Eyre Lines

Yesterday was the ten month anniversary of me waking up not depressed after over six years of serious clinical depression and 11 years before that sliding gently downward. I am still not depressed, and it’s worth noting that I am wonderfully grateful.

I should note this more, if for no other reason that there’s a strong positive correlation between feeling grateful and feeling happy. I find I rather like feeling happy, having had six and a half years of not only not feeling happy but having forgotten what it was like to feel happy and being unable to recall occasions when I had been (serious depression ruins emotional memory as well, and can prevent recall of other circumstances where there’s been a strong positive emotion involved). Not being depressed does not equate to “happy”, of course; I can still manage low moods, but nothing like the crippling depths of two-and-a-bit years ago.

So I’m particularly grateful for The Gregory Brothers major-to-minor version of Pharrell’s “Happy” which I listened to this morning. It’s remarkable that such an upbeat song can be made into music to slit wrists by by dint of changing the key from major to minor and slowing it down, but the result wonderfully captures the feeling of (say) a year and a half ago when I heard (for instance) the Twelve-Step “Just for Today” lines which read “Just for today I will be happy; most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be”.

I couldn’t do it. The harder I tried, the more I concentrated on “being happy” the more miserable it made me. And those “just for today” lines (which run along the same lines as quite a few well-intentioned “snap out of it” comments) made it feel worse, as it was clearly all my fault. I mustn’t want to be happy, I must be doing it to myself in some perverse self-flagellating way.

Not so, of course; depression is an illness from which I suffered, and I was the victim, not the perpetrator.

It’s nice to see that now.