I THINK I'm a fairly cheerful sort of bloke and sociable most of the time, but just now and again I have felt thoroughly browned off.
I used to describe this unpleasant, fleeting mood as being "depressed". I will never make this mistake again, for recently I discovered what it is to be truly depressed. Perhaps it was something to do with the chesty cold I went down with and which lingered for weeks? I really don't know.
All I know is that one morning a few weeks ago I woke up and felt paralysed. Not a physical paralysis. I could get out of bed - though I didn't want to. But a sort of emotional paralysis. I didn't actually cry, but I could have done. I didn't want to do anything. No - it was worse than that: I felt I couldn't do anything. It was as if a physical weight had descended upon me, or as if I had become a prisoner in my own skin. Words from Hamlet came flooding back:
"I have of late - but wherefore I know not - lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire -why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours."
I told myself not to be such a wimp and to get on with my work. I did get on with my work, but it was like going about with lead in my boots and a sack on my back. And when I settled down for a meal in the evening, I couldn't find any enjoyment in it. When I woke up in the night, the dreadful heaviness and terrifying anxiety were still there. Now I knew. This is what depression actually is.
I remembered Winston Churchill wrote about how he used to suffer from it. He called it his "black dog". And then by an astonishing coincidence - so appropriate and helpful to me that it was like a gift from God - there was an article in a newspaper about an advertising executive who had fallen into a long term depression. He managed to do something about it. He wrote a short comic strip book featuring a black dog and how he pictured this black dog was his depression, ruining his life.
This was the start of his determination not to let the black dog ruin things. By objectifying the inner mental state, he began to overcome it. I thought I would try to do the same. But before I even got started, the depression lifted. The weight was gone. Nothing objectively in my life had changed. The day contained the same proportions of pleasure and pain as usual. Objectively - out there - everything was the same.
But suddenly, inwardly, I was entirely different - back to what I thought of as "my old self."
The weight had lifted. I was no longer dragging myself around. Work was something enjoyable again. And the evening meal was beyond belief delightful. I was as joyful as the redeemed Scrooge on Christmas morning.
I am lucky. Whatever it was seized hold of me, it went fairly quickly - not as in the case of the advertising executive who suffered for years. It probably was something connected to that chesty virus I went down with. I don't know. I hope it never comes back. But I'll tell you one thing for sure: I'll have a lot more sympathy in future when someone in the parish tells me he's depressed.
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