Tag: depression

A Dummy’s Guide to Feeling Alright

It was early September, I was feeling like a horse’s ass, low mood state. A mate was coming to stay. I’d warned him I was struggling to put a sentence together. As he came through the door I felt myself freeze. How was I gonna get through this. Before I knew it he was stood there telling me what a trainwreck his life was. We headed out to see a friend at a local restaurant. Sat there over some million-layer potatoes, the two of us listened to her. She was a mess, worse than my mate. I was stunned.

Everyone’s life was a disaster.

Compared to these mugs I was doing superb.

Three months on.

The depths of winter, silly season, when a palpable London energy is all about us and deep down perhaps we wish we had a right to feel worse, worse than the lights and mulled wine and impending Christmas cheer are obliging us to feel. I meant to write this in autumn but never made it.

In my local the other day in conversation with the barman, how was your 2023, I asked. Mate worst year of my life. What, actually, that much worse than the previous ones. Yea, he said. Weird, mine has been a total shitshow too. Wonder if there was something in the air this year.

Fell off my bike, broke my shoulder, went through far too long a depressive episode which drowned out the whole heat of summer, but got through it. By autumn I was feeling fantastic. Not a snowball’s chance in Hades of me falling back under, I thought. Went to the desert, stood there looking out across the dunes, came back, and lately I’ve just been feeling pretty existential.

Not low exactly, but a lot of what does it all mean. But the thought kept coming back, that having plumbed the depths of feeling that bad, I had some goods to report back from the coal face, some shrapnel in my ass from the front-line, something I could write like a guide, a soupçon to help people through the hard times of being alive.

Here goes.

A Dummy’s Guide to Feeling Alright.

DON’T BE A DICK

Visiting my brother the other day in a rainy West London, I left my bike locked outside his gaff. A few hours later when I came back, my mud guard and rear light were nowhere to be seen. The front one was still there. Which meant one thing. No bike thief in search of a tenner for a fix, this was some cyclist in need of what he was missing. This was way worse. Nothing but pure blind opportunism.

A mate of mine once got a bike knicked three times, and the fourth time he told me he bought some bolt cutters. Not sure this was the finest act of strategy I’d ever heard. I don’t care how Robin Hood you think you are, you don’t right the worlds wrongs by echoing the wrongdoing. The robbed that smiles, said Shakespeare, steals something from the thief.

If you really need to let off steam, put up a lairy sign.

I mean to say we have to be accountable to ourselves. To the voice inside us when no-one else is looking, how do we act, do we let ourselves get away with things. I think we should follow the voice that goes, maybe don’t do that. Work we can do to iron out the wrinkles in our soul.

Above all, do not lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

This leads onto my next bombshell.

A NET OF ENERGY THAT SPARKLES

On Grosvenor Road a few years back on my bike, I saw a man, literally belting it down the street. Linford would’ve raised an eyebrow. People were stunned, alarmed. What was he doing, was he mad, what had he stolen, the whole street was gripped. In the end this guy caught up to a moving taxi, 250 metres down the road, started knocking on the window while he legged it alongside.

Cycling behind, I had front row seats to the spectacle. Hell do you want, said the Cabbie, I’m busy. He was like stop stop, and as the window wound down, panting, he handed a passport through it to a startled lady, there with her family amongst the luggage she had clearly just brought from overseas. A passport she had dropped without noticing as she got in the cab.

The whole scene, the cocked faces, interrupted conversations, as soon as people gathered what was materialising, there was a collective sigh that cracked into a collective smile, grins, a great pause, as the poor guy caught his breath there was even some applause. About 100 people, involved in this soap opera, got their conclusion. I swear on my life it affected everybody around them. This act of strange spontaneous duty was a fist-bump for mankind, it brightened the whole street up, that buzzing minute of summer buzzed harder for a moment, people carried it with them all day, I’m sure of it.

I definitely did.

Evidence we are all connected, and whether we know it or not, the tiny little sparkles of goodness we put into the ether, a smile, a glance, a wave, running after a taxi at a speed that would break most regional top 10 records, to hand someone a passport, can make people’s days infinitely better. And knowing we are involved in this, and that our little flickers of interaction are meaningful, makes us feel part of something far bigger and grandiose.

AMÉLIE

I always loved the French film Amélie. Audrey Tatou was consumed by making strangers’ lives a little bit better, anonymously. She would notice the lives of her neighbours, of those in the street, and leave them little surprises, little traces of goodness. Some cynics labeled her a meddling creep, called for her arrest, but I loved the sentiment.

In his definition of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes the words..

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.

PEOPLE

Once upon a time I built a raft from sapling bamboo and sailed the length of the Yangtze where I proceeded to be taught the art of Shaolin by an ageing monk. Hand me a 9ft staff even today and I can still probably defend a military position. Anyway I met an Israeli guy there called Jan, who had been travelling across China for a year.

He told me, as majestic as the places he had seen, the landscapes, the sunsets and the misty mornings, the customs, the food, nothing came close to the encounters with the people who crossed his path. People are the most important thing in the world, he said. When they die, we lose a part of ourselves we can never get back. So we keep them alive in our thoughts and with our memory.

Bukowski said once…

As a man who spends 90% of his days alone, this line hit me like a truck. We are tribal animals, meant to be with each other. Get outside and be with people, take them by the hand, tell them you love them. Sink a cold one, have a dance.

GET IN THE TUB

Have more baths.

Stare up at the ceiling, til your fingers go wrinkly.

JOURNAL

In the Guardian recently there was an article extolling the merits of keeping a diary. As a way of bringing you daily peace. For close to a decade now I have been wearing bics down to an inky pulp in search of enlightenment.

My mate Wilma once began this habit, of waking up and writing freely every morning for 20 minutes on whatever took his fancy, this coming from a guy who struggles to spell his name correctly, and loved the habit so much he compared it to a morning practice like bleeding the radiators. In it he found an incredible balm.

My experience with scrawling in my books has been a total unwind. Unravelling my brain onto paper all of a sudden I see the cacophony of my thoughts laid out on a page for the first time. This gets them outside of me, and for the first time I get to read them back. To me. The whole process is wondrous. Similar to meditation, an enormous exhale. One gets to map one’s internal monologue. And it feels like an anchor, tracing its way along the ocean floor, creepingly, and finding a jagged licheny outcrop to drag over, at last it finds some purchase, and locks in.

