interactions have been so taxing that they’ve left me destitute for the next three days. The things that should feed me seem to poison me so I find it safer to stay at home, and thus am further isolated, me and the spectre of Real Suffering laughing in my face, You call that hardship?

I know there’s a name for this, I know that I’m depressed, I know that I’ve been subject to this for most of my life, though I have steadfastly refused to admit it. If I don't speak it out loud then it isn't really happening, it’s just a low mood, just one of those days, one of those days that goes on for a week, six weeks, two months. I’ve never been able to accept the reality of the situation because that would also mean my accepting defeat, that I’ve finally come up against an obstacle I couldn’t overcome, and this embarrasses me because I’m nothing if not tenacious. But heartaches, dysphoria, three-day comedowns, professional humiliations, deportation and long, long stretches of housing insecurity well, they were a walk in the park compared to this.

Because it has cut me off from reaching for any of the things which might help me, it has walled me up behind the ugliest of pasteboard partitions, with life raging insatiable firmly on the other side. I want to tell people how awful I’ve been feeling but it seems so unfair to further burden them, in this time when everyone seems so bereft. Moreover it’s just such a bore, who wants to hear it? And the alarm it might cause, the ignominy of the inevitable Sorry to hear you’ve been feeling bad. I don’t think I have it in me to process any such kindness, however tepid. Besides, the idea of actually doing so, expressing openly and honestly how I feel, is beyond mortifying. Not that I have been able to, I’ve even failed at that. All the media training I’ve soaked up taking me by the throat, removing the microphone from my hand, What my client means to say is…. I’m only able to write this now, as a sort of last ditch attempt to save myself. I’m putting all my chips on Freddy Nietzsche, in the hopes that the creative act will shelter me.

I have everything I need to be happy, I know that, logically I know that. I have a home, I have someone who loves me and whom I love, I eat every day and I have the career that I have strived for since I was eight. I have everything I need but that’s somehow worse, isn’t it? That I have so much and still feel so bad all of the time, what ingratitude is this? What thanklessness.

My mother suffered from depression all through my childhood, it was undiagnosed but apparent, she inherited it from her own mother. It made me so angry, how she would go to bed for weeks on end, and over time this anger has become guilt, shame that I ever held it against her. I wanted her to be able to pull herself together, I didn’t know how impossible the demand I was making on her was, and the guilt is compounded now by my own inability to master our shared condition. I see myself from outside of myself, still in my pyjamas as the light fades, sighing with relief when someone cancels a tentative plan, and all I can think is, Fuck, what a waste of a life.

Such things are cyclical, I know that. Writing this is evidence and Easter is only fingertips away. I’ll come through this. I’ll get back on my feet, I haven't given up, I refuse to. I won’t be the source of anyone else’s sorrow, I wouldn’t give the bastards who misrule this world the satisfaction. I owe too many people too much, I have too many debts of gratitude to repay first. I’ll come through this, with an in-depth understanding of liquid rhinoplasty and low-glycemic fruits. I’ll come through this sick to death of breakfast cereal, Christ help me, I will come through this. Then you can lay your head on my shoulder and cry, and maybe you’ll believe me, when I tell you that you will too.