One Tuesday morning, I sat at my desk and stared at an email for forty minutes. It was three sentences long. I read it five times. I could not work out what it was asking me, what I should say back, or why my mind refused to do something it had done ten thousand times before.
Nothing about that email was hard. The day was. The week was. The thing inside my head was.
It was the kind of small, ordinary moment that does not look like depression from the outside. But inside, the lights had gone out — and the switch I usually reached for was no longer where I had left it.
Depression isn’t sadness. It’s a storm.
If you have not lived this, the most useful thing I can tell you is that depression is not, primarily, an emotion. It is a thinking problem.
The American novelist William Styron, writing about his own depression, called it a storm in his brain. The phrase is quoted in Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy, alongside the observation that Lincoln himself knew this storm well.
A storm in your brain.
I have not read a better four-word description in forty years of living with this.
Picture a country town. The lawns are mown, the gardens are kept, the cars are washed in the driveway on a Saturday morning. Everything that belongs to that town is in its place. Then a cyclone comes through, and in a single afternoon the trees are down, the roofs are off, the streets are unrecognisable. Nothing in the town has changed, exactly. But nothing in the town works.
That is what an episode does to my thinking. The memories are still there. The skills are still there. The love I have for Christina, for our son Adam — still there. But the cyclone has blown the orderly arrangement sideways. I cannot find the thoughts I need. The ones I do find are not the right ones. The instruments I rely on to take a problem apart, work it out, and put it back together are gone. The cyclone has scattered them down the street.
People often say “I had a hard day.” I have hard days too. What I am describing is something different. A hard day asks you to drive a familiar car on a difficult road. A depressive episode asks you to drive at all, while someone has quietly taken the steering wheel out of the dashboard.
I read that email five times because the part of me that reads emails was not in the room. The part that takes in a sentence, holds it, produces a sensible response. I knew it should be there. I could feel the shape of the space where it usually sits. It was empty.
Why this is so hard to explain to people who haven’t been there
Years ago, my father ran a workshop where he repaired cars. He had spent decades collecting tools — some no longer made, some he had designed and built himself for a single specific job. Late one night, the workshop was burgled. The tools were gone.
The insurance money came through eventually. He bought what he could. But for months, he could not work to his usual standard. The right spanner for the unusual job was not there. The custom bracket-puller, the one he had built himself, was not there. He knew exactly how to fix the car in front of him. He did not have what he needed to do it.
That is the part of depression I find hardest to explain.
It is not that I do not know what would help. I do. I know the breathing, the walking, the cold water, the call to the GP, the message to a friend. I have written about them. I have spoken about them. I teach them to other people.
The trouble is that knowing what would help is itself one of the tools. The storm has stolen that tool too. The mind that is meant to reach for the solution is the same mind the storm has just torn through. The decision-maker is the thing that needs repair. The reasoner is the thing that has stopped reasoning.
How do you repair the thing that is supposed to do the repairing?
This is why advice like “just think positive” lands so badly when you say it to someone in an episode. It is not bad advice. It is unusable advice. You are asking a person whose hands are tied to clap.
This is also why the people who love someone with depression so often feel helpless. They are watching a competent, intelligent person become unable to do the most ordinary things, and the competent, intelligent person cannot explain why. Because explaining why is, itself, one of the tools that has gone missing. The vocabulary is gone. The metaphor is gone. The patience required to find the right words is gone. What is left is silence, or a flat “I’m fine,” or a clumsy answer that nobody finds satisfying. Least of all the person giving it.
What I’ve learned to do when the storm comes
I do not write these as a list of solutions. I write them as the small set of things I have found, over forty years, that do not require the broken tool to work them.
Recognise the storm as a storm. Not as truth. Not as fact. As weather. When my mind tells me, in the middle of an episode, that my life is worthless, that everyone would be better off without me, that nothing will ever change — I do not have to believe it. I have to recognise the voice. That is the storm talking. Not my judgement. Not my conscience. The storm. Naming it is the closest thing I have to a first step. I cannot stop the wind. I can stop mistaking the wind for the truth.
Don’t try to out-think it. This is the rule I forget most often. I am a thinker by trade. I solve problems for a living. When something hurts, my instinct is to reason my way out of it. But during an episode, the reasoner is what is broken. Reasoning harder only puts more weight on the broken thing. I have learned, slowly, to reach for the physical instead. A walk. A shower. A glass of water. A meal at the table with my family. An hour outside. Not because any of those things cure anything. Because they do not require the cognitive tools the storm has stolen. The body still works when the mind will not.
Hand the repair work out. When the workshop is empty, you borrow tools from the next workshop over. During an episode I do not try to be my own counsellor. Christina knows. Adam knows. My doctor knows. A close friend knows. The rule we have, in our house, is that during a storm I do not act on my own judgement about the storm. I act on theirs. Not because I am weak — because the part of me that judges has temporarily gone offline, and the people who love me have not. There is a particular kind of courage in saying, out loud, “I cannot trust what I’m thinking right now.” I have had to practise that sentence. It does not come easily.
Wait it out. Every storm I have lived through has passed. Every single one. When I am inside one, I cannot believe this. Depression tells me, with absolute conviction, that this time is different. This time it is permanent. This time I will not come back. It has been wrong every time. Forty years of evidence says the same thing: storms end. Even the really bad ones. Even the ones that feel like they will not.
I keep these four close because they ask nothing of the part of me that is broken. They do not require me to think clearly. They require me to remember a few simple things I wrote down when the sky was clear.
A quote I carry
Lincoln, in a letter to a friend, once described his own dark hours as “that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to the bitterness of death.”
That line is exactly right. The sweetest idea threadbare. That is what the storm does to good things. It does not invent new horrors so much as wear out the texture of what you love until it feels like nothing. The marriage. The child. The work. The friendships. The wrong kind of thinking wears it all thin.
If you have ever wondered whether the people who talk about depression are exaggerating, sit with that line for a minute. Wear the sweetest idea threadbare. They are not exaggerating. If anything, they are understating it.
If you’re in the storm right now
I do not know your storm. I know mine. I know it has tried to convince me, more times than I can count, that I should make a permanent decision based on a temporary state of mind. I know I have nearly believed it. I know I have nearly acted on it.
I am writing because I forget, easily, how dark those rooms were. I am writing because someone reading this is in one right now, and the part of them that would normally reach for the right tool cannot find it.
If you are that person, please borrow mine. None of what I have written here will feel like enough when you are inside the storm. The fact that it does not feel like enough is the storm talking, not the truth.
If the room you’re in feels wrong, it might be the room. Or it might be the storm. Learning the difference is the work of a lifetime — and it is worth doing.
A Most Unlikely Trailblazer 