GET YOUR MONK ON

I wrote something recently about spiritual practice. That in the relentless world of TikTok and screens, instagram stories and XXXVideos, it might be the only saving grace we have to stop ourselves from going mad.

To steal back a moment for ourselves, be it arctic showers, breathing deeply, meditative practice, sitting in a chair and thinking about something or other before going back to the mantra, be it a walk in the woods, a two-day fast, a bath staring up at the ceiling, staring into the eyes of a stranger cracking a smile, staring into a child’s eyes and watching the whole Universe stare back at you, we could do with being reminded by our older wiser selves, how to be in the world.

NEW HABITS DIE HARD

Take up pottery. Learn to fashion a spoon out of flotsam. Join the local choir. Start a middle-aged rap career. Maybe stop watching so much YouTube Domingo. Nothing you read on a screen can make you as happy as something out of the pages of a good book.

Get a tv dog. That’s next on my list.

GET INTO NATURE

Get your tv dog, turn off the tv, and get the hell into the stix. Better still, hook up with your hiking-nerd mate and go walking on the south coast for four days of back-breaking, calf-destroying, soul-restoring glory. It has been said that a half hour walk in nature is the equivalent for your serotonin levels as an anti-depressant.

Certainly sorted my melon out.

NEXT BEST THING

In AA they have a dictum, you can’t think your way into better action, but you can act your way into better thinking. If you’re having a shocker, just keep on moving, move your way into an alternate destiny, things only stay the same if you stand still. I’m an expert at (not doing) this.

The other day I was having the mothership of a menopausal time. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I looked about 65. I looked like I hadn’t slept since March. Whatever was enveloping me, it looked fatal.

I went back out, started pacing, where had my life gone, what had it been, how limply would it end. And then something distracted me, a message on my phone that made me chuckle, I went back into the bathroom, and in the mirror someone else was staring back at me. I was alright, I looked roughly my age, had some wrinkles sure, but also a slick moustache that went down at each end, my life was full of possibility, things were looking up.

43 seconds had elapsed.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Seneca

GRATITUDE

In Tesco’s the other day some dude was there, veins popping out of his forehead, literally railing at the poor cashier, for being charged 20p for a plastic bag. Whatever the meaning of life was, this was not it. Apparently it is physically impossible to harbour both anger and gratitude in your brain at the same time.

We should practice gratitude, be grateful for the flaming miracle of everything. I mean what are the chances of even being alive.

THIS TOO SHALL PASS

Whatever you’re going through, it can’t last. After many a depressive episode over the years I was at last gifted a nugget of gold. Depression wasn’t me, it was only happening to me. And like a wave gently breaking over a Tahitian shore, it would subside into nothingness and the light would flood through my window and once more into the interior of my being.

We have a habit of thinking how we feel in a moment is a permanent state, when we really just have to ride it out. Like an especially un-enticing office Christmas party. Going back to the last point, on gratitude, the first noble truth of Buddhism declared we should be grateful despite the fact our suffering.

You are a child of the Universe,
No less than the trees and the stars.
You have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
No doubt the Universe is unfolding as it should.
With all its sham drudgery and broken dreams,
It is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Max Ehrmann

I liked it a lot, put it on my arm.

REACH FOR THE LASERS

Life is a serious business, it is fatal. But come on it’s not that serious. This kid has the right idea. Attempting the longest yeaaaboiiii in history and passing out in the attempt. That is some way to spend an afternoon.

If being alive is a matter of life and death, it is also fucking funny. We shouldn’t take it too seriously. When did the super intense dude clutching the post-modern novel in the corner of the bar ever get the girl.

Sat there the other night, watching Human Traffic, a feeling filled me with joy, the story of a long weekend in Cardiff, five mates going out til the witching hour and beyond, squeezing every last drop out of the hedonism of youth.

Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

Voltaire

Lead a life our older selves will be happiest to look back on.

Strikes me that is where we should focalise our aim.

That’s the ticket.

REACH FOR THE LASERS.

SAFE AS FUCK.

Making Rainbows Out of Something Painful

Hello again.

It’s been a while. What do you want from me. What will you take from me, this time. I know something I didn’t know before. You aren’t me. You are only happening to me. I will twiddle my thumbs and you will pass. This is what I’ve learnt. You are happening to me. But you aren’t me.

I am more than you.

I looked down at my cactus, once green and plump, now purple and shrivelled. Was this some sort of winter hibernation mechanism, I wondered. It looked more like it was dying. All the life sucked out of it. It looked like I felt, purple and dry and far from life.

I mustered the energy to hit the plant shop, wondering if they’d refund me, I didn’t do much wrong, I told myself. Holding the cactus up to show the girl at the counter, she looked at me aghast, like I was some sort of plant molester. What did you do to it? I stared back blankly. Your cactus is dying, she said flatly. I walked back from the shop under the cloud of my own mood, thinking how on top of my life being a total dead-end no-show, I was a murderer.

For close to two months I’ve felt like this. Unlike my cactus, I don’t quite have the energy to die. I just feel inanimate, unplugged from the wall. But I must be coming out of it, I haven’t been able to write for weeks, and now here I am, tapping something out, thinking maybe my only option is to write my way out of this.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

David Foster Wallace

My friend Alfie gave me a little picture book once, I Had A Black Dog it was called. About a man and his depression. It showed the depressed person being accompanied by the symbol of his mood, a black dog. It was very moving and accurate.

Inside he’d written ‘I’m always here brother’ and then below ‘… watching.’ I went to the window and looked out anxiously, I was taking no chances. My isolation was real. Isolation, I have come to know, is a prerequisite when you feel depressed. Seeing nobody is something you gradually slip into, that then becomes the portcullis to your fortress.

I flicked through the pages of the book and understood something. If I covered over the dog with my hand, all that was left was the man looking miserable. This is what it feels like, I thought. Just somebody alone, under the weight of a force pushing down on them, without reason, day after day after day.

The episodes I have suffered on and off from since I was 22, never had specific reasons for them. No-one had died, no bad breakup, just a feeling that would come out of leftfield and smother me for a couple of months, until like a cloud it would pass on. My therapist thought it was endogenous, that it came from within me, my mother disagreed, if you were busy and charged with responsibilities this wouldn’t happen, her eyes would burn across the table.

