Zoetropes

I’d like to tell you that I’m feeling better, but I’m not. Outward functionality is maintained, but inwardly it has become like an activity course for special needs children. Come on h-bird, you can do this! I exclaim to myself over even the most mundane of tasks, following up their completion with a hearty “well done!”.

Thus is bed got out of, morning ablutions made, dishes done and meals prepared. My efforts to go to a movie last night came to nothing when I got the time wrong and turned up to a screening that didn’t exist. Teaching classes has been keeping me on the straight and narrow, but these finished today for the year.

I still have a job, and a beautiful puppy, and much, of course, for which to feel fortunate. It’s just that depression, as a function of an illness, is like a roadblock falling between me and these things, making it as if I see them across a barrier, or from a distance.

The time of the day I most favour at the moment is just before falling asleep, the point of greatest distance before I have to get up and do it all again. Waking up is the worst, with everything that has to be done extending out before me like a series of hurdles to be got over.

In the midst of all of this I try and keep my writer’s eye open for fragments where narratives might previously have turned up: one of my Malay students still wearing her usual layers of jerseys and hats on a day when everyone else is down to single layers; a Chinese grandmother wheeling a light-framed silver scooter along a suburban street; the boulanger at my bakery of choice stacking the shelves, his head barely visible above the display containers.

It seems that synonyms for the experience of watching others while depressed abound: moving images through an early cinema projector, zoetropes, maybe. The scene from Trainspotting in which Renton o.d.s and sinks into the ground keeps coming to mind, not for the suicidal impulse (not at all) but for the sensation, or maybe Gillian Welch’s couplet “coming in loud / and my mind let go”.

At two weeks now, this is the longest depressive stretch I’ve had for a while and I wonder what the consequences will be: continue to fight or just give up and adjust? Will it pass like clouds clearing, or will there be further seismic shifts I have to make, rethinking what it means to be me in order to shake these damn blues?

Enough.