crumpled quality, her eyes glazed with tears. I felt it. The weight of Mum. The weight of being a son that had gone wrong. The weight of being loved. The weight of being a disappointment. The weight of being a hope that hadn’t happened the way it should have.
But.
I was better. A little bit frayed. But that was understandable. I was better, essentially. I could still be the hope. I might end up living until I am ninety-seven. I could be a lawyer or a brain surgeon or a mountaineer or a theatre director yet. It was early days. Early days. Early days.
It was night outside the window. Newark 24. Newark was where I had grown up and where I was going back to. A market town of 40,000 people. It was a place I had only ever wanted to escape, but now I was going back. But that was fine. I thought of my childhood. I thought of happy and unhappy days at school, and the continual battle for self-esteem. 24. I was twenty-four. The road sign seemed to be a statement from fate. Newark 24. We knew this would happen. All that was missing was my name.
I remember we had a meal around the kitchen table and I didn’t say much, but just enough to prove I was okay and not crazy or depressed. I was okay. I was not crazy or depressed.
I think it was a fish pie. I think they had made it especially. Comfort food. It made me feel good. I was sitting around the table eating fish pie. It was half past ten. I went to the downstairs toilet, and pulled the light on with a string. The downstairs bathroom was a kind of dark pink. I pissed, I flushed, and I began to notice my mind was changing. There was a kind of clouding, a shifting of psychological light.
I was better. I was better. But it only takes a doubt. A drop of ink falls into a clear glass of water and clouds the whole thing. So the moment after I realised I wasn’t perfectly well was the moment I realised I was still very ill indeed.
The cyclone
DOUBTS ARE LIKE swallows. They follow each other and swarm together. I stared at myself in the mirror. I stared at my face until it was not my face. I went back to the table and sat down and I did not say how I was feeling to anyone. To say how I was feeling would lead to feeling more of what I was feeling. To act normal would be to feel a bit more normal. I acted normal.
‘Oh, look at the time,’ Mum said, with dramatic urgency. ‘I have to get up for school tomorrow.’ (She was a head teacher at an infant school.)
‘You go to bed,’ I said.
‘Yes, you go up, Mary,’ Andrea said. ‘We can sort out the beds and stuff.’
‘There’s a bed and there’s a mattress on the floor in his room, but you are welcome to have our bed if you like for tonight,’ said Dad.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘We’ll be fine.’
Dad squeezed my shoulder before he went to bed. ‘It’s good to have you here.’
‘Yes. It’s good to be here.’
I didn’t want to cry. Because a) I didn’t want him to see me cry, and b) if I cried I would feel worse. So, I didn’t cry. I went to bed.
And the next day I woke up, and it was there. The depression and anxiety, both together. People describe depression as a weight, and it can be. It can be a real physical weight, as well as a metaphorical, emotional one. But I don’t think weight is the best way to describe what I felt. As I lay there, on the mattress on the floor – I had insisted Andrea sleep on the bed, not out of straightforward chivalry but because that is what I would have done if I was normal – I felt like I was trapped in a cyclone. Outwardly, to others, I would over the next few months look a bit slower than normal, a bit more lethargic, but the experience going on in my mind was always relentlessly and oppressively fast.
My symptoms
THESE WERE SOME of the other things I also felt:
Like my reflection showed another person.
A kind of near-aching tingling sensation in my arms, hands, chest, throat and at the back of my head.
An inability to even contemplate the future. (The future was not going to happen, for me anyway.)
Scared of going mad, of being sectioned, of being put in a padded cell in a straitjacket.
Hypochondria.
Separation anxiety.
Agoraphobia.
A continual sense of heavy dread.
Mental exhaustion.
Physical exhaustion.
Like I was useless.
Chest tightness and occasional pain.
Like I was falling even while I was standing still.
Aching limbs.
The occasional inability to speak.
Lost.
Clammy.
An infinite sadness.
An increased sexual imagination. (Fear of death often seems to counterbalance itself with thoughts of sex.)
A sense of being disconnected, of being a cut-out from another reality.
An urge to be someone else/anyone else.
Loss of appetite (I lost two stone in six months).
An inner trembling (I called it a soul-quiver).
As though I was on the verge of a panic attack.
Like I was breathing too-thin air.
Insomnia.
The need to continuously scan for warning signs that I was a) going to die or b) go mad.
Finding such warning signs. And believing them.
The desire to walk, and quickly.
Strange feelings of déjà vu, and things that felt like memories but hadn’t happened. At least not to me.
Seeing darkness around the periphery of my vision.
The wish to switch off the nightmarish images I would sometimes see when I closed my eyes.
The desire to step out of myself for a while. A week, a day, an hour. Hell, just for a second.
At the time these experiences felt so weird I thought I was the only person in the history of the world to have ever had them (this was a pre-Wikipedia age), though of course there are millions going through an equivalent experience at any one time. I’d often involuntarily visualise my mind as a kind of vast and dark machine, like something out of a steampunk graphic novel, full of pipes and pedals and levers and hydraulics, emitting sparks and steam and noise.
Adding anxiety to depression is a bit like adding cocaine to alcohol. It presses fast-forward on the whole experience. If you have depression on its own your mind sinks into a swamp and loses momentum, but with anxiety in the cocktail, the swamp is still a swamp but the