Both parties have a point.

Over time, my understanding of depression is more or less this. Highly sensitive people have pores that are always open, to information coming into them from all angles. Sensitive people, a poet once said, are constantly being beaten up by things insensitive people can’t see. It means the world is always informing you. Which when you are on top of things is unbelievably wonderful. But when your shield is down, it’s too much. And it doesn’t stop.

Perhaps, I wondered, depression is a way of shutting you down until you can recover. Like what the ground does in winter. A state of relief until the business of regrowth begins. Like what my cactus was doing. Oh no wait, my cactus was dying.

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain.

Emily Dickinson

I’d felt a mood shift in January, thought it was just a classic January blip. I stopped myself falling a number of times before I did. But it was persistent and it kept on at me, tap tap tapping at my temple. At some point I must’ve laid down my arms, and it hit me like a truck.

There is a downward slope to depression before you hit the bottom. Things begin to lose their meaning, their point. You almost relish the first stages, a tired middle finger up to the world. I stopped writing. Stopped exercising. When your things to do list comprises of ‘WRITE BOOK’, and you read the stuff you’ve written and your addled brain proclaims it’s garbage, things begin to snowball.

Time started to flow strangely. My short-term memory went. Dreams got freaky. Anxiety ramped up. I wanted to sleep, a lot. Waking hours were mean and unforgiving. Depression strips you of the ability to give or receive joy. I stopped making plans. What use would I be in company. I stopped listening to music. What right did I have to feel the joy music might elicit. This is how a depressed brain talks to you.

Instead, I listened to information. More aptly put, I blanketed myself in background noise.

Is there no way out of the mind?

Sylvia Plath

Years ago I would pass a man on Euston Rd who spent all day lying on a bench listening to a tiny transistor radio blaring out at full volume, talking to himself manically. My mother would leave the radio on all night sometimes to keep her company during bouts of insomnia. These worrying signs told me I had joined the party. I’d listen to the radio long into the night. I couldn’t be in my head. It was one of two things, raging or on mute, a cocktail of unfeeling and too much feeling. Certain of one thing, no good would ever come.

I got aggressively into football, tactics, fixture lists, I’d do intense calculations with the league table. I got into Rodeo. Learnt the names of the rankest bulls, the top bull-riders. Anything to deflect my brain from talking to me, reminding me how dead-end things were. Somewhere I had read the word enthusiasm meant ‘to be filled with God’s spirit’. In the silence between the radio’s pauses came the news God’s spirit had left the building.

From time to time I would self-medicate, get drunk and the rest, and for some hours it would bring me out of my stupor and I would message people and that involvement once again in the world was positive. But even if I felt back to normal for an afternoon, it wouldn’t last, the feelings weren’t coming from inside the mainframe.

Once in the throes of a depression, my experience has been I must wait for it to subside, however long that may be. Getting drunk or high was an artifice, the shift back to life was far deeper and more fundamental and would take much longer, and when it came there would be no going back. I was wary of false dawns, they seemed like news too good to be believed.

It doesn’t thrill me to write all this.

It brings it out from inside me. It makes it real. It is uncomfortable. When I was feeling rubbish I would gravitate towards accounts of other people feeling the same. A tennis player admitting to darkness and drug abuse, a 19^th century Russian author hunting without a gun for fear of what he might do alone in the woods, Fleabag staring into the middle-distance saying she just wanted to cry all the time.

These people existing was a balm, their stories were company.

There was another thing. Meditation had taught me there is a place that exists beyond thought, outside the mind, where we are more than just the whirring of our brains. Thinking maps the contours of the world around us, by way of thoughts that appear like magic tricks inside our heads, but they really are just stories we tell ourselves. With daily practice I could access a place outside my ‘thinking brain’, a place of calm, of un-thought. Where I noticed the separation of perception and reality. Depression being an illness of thought, this was useful information.

Over the course of last year something else happened. A newly formed relationship with myself that was kind and accepting and didn’t, as past episodes had, make me the obvious culprit for my low mood, had brought me to a place of peace, and so even when I was bad, I was dimly aware, as never before, of a glittering place I might have access to once this thing ran out of steam.

When I could tap into the un-thinking control panel, it reminded me my brain was doing its best to trick me, it was sick, it fibbed, and lied, turned down the contrast and desaturated the colour on everything. But it was just thought. Thoughts that were happening to me.

They say the real work of depression exists outside of it. In doing the things that stop you from falling so hard. In learning how to contain low mood states before they become two month-long leering monsters.

My mother was right. If there is a place one absolutely must be at 8am every morning, contractually, to take your mind off the inevitable discomfort of being alive, perhaps one wouldn’t fall as far. A lifestyle of casual freelancing and mustering the courage to write a book did not provide this type of flotation device.

But knocking, it had come.

And there was another type of thinking too. One which asked: what are these states setting into motion? Depression is a lady dressed in black, wrote Jung. Invite her in, tell her to sit a while, ask her what she has to say. I wondered what this process might be stirring in me, whether this was a seasonal thing (in the literal manner of seasons), a sort of great breathing in, before a breathing out. It is not so far-fetched. Apocalypse is the Ancient Greek word for revelation.

Five years ago was the first time I wrote about depression, a cat out of the bag moment. It felt scary, but people responded to it in a way I had not anticipated. In it I stuck Matt Haig’s 10^th ‘reason to stay alive’, a list he wrote to his suicidal younger self to stop him from jumping off a cliff.

You forgot number 11, said Jules. It’s not what the world has to give to you, it’s what you have to give to the world. He went on to list some things the world would not have, should Domingo choose to not be in it.

He was right. Although we might deny it, we are more involved in life than we think, more connected. When you remove yourself from things, in your isolation you tell yourself at least you’re doing no harm, that the world goes on the same. But it doesn’t. It is stripped of your energy. Your life force. The question you might ask, the joke you might send, the shoulder you offer, the ear you lend, the smile, the nod, the thank you, the tiny little sparks of energy you put out into the world that change it.

When I am down I am a non-existent family member, a shit friend, a ghostly neighbour, and whatever this process might be regenerating in me, the world loses access to me, the enormous humming organism loses a tiny microscopic thing. Which is not nothing. And that is sad. You could argue it is my obligation to try and stay undepressed. Not for my wellbeing, for all you fools, for the world around me. Worst of all, while one is there, alone, taking time out from life, depression is taking time out of you.

