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The Frosted Pane
Driving across Witney today my music player randomly selected Pagan Wanderer Lu‘s The Frosted Pane. Just like the first time, I was absolutely wrecked by the heartwrenching lines that show the bout of depression he’s singing about is interminable, as the seasons pass with him still unable to see the world in the clarity and colour he’d enjoyed before:
Trick or treaters
I see them through the frosted pane
Carol singers
I see them through the frosted pane
My wife and daughter
I see them through the frosted pane
Probably it wouldn’t have hit me so hard, but things have been tough lately. There’ve been plenty of times (not always the obvious ones) over the last few weeks where my “healthier” coping strategies haven’t really pulled their weight and I’ve definitely found myself resorting to flumping, overeating, or “just one more glass of wine”1.
A philosophy of depression
The experience reminded me of a blog post published about four-and-a-half years before the death of David Bowie2. A philosophy of depression, published pseudonymously by “malbo21”, describes the strategies the author finds successful in managing their depression.
If you believe it’s the tree in your neighbour’s garden that’s giving you depression then you can’t cut it down. You can’t ask the neighbour to cut it down. So maybe you start to resent the neighbour? You resent the way he puts out his bins. You resent the way he parks his car. The way he laughs all the time and looks happy. You resent the fact that your friends don’t agree what a dick your neighbour is. Stupid friends, they’re just like him – with their laughter, and car parking and bin putting out. Wankers.
So maybe it’s your friends who are making you depressed as well? After all you do seem to be depressed whenever you’re around them… You remember that one occasion that you were out when everyone else was having a good time and you just wanted them all to fuck right off. You sat there thinking what unbearable idiots they all were. And yeah sure, you were tired, you were a bit drunk, you’d had a stressful day… but those things have happened before and you were fine. So it mustn’t have been those factore, it must mean either that your friends are awful irritating people, or that some external force called ‘depression’ is manifesting itself via your friends, your neighbour, and that fucking tree!
Looking back on it with the experience of, y’know, studying for a foundation degree in counselling and psychotherapy in the interim, the fundamental strategy suggested here might be described as self-reflection, internalising your locus of evaluation, and developing your authentic self. A Rogerian hat trick, and exactly the kind of uplifting humanistic approach I might expect from somebody with malbo21’s history3.
Chopping down the tree is as easy as getting your ass in the garden. Feeling better about the tree is harder, but it might lead to greater insight and to genuinely solving the problem.
That’s a simplification. I don’t intend to minimise it! The post’s still great, and it’s reinforced by some excellent examples and metaphors. Putting fancy words on it doesn’t undermine it. Humanistic psychotherapy is of that special category of magic that still works even when you know the secret!
But fucking hell, having a human brain’s hard sometimes, right?
Normal life
Mostly, I just want my normal life back. For a while there, I felt like I’d got shit mostly figured-out. Ruth jokes that I’m the kind of person who likes to carve out a comfortable rut that they can sit in, and while she’s mostly used it as a metaphor for my tendency to find a job I love and then stop considering the possibility that there might be a better one… I think there’s an analogy there for the rest of my life, too.
I like to know what I’m doing and where I’m living a week from now. I like to know where my stuff is. I like to have my own space and make my own mark on it. And while I also like to explore and adventure and to be surprised, I like to do so on my own terms: I like to be able to “turn off” the crazy-times. If that’s being-in-a-rut, then yeah: I like being in a rut.
But all the disruption in my life right now doesn’t give me that feeling. It makes me feel unsafe and unsettled to not know where I’ll be living in the near future, or how it’ll be paid-for. It leaves me uneasy to have my routine broken, re-cast, and broken again: even if it’s just little things like… normally, I try to get myself 5-10 minutes of piano practice on weekdays, while my lunch heats. But the piano lives on the ground floor and it’s not in its best state and even if it were… that’s not where I am.
When supporting a person in emotional crisis, I like to consider their window of future vision. A person in the most-critical of distress might not be able to tell you what they’ll do tomorrow, because they struggle to imagine a tomorrow in which they still exist. As their distress eases, they expand their window to be able to see past hours, then past days, eventually past weeks and months: to be able to plan a future that has a place for them in it.
Distress causes a person to close their own window. But uncertainty in your life closes it for you. The reason I don’t know where I’ll live (or work, given that I work from home!) in two weeks is because, well, that’s uncertain! It is, at least, easier to be rational about a window of future vision that’s being closed by an external factor… but it still isn’t a pleasant feeling.
Ugh.
A dim place
All of which is to say, I guess… thanks, Spotify and Pagan Wanderer Lu?4 Thanks for throwing a stumbling block right in front of me when I was already limping. Thanks for tripping me up such that I landed on a 15-year-old blog post, written from a dark place, and had to look back on it from a somewhat dim5 place of my own.
There’s light at the end of the tunnel in the saga of our flood. My brain just lags a little behind, I guess.
Footnotes
1 By the metrics, I’m doing better now, on F-Day plus 22, than I was earlier on: even with Lu’s successful attempt to bring me to tears this afternoon, I’m now crying fewer days than not, so that’s a win, right?
2 Why do I mention Bowie’s death? It features in the first line of the song and acts as an anchor in time to the events it describes, as well – perhaps – as a catalyst.
3 Obviously the author’s using a pseudonym for anonymity, but I’m pretty confident that I could pick them out of a line-up of “everybody I ever helped train to volunteer on an emotional support helpline that happened to be underpinned by similar psychological principles”, possibly with my eyes closed.
4 Clearly this whole thing is the result of an RNG/PWL collusion!
5 This bit is a coded way of saying “no, I don’t think I’m depressed, just… fragile”. This footnote is a non-coded way of saying the same thing. Footnotes are great. Why don’t Andy’s lyrics come with footnotes, hmm?
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