Then the Worries Arrived

A while back, my mum sent PDB11 and me a suggestion:

‘A little game to play with fellow readers.  Take the opening sentence of a book you know well, and then add, "and then the dragons arrived." '

This is all very well with most classic literature:

'No-one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.  And then the dragons arrived.'

'It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.  And then the dragons arrived.'

'My father's name being Pirrip and my given name being Philip, my infant tongue could make nothing more of either word than Pip.  And then the dragons arrived.'

'Once upon a time there were four little rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter.  And then the dragons arrived.'

In our case, this didn’t work so well, because the walls of our bedroom are mainly lined with fantasy novels:

'There were dragons when I was a boy.  And then the dragons arrived.'

'All was still in the valley of the dragons.  And then the dragons arrived.'

Different things disrupt life for different people.  In my case, January 2023 went something like this:

I thought I was making progress.  I had gone nearly three weeks, from Christmas to mid-January, without bursting into tears, feeling too depressed or guilty to enjoy things, worrying that it would be better if I did not exist, stressing PDB11 out, inventing paranoid interpretations of theology, being so restless that I couldn’t keep still, feeling so angry that I wanted to slap myself, having panic attacks, or getting into an angry argument with anyone.  Pretty much the only irregularities in my life had been waking up much too early in the morning (not because I was anxious but because I was buzzing with ideas), coming downstairs to do some writing, and then crashing out mid-afternoon.

I had managed to get a balance of activity into my life that included praying, exercising, learning, writing, and starting voluntary work in the new Community Café that has just opened in our village.  In the five-week gap between appointments with my therapist, I had been starting to deal with some of my worries by addressing them directly in letters to my younger self.  When despondent thoughts tried to nudge their way in, I was able to tell them, ‘Yes, I can hear you, but that doesn’t mean I have to believe you.  You’re just a hormonal imbalance, not a rational argument.’

And then the good weather arrived.

For the past three weeks, it had mostly been raining.  I didn’t mind going out for the odd short walk, but there was no sense in overdoing it.  But now, we had gone from wet autumn into bright, crisp, frosty (and sometimes snowy) winter, and it was a joy to be out in it.  So, on Friday 13^th, I don’t think the date brought me bad luck, but going out for the first decent-length walk of the year, a ten-mile stroll to Shepton Mallet and back, probably did.

It didn’t feel bad while I was walking.  On the contrary, I enjoyed the beautiful day, and thinking about God being the Father of all of us and the life-spirit in all of us, and seeing the first shoots of spring flowers I had seen this year, by the bench under the cherry tree where I stopped to eat my sandwiches.  It was a splendid day.

But after I’d come home, sitting on the sofa reading a book review in a magazine, my hopes came crashing down very abruptly.  I knew that I wasn’t being rational, and that the worries I complained about, to Philip and to my mum, were the same ones that I had complained about many times before.  I knew that there were fairly obvious physiological triggers: my hormonal cycle, and the fact that I had been for a long walk and was tired.

Still, knowing this does not alter the fact that the same worries are always lurking at the back of my mind, waiting for a chance to become ascendant.  I can rant about them to PDB11 (who gets frustrated at my ability to listen to logical explanations), and, when I want to give him a break, I phone my mum to rant at her (she’s sometimes less good at giving logical explanations, but better at being patient).

Knowing the answers to my questions, and even being bored with myself for endlessly asking the same questions, doesn’t help.  Finding a distraction, like working in the café or answering questions on Quora (because it’s so much easier to feel wise and in control when answering someone else’s questions rather than my own) only helps for a little while.

Knowing that my friends and family care about me helps up to a point, but at the same time, it makes me feel guilty that, if I cling onto depression, it suggests that I love depression more than I love them.  I feel frustrated with myself for constantly getting like this, when I know that it hurts PDB11. 

I feel that if I can’t get rid of this problem, I ought to get out of everyone’s life so that they don’t have to deal with it.  But at the same time, I know that in practice, being out of contact with me would make my mum worry about me even more, and being separated from me would make PDB11 thoroughly miserable.  So then I start to worry that, if I can’t solve my problems and if I can’t make the people I love happy either by staying with them or by leaving them, I’m a bad person and ought not to exist.

But then I try turning the problem to look at it from a different angle.  I feel that I ought not to exist, because I have a health problem that causes me to lose control of my mind, and restricts the activities I can cope with (so that going for long walks can trigger depressive episodes).  I used to have a health problem, epilepsy, which caused me to lose control of my body, and restricted the activities I could do (for example, it was the original reason that I didn’t learn to drive when I was younger – though the reason that I still don’t drive has more to do with being so bad at it that I terrified driving instructors).

Thankfully, I now have medication which stops me from having seizures.  But if I still did go through occasional phases of losing consciousness and rolling around on the floor chewing my own tongue, I wouldn’t feel that I was a bad person for not having the strength of will to prevent this from happening.  And PDB11 wouldn’t worry that he was failing in his duty as a husband by not being able to protect me from myself.  We would just go on coping with the situation however we could.

Having an atypical brain means that my triggers are different from most people’s.  Things that are supposed to heal depression, like sunlight or exercise, can make me depressed.  Things that are supposed to make insomnia worse, like tea and computer games, can help me relax enough to sleep (there is something very soothing about the simplicity of an old classic game like Tetris).  I just need to learn more about how to cope.