Money in tha bank, sneakers on ma feet.

Asaviour ft Jehst

One day, a week or so into March, staring out of the window a feeling something like a sadness flooded through me, and I got my jacket and went out, even though the world was scary and all eyes felt on me and the thought of bumping into my neighbour was terrifying. I surprised myself.

Walking back from the shops I realised I was done with it. I was sick of the sickness. A month ago that emotion would’ve floored me, but I was over that part. I was on the way back, even if faintly, even if I felt shit and my skin felt like tracing paper, I couldn’t go back to inanimateness. And this feeling I was feeling, at least I could feel that I felt it, which meant there must be someone living inside there.

The sunlight poured through the flat, exposing the dirt and dust I had not been able to see. When you’re ready for the light, you take stock of the work that has to be done. I heard a rustle, God’s spirit re-entering the building.

For four days straight spring has graced us with twelve degree sunshine. The magnolia is hitching up her skirt, the sky is a piercing blue the colour of a Davidoff Cool Water ad. I’m listening to tunes again, walking to the shops. I look at the mural under the overground bridge and smile. For me? Guys you shouldn’t have.

On a Saturday after rain we go shoot hoops, Ab gets 3 in a row and proclaims through the morning air THASS WHAT AM TALKIN BOUT. We cross town and catch Encanto at the Picturehouse. I well up three times and am close to breaking point once. I do my best to hold it in, thinking I’ll scare him. But it is back in the building, the life force is flooding in, I can feel it, I haven’t cried in months.

One morning I return to the plant shop, the poor cactus I murdered needs replacing. I walk back down Dalston Lane with a little bonsai pine. I like it a lot, makes me want to tend to it, channel my inner Mr Miyagi.

In a mood a few years back, I’d mustered the energy to go see a friend. Making our way down the hill I said to him, I suppose even people who have their lives most together think their shit is a mess. Mate, he said, seriously, nobody thinks you have your life together. We cracked up hard, in the depths of that pain something could still get in. Guy said something else I still remember. It’s okay to feel sad. It’s just dumb to feel sad about feeling sad.

Being the depression guy doesn’t sit very well with me, I want to be more than that. Some of history’s coolest cats are lifelong depressives, and we know about them because they did great things, in spite of their malaise. In the end I decided to write this because it would’ve helped me to read it. And also I’ve discovered, writing has this strange way of saving me. It reminds me to not forget what I have learned, to hold onto it, to keep it safe.

You are happening to me. You are not me.

I am more than you.

Thanks fam. I needed that.

When Your Only Option Is The Next Best Thing

Canessa and Nando had been walking blind for four days through the snow of the high Andes, skin ulcerated, bone poking bone, their food and their hope running out, knowing their imminent death would mean death for the fourteen back in the fuselage. Nando had buried his sister and mother in the snow and seeing his father’s face again was the sole thing keeping him alive. To climb out of this valley of death back to the living. But they were lost, their own bodies were eating them alive, and Canessa sat down in the snow to die.

Many years later he said of the experience:

There will come a moment when you think you can’t go any further, when you’re done for. When you want to give up. All you have to do is take one more step. And you will see that doors will appear in walls you didn’t know existed. And you can walk through them.

I had a teacher at art school who was very into magic, sometimes at the beginning or the end of a lesson he would show us something. He told us there are five different reactions to a magic trick. The first is a plain lack of interest. The second looks on reluctantly. The third wants to work out the mechanics of the trick. The fourth is smiling in admiration of the magician, the fifth is wide-eyed in amazement in the presence of magic.

I remember thinking how cool it would be to make the first feel like the fifth. To be a magician, I thought, you have to believe in magic. In its power. I wondered if a lifelong study of magic would impart a different way of seeing the world, a mystical one, or if it would do the opposite. As if it would remove the magic from things. I asked myself which one I was, I hoped I was the fifth.

Two years ago I read this thing which said take a step back from yourself and look at the things that make you feel happy, and the things that make you unhappy, and try to do more of the good stuff, and less of the other stuff. It was a time when I felt like dark forces were governing me but I lacked the perspicacity to give them any shape or form, and the line resonated inside me like a sounding gong. Nothing I had seen had hammered home an idea so simply and so searingly, I felt flooded by something clear and good.

As the demons of my bad habits leered at me I resolved to mark the moment, and tattooed the date onto my arm, backwards, so I could see it when I looked in the mirror. When I went running in the early morning I would stop by water and kiss my arm and a strange feeling would wash over me. I remembered saying to a friend once that everyone carried a large degree of self-loathing inside them. Looking concerned as if what he was about to tell me would be hard for me to hear, he replied: I don’t think that’s true mate. But kissing my right arm in the light of the early morning by the water, I felt like what was washing into me was its opposite, something like self-love.

Now in early December I go and celebrate my new birthday. Me and myself go out for a drink and have a think about things and raise a toast to one another. Fuck it, I thought, I can even call it my rebirth day. I’m two years old now. I resolved not to tell anyone.

A new year is upon us now. It’s the middle of January and we’re renewing friendships and joining gyms and full of fire because the new year brings change. Look at us shedding all our dead wood, closing the door on the previous year and opening the door to a new one. Taking a look at ourselves from a distance. What makes us happy. What makes us sad. Doing more of the good stuff.

I didn’t make any resolutions this year. I thought I’d concern myself with more of the same, the daily struggle not to fuck up. Wake up on time, be a good person, be involved in the world, buy fairy liquid, try to write something important, exercise, read good things. Try not to dwell on how strange things are or how lost. Walk through doors.

That’s the other thing my teacher said that I’ve always remembered. Walk through doors, he said. He didn’t elaborate, he just said those three words and smiled. I thought about it a lot. What sort of doors. Which ones. And I realised doors are everywhere around me. Invisible doors in walls I didn’t know existed, waiting for me to walk through them.

I didn’t know at the time that the date on my arm would become a daily reminder to do the things I know make me happy, a contract written in ink with myself to stop doing the things that don’t. And to keep the struggle close, to think about the day itself and not much more.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself, each day has enough trouble of its own.

I wonder what today will bring.

