Twenty-Five
The close of work for the year dovetailed into some heavy Christmas rains and a bout of overdue laziness, which meant I didn’t take a daily walk, and I didn’t exercise in any way. My one recourse in trying to address my sleep difficulties has been to tire myself physically, but now I was lazing around in my first week of holidays. Come the night, I would lie in bed, restless and hyperalert, the furthest thing from tired although I should’ve been due to the collective lack of sleep. Images flashed through my head – landscapes, and stars, and other things which, in retrospect, makes me think I must’ve been…
Twenty-Four
The very first melancholy episode I can remember experiencing occurred when I was ten. It was a simple moment of darkness, of feeling inexplicably down. Given it arrived with little surprise, things must’ve been happening earlier that normalised this for me, although I don’t recall anything specific. These episodes got worse through my teens, along with periods of agitation, punctuated by the occasional manic burst of energy. But I learned to mask it all as best as I could, although that wasn’t always easy. These things made it hard to fit in, hard to connect, hard to be like everybody else. Everything was an act. I looked like one of…