After being out of sorts for the last few weeks, and thus letting my diary lapse somewhat, today I wake up full of energy and a renewed interest in living life. Funny how depression can be like that.
Sometimes depression feels like admitting defeat, many days spent going to bed and thinking, ‘I’ll feel better the next day.’ For much of the last fortnight, this hasn’t worked at all. I’ve woken up feeling just the same, and have just tried to put a brave face on it, stumbling through the day, clinging to distractions. Comfort food, comfort TV, comfort radio. Whole days of nothing slipping through one’s fingers like sand. Unable to get out of bed for hours on end, and then before I know it, it’s getting on for bedtime. A terrible existence.
At such times, I don’t feel 35 at all. I feel either 15, or 85, or both.
It would be fine if this meant I had the energy, innate connection to new technology and trends, and untrammelled hope of the better kind of teenager; or the wisdom, experience, better dress sense and healthier perspective of the idealised pensioner. The pensioner that is always working.
But no. On days like much of the last fortnight, I get the bad sides of both. From the 15-year-old I have the moaning, carping, sulking, and frustration, plus the sensation of never quite recovering from childhood solipsism. The time in one’s teenage years when you realise that the world really doesn’t revolve around you, that other people regrettably do exist, that you’re on your own from now on. Father Christmas does not exist, but paying rent does. I’ve never quite recovered from that time. Or at least, I must have missed that class at school when they actually tell you HOW to grow up, as opposed to forever shouting at you to do so.
And from the negative aspects of the archetypal 85-year-old, I have the poor health, lack of energy, creeping small-mindedness (if not downright prejudice), resentment of anything new, and a searing mistrust of the young.
So it’s the worst of both worlds. I can be this way for days on end, oscillating from resentful, unproductive teen to resentful, unproductive pensioner. As if it somehow makes sense. As if I enjoy it (I don’t). As if it’s an easier option.
Well, it seems like an easier option at the time. But, in the same way that putting on a t-shirt, jeans and trainers takes the same effort, energy and time as putting on a suit and tie (or at least, it would do for me), depression is a lie.
Depression is as hard work as, well, hard work. Just as being unemployed is a full time job. The energy and time is the same. Not doing any work is hard work too. The time is still spent. The mind is still working.
So the trick is: telling yourself you can’t be bothered to NOT work. Getting on with work without realising you’re getting on with work. Losing oneself in the flow of it. Thinking, but without thinking about the thinking.
My self-help book would be called ‘Take Yourself From Behind’.