Forsaking resolutions for the new year for a resolution for a new day. When my day threatens to go south I’ll look for a door. Somewhere close by there is a door, the other side of which is the next best thing. Playing the snakes and ladders of each day, two steps forward, three steps back, winning some and losing some, feeling out with hands for invisible walls, reaching out for doors.

The Dark And Lonely World of YouTube Addiction

The wild elephants turn back to salute the men who have saved their baby elephant from the ditch. They raise their trunks aloft with wondrous grace in a moment between man and beast. I don’t blink, hardly twitch. Lit by the glow of the laptop screen, my face shows no flicker of emotion. The video finishes and the next one begins to load. Electrocuted squirrel gets CPR by kind man. Unbeknown to me, the daylight has faded across to the other side of the earth and I am in darkness. I am lying on my bed in the fetal position, as I have been for three hours straight…

… watching YouTube.

I don’t know how long me and YouTube has been a problem.

The first chapters of all addictions are written in the pen of innocence. Mine started in the same way all others must, with a joy unforeseen. A music video with a new friend behind the sofa at some party one unending night of summer. An email in my inbox linking a highlight reel of Messi’s greatest dribbles, coming in off the right wing, scything through tackles like water.

If I’m scrupulous I admit it started long before that, pre-internet. My parents didn’t let us watch much television. My answer to this depravation it seems, whenever they were away, was to flick through the channels like a drone, hoping of landing on something which gripped my attention for any longer than the spilt second it took for me to glean, ignore, and plough onwards. Alone, I never watched anything for longer than two minutes.

Years later I saw this interview with the writer David Foster Wallace, and it hit me deep.

Wallace fought a depression for most of his adult life that he succumbed to in 2008, aged 46. He suffered with different types of addictions, but said his primary addiction, as unsexy as it sounded, was to television. He was so afraid of watching it he couldn’t have a tv in his house. Hearing this for the first time opened my mind to the idea that the YouTube thing, as it moved silently along the forest floor of my impulses like a fox on his feet of silk, demanded a seriousness I was unwilling to give it.

Every addiction balances on the fulcrum of denial. The decline before the fall was coloured by a lake of awareness. I was unaware the habits I was slowly slipping into weren’t okay. At first it was just weekends. I was single and lived alone, if I woke up hungover it would be easy for me to turn my back on anything productive or social. One weekend I became fascinated by the internal politicking of the WTA tennis tour. Another weekend it was American High School track and field. A man in Pennsylvania fashioned knives out of rusted wrenches. I was in.

There were times when I wouldn’t communicate with anyone all day. It was isolationist, and repetitive, and hypnotic, I would sit entranced, swelling my command of thoroughly useless information as YouTube gently weaved its spell on me, drawing me down deeper and deeper into its pixelated underworld. As one video finished another one on a similar topic loaded, suckering me in for another five or ten minutes. Half hours became hours became half-days. And outside my window the world whizzed on.

A lot of people don’t know how to watch YouTube.

I wouldn’t know what to look for, my friend Milly once told me. Talking dog’s unique bark helps him get adopted is good, I thought. I shrugged and said nothing. A system of recommendations based on previously viewed videos appear as if by magic at the top of your screen, which means the table is always laid. If you’ve been watching videos on the Anunnaki and ancient alien space-travelling civilizations, it’s going to show you more of where you last left off when you next click on. Even when I wiped my recommendations, the subjects my dark side needed feeding on were etched already in my memory.

All that was left was to type them into the search bar.

To be addicted is to be completely at the whim of your impulses. Tick. To realise you are no longer in control of your decisions. Tick. To be aware that the behaviours you are undergoing are harmful to you, tick, are making you unhappy, tick, and in spite of this to repeat them nonetheless. Tick. I was losing control over my ability to not watch youtube, and in doing so I was losing days of my life I wasn’t going to get back. But still somehow I didn’t pay it the seriousness it deserved.

I did take a knife to my internet connection three times.

In 2007, back when I was at art school we were given a brief to go and do some Guerilla Marketing. To take something about the world we were upset about and use the urban landscape around us to be disruptive in. The idea was to give people a message we think they needed. I stayed up til 2am cutting out a set of stencils with a Stanley knife, I loaded up my backpack with spray paints and cycled through the darkness of the Witching Hour to go and leave my mark. The next day I went back as a sleep-deprived passer-by to watch people interact with it.

From just weekends, my YouTube habit morphed into week nights and then during the day. Work deadlines were affected. Spending a lot of time alone in front of my computer, the slightest sniff of procrastination would send me spiralling into the depths and I’d emerge an hour later, all the wiser, constipated by information I didn’t need to know.

Eating disorders are supposed to be so difficult because mealtimes mean the lion is let out of the cage three times a day. When most of our time is spent looking at screens, internet addiction means the lion never has a cage to begin with. It comes down to willpower and impulse control. Both of which are low on my list of virtues. Not having a smartphone or on any social media granted me a certain type of freedom, but it also meant all my wrath and self-loathing was concentrated into one place. Alone and in front of my laptop, I would make up for lost time.

I was acting out, YouYube was my drug of choice.

We’re going have to develop some real machinery inside our guts to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure. Because the technology is just going to get better and better, and it’s going to get easier and easier, and more convenient and more pleasurable to sit alone, with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that’s fine in low doses. But if it’s the basic main-staple of our diet, and I say this in a very meaningful way, we’re going to die.

David Foster Wallace

The strangest thing about the YouTube thing is this.

When I was acting out, I couldn’t watch anything that i enjoyed. I couldn’t sit down and watch an hour long documentary about wine-making or the Pyramids of Giza. That was the truly pathological nature of it. I had to watch short clips, back to back to back to back, about absolutely nothing. 95% of everything I watched in the grips of my youtube habit didn’t improve my life in any way. It was the American History X moment over and over again. Has anything you have done, made your life better.

This is all quite funny. The ridiculousness of it all, it’s laughable. But maybe I laugh to keep from crying. Because if you take away the politics of the WTA and fashioning knives from wrenches and elephants raising their trunks aloft to thank the men for saving their baby elephant from a ditch, what you’re left with is somebody alone in their flat, in the dark, willing unhappiness on themselves. In ignorance of the life going on outside their window they are walling themselves up against, in defiance of the light from the phone on the table beside them that is ringing and they won’t answer.

