“To every thing there is a saison…”

Though anxiety has truly been my bête-noire over the last few years, depression has cast itself very capably in a supporting role.

Over the last few weeks, though, it has elbowed anxiety out of the way and taken centre stage with all its ghastly mediaeval gravitas.

Desperate to escape from its suffering, the mind goes bananas trying to understand the cause of its depression.

Have the meditations, the inner-child practice and all the tapping I’ve been doing surfaced this nastiness in order to clear it out? Or are they just making things worse? What am I depressed about? If I can’t pin down the cause, how in God’s name can I address it?

Hour by hour the mind is on fire, observing the minutest changes to my depression, craving relief. Is it getting worse or better? Will yoga help? A walk in the woods? Dancing? Singing? Playing the piano? Prayer? Craft beer?

I turned to the internet, scouring the web for books on depression, alighting finally on Johann Hari’s Lost Connections. It was a line in the prologue that caught my attention.

Johann has been poisoned by an unpeeled apple he bought at street market in Vietnam. He’s been hospitalised and is begging the Dr, via a translator to give him something to quell the vomiting and nausea.

“You need your nausea,” the Dr replies. “It is a message. It will tell us what is wrong with you.”

What would change if we could see depression, anxiety and panic attacks, not as malfunctions to be fixed but as messengers? When we break a leg, we don’t consider the pain to be something to mask, it’s clearly a symptom of an underlying cause. And when that cause is addressed, the pain diminishes and is eventually gone.

This quote reminds me of another, this time out of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet. It’s a quote that I’ve turned over in my head for years, never quite penetrating what the implications would be for me.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility

Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

In the end and as always, the depression wound itself down and I went on to spend a rather pleasant few hours watching Gangs of London and drinking, not a bitter potion prescribed by my inner physician, but a pint of Arbor Ales’ Saison Des Fêtes.

But I had a new understanding.

Now, I was listening.