Look What I Found In My Head

Every day at work, I leave my desk at lunchtime, armed with my smartphone and my iPod and set off on a circular walk of just over two miles. My aim is fourfold:

(1) Get a little exercise.

(2) Escape the confines of the office.

(3) Enjoy some music.

(4) Clear my head.

I want to focus on item (4).

As I stroll around the streets, my mind wanders, replacing the inevitable stress and tedium of office work with a journey through my own imagination, accompanied by a musical soundtrack of songs that I love.

And that journey is usually quite fruitful.

The experience feels like I am in a room with thousands of doors. The journey begins when I open one of the doors and go through. The choice of door depends on my mood, the music I am listening to, the day I have had so far and random thoughts that have popped into my head based on conversations, news – anything really.

Ultimately I hope to find something interesting – like this idea for a blog post for example.

I am fascinated by the train of thought that eventually leads to the gems I find inside my own head. Sometimes they are good things but occasionally they are not do good. For example, if I am in a bad mood, or a little depressed about something, I find that sometimes it is difficult to drag myself from a negative path. In that respect I understand how depressed people think – I know this first hand because Mrs PM is prone to depression and in these situations it is difficult if not impossible to escape the irrational downward spiral that follows.

Happily, I have experience of seeing this is other people and can assist, if only to be the person who comforts them or to be a shoulder to cry on, so to speak. Of course, it is not as simple as that and, thankfully, Mrs PM is in control of it.

I don’t suffer from depression myself but if a negative thought threatens to enter my head and cause a negative cycle, I switch my mind to something that will distract it – like changing the song on my iPod of taking a moment to look around as I walk. This helps usually; rather like leaving the bad door alone and finding another more interesting one to go through. It doesn’t always work – and I have struggled sometimes in 2017 to be fair – but things are improving.

Sometimes, exploring my imagination can cause embarrassment. Here are a couple of examples.

Picture the scene. I am walking along oblivious to my surroundings and listening to a fantastic and happy song - a song such as this:

I find myself walking in step to the beat and imagine myself as the artist. The problem is that my step becomes jaunty and bouncy and on a couple of occasion I have actually started mouthing the words. If I have my headphones in, I can’t actually tell whether I am actually singing – I might be. In which case, it’s no surprise that I have acquired a few strange looks by people queuing up at a bus stop I have walked past.

On other occasions, a song has reminded me of a funny incident in the past caused an involuntary guffaw that is difficult to control and fuels yet more laughter, making me look like some kind of idiot marching along the streets.

Also, if I see somebody I know as I walk, I try to be polite and greet them as we pass. However, because of my headphones, it is more difficult to judge volume.

“Hi Dave,” they will say as we approach!

“HI ANDY,” I bellow at the top of my voice, in an attempt to drown out both the heavy metal song in my ears and the noise of cars, lorries and buses roaring past on the main road.

When I get back to work, I face the inevitable consequences.

“Why were you yelling at me in the street, Dave?”

Thankfully, this doesn’t happen very often and my walks are uneventful to watch.  The good news for me is that I have around 10,000 novel ideas as a result of my lunchtime walks. The bad news is that when I get back to work, I never write them down because the moment I sit back down at my desk, the shit hits the fan and I am plunged back into the abyss of the rat race before I have the time to write down a paragraph about invisible mutant aliens turning people into slaves.

However, I am certainly more relaxed and, for an hour or so at least, I find myself going about the daily grind with a smile on my face and a more relaxed approach to work.

I recommend you try it, dear reader. Once a day, grab hold of your own musical device and walk around the streets of your town or city for half an hour or so. Take off the chains of your imagination, walk through an interesting door and see where it leads you.

In almost all cases you will be amazed.

And for any Mancunians out there, if you see a greying blond nutcase singing or laughing as he walks – it might just be me.

Feel free to say “Hi Dave!” – I will try not to yell back at you.

Black Clouds; Silver Linings

About twelve years ago, I had a conversation with somebody who is very dear to me. It went something like this.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“No,” she said, tears running down her cheek.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, concerned.

“I don’t know,” she replied, struggling to keep control. “I j..j..just don’t know.”

I sat down beside her and held her in my arms as she completely lost control and sobbed her heart out. I said nothing; I just listened as she tried to pour her heart out to me and tried to explain how she felt.

It was all I could do. I was there for her but I felt helpless. I had no words to help her. I just had to be there, hold her and listen to her as she soaked my shirt with her tears.