Some poisons go to work more slowly than others. They hide in plain sight all around us, masquerading as tools to make our lives more accessible, more comfortable and more immediate. One day we wake up and they’ve wormed their way inside our minds, ossifying our imaginations, crowding our every moment. And before we know it without them we can’t breathe.

I’ve got this, we tell ourselves, but they’ve got us.

Wallace described the moment when we finally find ourselves alone, and the dread that comes with that, that comes to us when we have to be quiet. When you walk into public spaces these days, there is always music playing. It seems significant that we don’t want things to be quiet anymore, he said. And this is happening now more than ever, when the purpose of our lives is immediate gratification and getting things for ourselves, we are moving moving moving, all the time moving.

At the same time there is another part of us that is the opposite. That is hungry for silence and quiet, and thinking very hard about the same thing for maybe half an hour or more, rather than just thirty seconds. Of standing and looking at the branches of a tree, or listening to the birds singing. And this part of us doesn’t get fed.

And what happens is this thing makes itself felt in our bodies, as a kind of dread, deep inside us. Every year it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read a book, or to listen to a complex piece of music that takes work to understand. Because now in computer and internet culture everything is so fast. And the faster things go, the more we feed that part of ourselves that needs something immediate, that needs instant stimulation, and we don’t feed the part of ourselves that needs quiet.

The part of us that can live in quiet.

Brick Lane, 2007

Coming Back to Life Feels Alright Actually

Happiness is a bench on a railway platform on a Sunday afternoon dropped in the middle of fields. Waiting for something that will happen but not too soon. Birds are singing to one another in trees out of sight, the air is thick with the ease of a summer afternoon of inconsequence. The train will come, and move off again, and life will continue along its sinuous path. But for the moment not a lot is up to very much.

Right now happiness is the inhibition of dopamine reuptake through norepinephrine and dopamine transporters found in the prefrontal cortex of my brain. Each morning I sodastream some refrigerated tap water and wash a little white pill down my throat and it goes to work. Five weeks I’ve been doing it now.

But happiness isn’t the right word exactly. I wouldn’t say I’m happy this minute. I don’t know what happiness means today. I thought I knew yesterday when I sat down to write. But it isn’t here now, it must have got bored and moved on someplace else. I feel okay but I’m not euphoric.

It turns out writing about happiness is harder than writing about its opposite.

My doctor said he thought my depression was endogenous, that it came from inside me rather than being brought about by external events. He would say that wouldn’t he, said my mother. That’s what all therapists want you to hear. But your mother would say that, said my girlfriend. Accepting you have an illness is harder than reasoning you’re idle and uninspired.

As the meds went to work I noticed things becoming a little easier. Doom didn’t last as long. I’d wake up okay and go to bed okay, and things might get bad but I wouldn’t fall so far. Things were good, or at least better. Things were moving in the right direction. And I figured something out. The opposite of feeling shit isn’t happiness. The opposite of feeling shit is not feeling shit. The pills weren’t magicking up happiness, they were softening the blows. The floor of my mood was more a paddling pool than a dank black sea.

And I realised the happiness was up to me.

When my despair began to unseam itself it made me think of the parity between physical and mental health. You take good health for granted until it’s taken from you. And when it returns you feel incredibly thankful, to have something back you never realised you might be without. Increasingly I had my health, and all things twinkled in the gloaming.

But happiness is a bullshit word.

Happiness is wonderful but it’s also kind of stupid. It is camp and fleeting and unfaithful. It seems strange to see it as the bullseye. Happiness can be a high, but I don’t think it can be a state. The world is too twisted and gnarled and unstable for us to be hung up on the pursuit of it, maybe the best we can ask for is an absence of misery.

Lincoln said folk are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be. What he meant was we have agency over it, that perhaps happiness can be the by-product of things within our control. If you have the cud of an engaged life ruminating in your gut, now and again you’ll fart out some happiness.

Those are only happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.

John Stuart Mill

Happiness for me means coming back to life. It’s the sunlight of the early morning turning my plants translucent. It’s cycling through strange back streets in Lewisham at midnight listening to hiphop in the hurling rain. It’s the golden half-minute window propping up the bar as your pint gets poured. It’s the crema on the espresso from my expensive new coffee machine. It’s the clean feel of the street after rain. The line in the book that makes you freeze. The honeysuckle by the canal, the smile from the bus driver, the interrupted dream that finds its way back.

It is like the world has been illuminated.

It’s the feeling of strength that comes from a trust that when this happiness subsides there isn’t this darkness waiting to envelop you. And not being the hostage of the next thought that comes careening into your head. More than anything happiness is just not feeling like shit.

Perhaps there is a deeper longer-term happiness. The happiness in realising everything you already have is all you really need. I don’t think I’m there yet. It could also be having children. Last time I checked I wasn’t there yet either. But when you spend a very long time feeling apart from the world, seeing it through a glass darkly, to realise it’s still there and you are a part of it again and you have a role to play, and the people you love are still around and they love you and all is waiting to be resumed.

It’s pretty cool.

Brooks Was Here So Was Red

If somebody invited you to something you weren’t going to be around for, it would make sense to decline the invitation. A bit foolish to make plans you wouldn’t be there to partake in. A good definition of depression is the idea of there being no future. I believe this, because depression has been a topic of the last twelve years of my life, and I suppose aggressively the topic of the last 29 days of it.

It had been on the agenda to write something about depression for a while, but I didn’t think I’d be in its grips when I did. Irony or hiding behind humour hold no sway here. This is less a collection of memories of a mood, more a real time description of an experience. Writing this now it seems clear this is the only state in which I could do what I’m feeling justice, but the horse’s mouth also pulls hard on the reigns of the pointlessness of the whole thing.

It has made me stop short in my tracks five times in the last three days. Quacks call it a depressive episode. For me, it’s like pressing mute on joy.

I’m not sure what being suicidal really means. If it means not wanting to be alive then sign me up. If it means fantasising about ways in which to die, or making no plans because you have a strong conviction you’re not going to be around for any of them, or wishing the people who love you didn’t exist because you checking out would cleave their world in two, sign me up. But I don’t think it does.

I think there’s a chasm between not wanting to live and wanting to die. The absence of one thing doesn’t always mean the other. When you’re depressed, the idea of not existing for a while is a comfy place, to get the popcorn out and distract yourself from the pain of living. Same as drowning yourself in booze or fucking yourself up on drugs. But it’s a fantasy, a distraction.

