THROUGH THE KEYHOLE

It's one of those days when I've just got to hold it together. I really do feel like Depression is banging at the door and won't go away, won't give in, won't stop knocking, hammering, pounding outside with a damp thud and an off-beat rhythm.

It started with a bit of work that I just couldn't do. On its own I would have tackled it, stared at it, figured it out and done it... but there were hundreds of other things I had to do at the same time and they all just started crowding in on me, adding themselves to the hundreds of other near-impossible things I've got to make happen outside of work. Thump, thump, thump...

It's like... well, do you know that feeling when you're trying to solve a problem very quickly and everybody around you is trying to solve it too... but out loud? There's no space to think, no room to move, no calm moment to piece the answer together - which you know you can do when everyone isn't panicking and shouting and thinking and distracting you. Then someone asks you a question which you thought of two minutes ago and is now a bit irrelevant to your train of thought, so you ignore it and they get upset because you're ignoring it... it was a bit like that.

My chest goes tight, I clutch my head, I make a groaning, muttering sound as though I've got some deep inner pain and I rub my eyes with the palms of my hands. It doesn't change the fact that I've got snippets with text in the wrong place repeated throughout hundreds of files and no obvious way to change them, unpaid invoices which don't seem to match any quotes that I received and emails pinging into my inbox from people who use phrases like still not quite what I was expecting...

 "You're stressed," whispers Depression through the keyhole.

"Go away," I say.

"You're stressed because you can't manage your life," he continues.

"Go. Away," I repeat.

"You can't manage your life because you're a failure - a little, shambolic, seeping mess of a man who can't manage to succeed in ... anything."

"Shut up." I want to swear at him, but I know that only makes him stronger. I have tears in my eyes now. It's crazy because I know the tricks that Depression is trying to play - twisting truth into a form where the positives are hidden by the negatives, trying to snapshot everything into a single moment to convince me that it will always be this way, and crucially, trying to make me see the waves instead of their creator. I've encountered these sleights of hand before - and yet somehow I still seem to fall for it.

It is definitely one of those days when I've just got to hold it together. I might be quiet for a while.