That person was Mrs PM.

She was suffering from depression.

Over the years I have known her I have learned to read the signs of this affliction. I can tell when the trigger has been fired and the journey into the chasm has begun. From somewhere, a black cloud appears and completely envelops her. Even when she has every reason to be deliriously happy, the black cloud drags her towards a pit of despair.

She is helpless and cannot stop it. And I have to accompany her on this ride until the black cloud dissipates.

Normally, there are no external reasons for it to happen. Mrs PM may be really content in her job, happy with her friends and family and then suddenly the black cloud starts to materialise.

She should be happy – she has absolutely no reason not to be happy. She is comfortable, generally stress free and life is there to be grabbed and enjoyed.

Yet she is crying and can do nothing to escape. I have tried to help just by being a voice in the wilderness that tells her everything is alright, arms that hold her and listen to her words as she tries to make me understand how she feels.

I can’t understand how she feels and that is deeply frustrating for both of us.

When she first told me about her depression, I was puzzled. She had always seemed so happy, so confident and so in control. And when I first saw the black cloud I was shocked. I didn’t really understand. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I did not know what to say.

Most people don’t know what to say or do. And a surprisingly large number of people think that depression is a random bad mood that can be cured by the phrase:

“Just pull yourself together.”

This is the WORST thing you can say – absolutely the worst thing. This is not just a passing phase.

Having seen Mrs PM at her lowest ebb, I want to grab such people and scream “DON’T EVER SAY THAT TO A DEPRESSED PERSON AGAIN!”

There’s not a lot you can do, full stop, but such thoughtlessness can make things far worse.

Depressed people cannot help it. It is not a state of mind; it is an illness.

My experience of Mrs PM’s depression has helped me recognise symptoms in other people. Mrs PM, of course recognises those symptoms too, more so in fact.

When she first felt something was wrong, before she met me, Mrs PM went to the doctor to seek the answer to the questions:

 “Why do I feel like shit? Why am I so sad? Why can’t I stop crying?”

She has often said to me that two men have changed her life; the first is me (the charming baboon whose blog you are reading); the second is the doctor who answered those questions.

The doctor put her on a course of anti-depressants and she changed dramatically. If it wasn’t for those little pills, she would never have asked me out. Depression had confined her confidence into a cage deep within her psyche, and the key to that cage was lost. Those little tablets forged a new key and released that inner confidence, making Mrs PM the woman she is today – the woman who stole my heart (and won’t give it me back).

I don’t mind – my heart now belongs to her.

There were ups and downs as she got to grips with this new liberating medication; sometimes it introduced mood swings that made her totally and utterly euphoric one moment and absolutely devastatingly depressed the next.

Sadly, in order to find the right medication, she has had to endure a lot of pain. And during the first year or two of our relationship, I had to be there for her to help her through it. And I simply could not help her in any way other than to sit with her, look after her and make sure that she could cope. What's worse, I was a bit of a mess myself at that time, so I had to try to forget that and focus on Mrs PM.

Whether or not I helped, I don’t know. What I do know is that having somebody there was better than having nobody.

The silver lining to this black cloud is that Mrs PM has been perfectly fine for quite a few years now.  Her depression was a menacing abomination for the first four or five years of our relationship. Now, thankfully, the medication she takes these days has stabilised her mood, allowing her confidence to shine in abundance. The black cloud has almost been annihilated so much so, that I have almost forgotten what it looks like.

I know that if she were to stop taking the pills, she would fall back into the black cloud’s clutches once again.

If you met Mrs PM, you would have no clue that she had ever suffered; she is warm, confident, funny and wonderful. And best of all she is happy.

Of course, not everybody needs medication. There are techniques that involve no medication at all such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), something that works for some people.

So why am I telling the world about this?

I have seen the woman I love reduced to a sobbing mess due to depression. We were talking about a friend of hers, the other day, who is recovering from post-natal depression and I thought it might be a good idea for a post.

Mrs PM gave me her blessing to write about her experience, because she knows how debilitating the condition can be. I have heard her chatting to friends about it and in some cases, some of her friends have actually recognised the symptoms and done something about it as a result.

There is no shame in admitting that you are depressed, in Mrs PM’s eyes. She has turned her life around and wants to talk about it. She wants people to know that the black cloud can be beaten into submission.

Mrs PM is now a happy person and has been for years. The black cloud occasionally threatens to make an appearance but more often than not it is a fleeting threat and she copes admirably.

That’s the silver lining.