The trouble with humans is that impulse can bridge that chasm very quickly. Not wanting to live can become dying in no time at all. Practically speaking, it’s not difficult. The tragedy of suicide is that nothing is more final and irreversible, you don’t get a take-back. If leaving the pain for a while was the objective, not existing forever is what you’re left with. What the people who love you are left with. Camus said it is braver to live than it is to kill yourself, but I’m not so sure.

My depression began proper in my early twenties. But I think it had been there in some form all along. My father recalls a sadness in my eyes as a child, I lived a lot inside my head, kept everything cooped up, I was melancholic on my birthdays. Things got quite bad at university, but it was aged 22 I remember the blinds came down hard. One February morning I got into bed and didn’t get out again until early summer. A doctor prescribed me anti-depressants, which seemed to help, and which I’ve been on some form of ever since.

From then on going forward, on average a couple of times a year, I seem to go under. A friend of mine came up with a name for it. He called it the quagmire. It’s a disappearing act. Until the worst of it is over, Domingo goes awol on the world. Those who don’t know me that well might be surprised, since I only really show my face when I’m feeling good. But the idea of going to the pub in the middle of an episode is as appealing as running naked down Oxford Street in mid December screaming out who wants a reload.

Depression is complex.

It’s an each to his own thing. Mine is different to yours is different to hers. But it’s important to point out to those who might not be aware, there can be little logic to it. From my experience it is not a causal thing. It isn’t tripping over and stubbing your toe. It’s your toe beginning to throb for no reason while you’re sat on the sofa. It’s not an unhappiness provoked by hard luck or a string of unfortunate events. It’s a land mine that goes off under your foot on a beautiful summer’s day.

To accept I’m not responsible for my depression is something I find pretty hard. People with a healthy degree of self-loathing don’t need to search far and wide for who to pin the blame on. Personally, it takes those closest to me to remind me the quagmire is not my fault. The first person I’d spoken to in a week was my brother, when he called me three days ago. When I told him how I was feeling he listened, paused, and seeming distinctly unfazed said to me mate that’s okay, that’s what happens to you sometimes. It’s been happening to you for ages.

Depression can get a whole lot worse before it gets better. Not unlike a tumour, it can grow if left unchecked. Because the outside world becomes so scary, isolationism is a coping mechanism. But the less you check in, the more stilted your truth becomes. You tumble further and further down the rabbit hole, further and further away from the light.

Like a domino effect, things you wouldn’t think twice about become progressively more difficult. Day to day things become terrifying. That terror you felt in the hush of the examination hall at school, walking down the rows between the desks scanning for your name, is the same terror I felt yesterday walking along the milk aisle at Tesco.

As reality drifts out of focus, tiny little actions take on a crazed importance. Little rituals are flotation devices in 50 year storms. Making myself a coffee in my favourite espresso cup is one of these. As stupid as that sounds, this action is often a last ditch attempt to save myself. Last week I could not for the life of me rationalise any point in the act of making a coffee to then drink it. Since I’ve been writing this, over the last two days, the coffee machine’s gone on again. It’s like a symbol of fighting back up towards the light.

Disclaimer

There is no self-pity in depression. There is confusion, anxiety, inertia, self-loathing, panic, hopelessness, flat-lining, hours of staring into the middle-distance, but there is no self-pity. Self-pity in depression is like volunteering to down a pint of water while drowning.

You know that nervous excitement you get before a first date. The feeling you used to get before Sports Day at primary school. A kind of strangulating adrenaline in your gut, almost a nausea. Imagine you couldn’t switch that off. For some reason these are the physical symptoms of my quagmire. It’s what I feel right now, what I’ve felt day in and day out for 29 days. When I close my eyes at night, and in the morning, and when half asleep I grope through the dark to take a pee. People think a mental illness is only felt in the mind. This isn’t true. It’s also physical.

The misunderstanding of mental illness arises from the strength of its disguise. People find it difficult to believe what they can’t see. There is no leg in a cast. No loss of hair from chemotherapy. Just someone to the untrained eye doing an on-point impression of a wet blanket. Sitting here right now, hand on heart I can say I don’t think anyone would choose to feel like this. Last week I remember thinking this was never going to end. This was not a perception. It was my reality. The idea it might not be, is as difficult to get my head around as convincing the man in the street his entire reality and everything he knows to be true, is itself make-believe.

I read a parable once about a man who envisions a glittering future for himself. He works his way inch by inch towards this glittering future, and one day it presents itself to him at last at the top of a long staircase. He packs up the contents of his old life, puts on his best threads, and starts climbing. As he reaches the top of the staircase, he sees his path blocked by a huge security guard, who holding his massive arm out, point blank refuses to let him pass.

Despite lengthy protestations the guard stands firm. He tries again the next day, and the next month, and the next year, and the security guard is always there, blocking the top of the staircase, the only path to the man’s idealised future, pinning him to the shackles of his old life.

The point of the parable is this.

There is only one character in this story. The security guard and the man are the same person. The security guard is the glitch, the fog inside the man’s own head that is barring his own path and stopping him moving forwards. It is something within him that is getting in the way of his glittering future. The reason I mention the parable is because I want to make it clear that this thing stopping the man in his tracks, whatever it is, it’s not depression. Depression is not the security guard.

Depression can make the staircase five times longer, or make the man especially heavy-legged on the climb. It can serve to stall or delay the glittering future, but is does not bar you entry from it. One of the most important and difficult things to remember is that the depressive still has the power to affect their life, even in the deepest darkest grips of it.

Russian people don’t believe in the idea of being too cold. They believe you’re not wearing enough clothes. The Russians can’t change their sub-zero winters, and I’ve learnt I can’t halt the onset of my quagmire. But we can both do things that protect us against the full force of the gale. I can keep active. I can distract my mind with work. I can choose not to self-medicate with shit that in the long run will only make me feel worse. I can try to eat healthily and do my best to take exercise. When I’m at my worst the futility of these things seem insurmountable, and to lead myself almost blindly into them is all I can do.

And yet fail repeatedly.

*

Columbo would be into this next bit.

There is… one more thing.

