Dodging

This morning I woke up not feeling so great. I got out of bed to find that I was still fully clothed from the day before. I came down stairs, checked my e-mail and felt myself sinking a little further.

Alicia is a childminder amongst other things and so from time to time the house is filled from the early hours with little voices. I am ‘silly’ at heart so we all get on just fine. I like our conversations amongst the bustle of breakfast. One of this morning’s exchanges went something like this: “Please can we play with the robots?” “Sure”, I say, “but the parts are scattered here and there (pointing to the car basket, the multi-story garage and the robot box) the robot pants are in here.” “Smelly pants.” “Noooo, not smelly pant” I say, “everybody knows that robot pants don’t make smells”. The silly conversations come easy… and we all laugh.

I stepped outside for a cigarette, trying to feel what shape my day might take. It occurred to me that I should do something to change out of this slow gear. I could take the dogs for an early walk… but the motivation isn’t there and with little effort I convince myself I don’t have it in me. I’m tired, unnaturally tired.

My writing is postponed for a moment whilst a wand wielding fairy turns me into a frog. When the fairy leaves the room, my writing resumes.

This writing helps me to reflect with objectivity; I am getting better. Much better. The faulty morning is put into perspective. It doesn’t reflect the general run of things. Yesterday I cleaned for the first time in a long time. I am one of those people who enjoys cleaning, I like making things shiny. Alicia and I took on the lounge together and now it is a beautiful and peaceful space. I spent the afternoon in the back ‘garden’, I use this term loosely, clearing away months of unwanted growth.

There are many ways to measure how long someone has been down with a depressive episode. Just look at the height of the weeds in their garden, or the size of the laundry pile, or the stack of unwashed plates by the sink, or the number of unopened letters by the front door. Fortunately for me, Alicia has kept our household running as best she can and we don’t have so far to travel to get things back to the way they were; the exception being the ‘garden’. I must really find another word to describe the outdoor space at the back of our house. Garden, to my mind, conjures up all sorts of lovely images. I would sit and play in a garden, and would admire a garden. We have a small area of land covered in a mix of gravel, weeds, and concrete slabs, minus any kind of perimeter since I took the trees down last summer. I have plans to turn it into a couple of raised beds for vegetables, little pea shingle paths, a chicken house and run, and somewhere to sit and eat. It will take some doing to bring the transformation about. In the mean time, nature has been undoing the work of last summer and yesterdays pursuits were strangely familiar. The set back of depression has given everything a generous head start on me.

So when I sat down to write this morning there was something I thought I would get to. Something that I was going to confront. Muhammad Ali tells me that we don’t get far unless we stop dodging our fears. But I’ve talked about the garden and the general run of things and the thought of writing about anything else, it, is making an uncomfortable void inside my chest. Today is not the day. I’ll deal with that another day maybe.