Over the past few weeks I’ve realised the most important thing we can do, is talk about it. To share the weight of whatever is going on inside our heads, with others. We can get together and lend each other our ears, and just listen. Actually listen. Much of the time people don’t want advice. All they want is an ear. If you do get the opportunity to chew someone’s ear off, make sure you offer yours in return. If writing this is anything, it’s an encouragement to communicate. To look into the eyes of the person next to you and ask them how they are. Tell me how you’re doing. And once they’ve muffled a reply, slowly repeat the question again.

I think you’ll get a different answer the second time you ask.

There isn’t a person on this planet that doesn’t have something worrying them. We all got beef. Everyone has a humungous sirloin steak slapping them across the face always. And it makes us feel very alone. But the antidote to loneliness is meaningful connection. Asking for help is an action of self-respect. It means you mean something to yourself. Admitting you’re ill means you think you’re worth saving.

It’s the pretending we’re okay that really fucks us.

This last month has been horrible. As I said it’s been like pressing mute on joy. Happiness doesn’t reign here. Neither have I felt incredibly sad. Just one long unmoving flat-line. An interior voice shitting on all my plans. Bulldozing my future and pouring cement over the rubble. Pushing away the people I love and the people who love me. In the end, depression is like some inconsistent stick of 90s chewing gum. Horrible to chew alone on, day after day. But for some reason much more bearable when shared.

The reason it has taken me three days to write this, is because I keep telling myself it isn’t worth it. It feels like one long overshare that I’ve talked myself out of continually. But this is the reason I need to write it. Depression is twice as common in women as it is in men, and yet men are three times more likely to kill themselves because of it. I wonder why that is.

What I’ve just written is the most I’ve told anyone about my depression. Which makes me feel a little bit sick. I don’t know if people will look at me differently if they read this. I don’t know if writing this in retrospect will feel like I’ve lost something. That I’ve let something out of the bag. I’ll no longer be able to go awol and pretend I’m fine. But then again, most of the people who know me already know about my quagmire. Just perhaps not the extent of it. One thing I know is I’ll have got closer to running out of things to hide. Which is a good thing, I think.

No secret is as bad as the hell you construct inside your own head.

A guy called Matt Haig wrote a book on depression called Reasons to Stay Alive. This guy suffered from depression for most of his adult life, and came very close to throwing himself off a cliff when he was 24. Below he writes his suicidal-self at the time a list of ten reasons not to jump, ten reasons to keep on trucking. This is the tenth.

He also wrote the words:

Depression lies. Depression makes you think things that are wrong.

For me that was one of the best things I could’ve read. To remember that this thing inside my head can often be found speaking out of its arse. W H Auden once said if you take away my demons, you’ll take away my angels too. This might sound hypocritical, but I don’t hate my depression. And I wouldn’t necessarily live my life over without it, given the choice. We are the product of all the moments of our lives. If you took away my depression I wonder how much of the good stuff would be deleted along with it.

Depression isn’t all bad. The flip-side of it can be pretty incredible. The benefit of seeing through a glass darkly is that when finally the light comes in, shit gets colourful very quickly. Speak to anyone who suffers from it and ask them about the extent to which they can make themselves happy.

As bad as things have gotten in the last few weeks, maybe the storm clouds are parting. I don’t think I could have written this two weeks ago. I would’ve sat in front of my computer for two hours without even realising it was out of battery. To go back to where I started, on the question of not wanting to be alive. As helpful as this reverie might’ve been when things were very bad, what I’ve realised in the last month is that I’m really not going to kill myself. Don’t worry mummy. Not this minute. You might not want to be here very much right now, but let’s not go overboard.

It is passing, it seems. There’s an out. Somewhere up there is the crack of light inside the snow drift. The house fly knocking all morning against the window is moving ever closer to the open latch. And out into the spring air. Life is waiting for you. Camus was right after all. It is braver to live. But it’s also a lot better. I said before that the absence of one thing doesn’t always mean the other. But in some cases the absence of one thing can only ever mean the other. When you remove death from the equation, the only thing you’re left with is…

Life.

I can feel now there’s some living to be done.

Why not get busy doing that.

When He Got Sober He Got Lonely

When I stopped working on the races I was glad, but it left an emptiness. By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.

Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

If he was a top-trump card, kids would whoop and holla when they got him because they knew the 98 score on power to chill on his jax trumped every other card in the pack. He’d lived out most of his young adult life with a corset on, the tightness of which symbolised the strength of his self-containment. Loneliness wasn’t for him. The company of other people, to give him what? His was a landmass surrounded by turquoise waters on all sides, well away from the maine.

On the off-chance he’d need to, he might seek company out. But always in a removed way that screamed out in veiled text that he wasn’t bothered either way. Even when his therapist flipped the script one day and told him his lonerdom was fear of engagement and his singledom was fear of rejection, he’d still beat the drum of one of the old Greek guys whose words echoed upstairs whenever he needed reminding. Self-sufficiency is the greatest virtue.

Seven weeks before he had given up drinking. And loneliness had crept up behind solitude and tapped it on the shoulder discreetly. My turn. And they had switched places. And now he felt lonely all the time. Perhaps not in the sense of needing to be with people. More in the sense of an awareness of the crushingness of how totally alone he was. Every single thought process which led to another thought process which led to another, was his alone. If he employed someone to a permanent position of listening to him speak his mind for twenty-four hours a day, an ocean would still remain present between them. Which led him to feel an ocean away from everyone.

Seeking help wasn’t really the issue. Since any help however well-worded wouldn’t penetrate. The issue had no core, nothing to get to the heart of. He could think of nothing more pathetic than wailing down the phone at somebody or staring deeply into a glass of sparkling water outside a café describing his symptoms and his ailments. And yet he had a sneaking suspicion he was doing his best to deny that he wanted more than anything for people to beat his door down and find him sat there in his flat at night, staring deeply into his glass of sparkling water, and ask him what was wrong. Nothing was wrong, he might reply. What is what.

There was a strange satisfaction in this death march. As if an unending set of enormous waves were crashing down on his head repeatedly, sending him spinning and tumbling into the depths, from which he’d surface just in time to catch sight of the next oncoming wave, to lock eyes and smile calmly at it. Then he’d go under again. It was calm and it was persistent.

A friend of his with a brain like a triple-decker bus and a heart like a champagne glass teetering on the edge of a table had told him that the colour would return. One day. The emptiness would fill up by itself. Or perhaps with something better.