What is wrong with me?

On Saturday I felt physically depressed all day. It was horrible, I could actually feel it, I wasn't just feeling down. There are many reasons why. On a very superficial level it could be something to do with not riding the bike. I normally go out on Saturday morning, ride around 20 miles and come back feeling energised. Not this Saturday. And normally, when I don't go out I fret inwardly about my lack of exercise until I forget all about it either because of a pleasant distraction (like we all go out somewhere that is happy and away from the sources of my depressive state) or because the whole thing just lifts, again through a distraction: it might be the television or something and it disappears, or somebody tells me to lift my spirits and remember that I'm a lucky guy (which I am). Sometimes it does the trick, but not this Saturday.

It's probably worth pointing out that last December my sister died and more than any other passing I have experienced it had a physical effect on me; I started getting what I thought were panic attacks, a kind of fluttery feeling in my stomach that led me to thinking I was going to die or have a heart attack or pass out or something and it wouldn't go away unless I chilled, took deep breaths, drank a glass of water and again tried to distract myself in some way. I thought it might be that I was dehydrated. In the recent past I'd come home off a ride and then go straight out in the car without drinking a glass of water or having a cup of tea or a brief rest; the end result was a dizzying, uncomfortable feeling that, by and large, disappeared after I'd swigged a large glass of water or sat down with a mug of tea. There have been occasions when I'm in the car and simply have to stop, take stock, drink that much needed bottle of mineral water and then continue, relieved that I haven't died or had a heart attack or whatever. I quickly worked out that I was dehydrated and that drinking cappuccino might have been the problem, although I've drank cappuccino on many other occasions and all was fine.

But it's not just the odd occasion of being dehydrated, that I can deal with, although these days when I come home after a ride I make a point of drinking a large glass of cold water or I make myself an equally large mug of decaffeinated tea before I do anything else.

When my sister started her short journey from walking into an operating theatre carrying her own drip, being deposited in a ward afterwards and ultimately wheeled to the morgue and driven to the crematorium, I wouldn't say I was upbeat. I'd driven her from her house in Carshalton to Epsom General at the end of October and as we sat there waiting for her name to be called for what amounted to an operation I hope I never have to undergo, I was unsure how I felt about it all. My sister had been a drinker and smoker and did both to excess. She had been diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer but her liver was in such a mess, it wasn't the cancer that killed her. I drove to see her once or twice a week until the end and as her body realised it wouldn't be getting any more alcohol there were side effects: she hallucinated and sometimes was unsure of where she was or what she was doing. It was unpleasant to watch and I used to try and push it all out of my mind on the drive home, listening to music or Radio 4 and then, when I got home, looking for escapism on the small screen. I wanted happiness in bulk and found it initially in that documentary about David Beckham, which I watched time and time again just to bring a smile to my face.I needed to be outside of my own world and in somebody else's. Netflix and Amazon Prime did the trick as I immersed myself in movies every night or watched rock interviews on YouTube, anything but to be in my own world.

On the day my sister passed and after I'd seen her dead body, no longer warm but still on the ward, I drove my niece and my brother over to mum's to tell her the bad news, not that it affected mum; she had either conditioned herself not to be upset or she wasn't at all perturbed by what had happened to her only daughter, but let's not speculate.

It took me a long while to rid myself of the panic attacks. In fact, they've only recently dissipated. I've stopped drinking cappuccino and for a long while now I have been drinking decaff tea and trying not to get over-hyped. 

Cycling has always been good for this sort of thing. During the pandemic and all through that amazing summer of 2020 I rode daily out into the sticks. I remember when my dad died back in 2011 I used the rides into nowhere to shed a tear when nobody was looking. It worked and I guess it worked to a degree for my sister even if I wasn't cycling as much as I did during the lockdown, but there was one big difference. Dad died of old age, he'd had a good life. My sister was younger than me and you know what? I've yet to shed a tear. I doubt I will now and perhaps that's part of the problem, I hold things back, I don't want to let go, I hold it all in, I grin and bear it, especially at funerals as I don't want to let the imaginary side down, my side, me; but that's just the way I operate, although I have in the past had situations where I have broken down, but not in public.

I remember once on my way to work some years ago I was listening to music in the car. The album in question was Spirit of 76 by Spirit and the track, Guide Me. I drove to the top of a multi-storey car park when Guide Me started. The long and the short of it was I broke down, I was in floods of uncontrollable tears, it was terrible and it shook me to the core. I couldn't figure out why it was happening and in all honesty I still don't have an answer. It started happening with poetry too, not that I was a great reader of poetry, but I remember buying an anthology, Poems on the Underground and in it a poem, Thanks Forever, by Milton Kessler. It got me good and proper and probably still would if I read it again. Then it was music. Suburbia by the Pet Shop Boys, that 1990 World Cup song by New Order, Nessum Dorma by Pavarotti, and I will go sailing no more by Randy Newman from the first Toy Story movie, when Buzz realizes he can't fly. And let's not forget the silver screen. I have to leave the room at the end of the first Babe movie when the farmer shuts that gate and says 'that'll do pig, that'll do'. Toy Story 3 was even worse. I saw that in a darkened cinema, thankfully, when my daughter was 11 and managed to dry the tears before we hit daylight. Suddenly I had become a volatile human being, and all these things are, to a greater or lesser extent, still with me today. 

But today it's different. After my sister's passing the panic attacks slowly intensified as did my desire for happiness which has continued to elude me. There were things that made me feel good, took me out of myself, like visiting Hooper's department store in Tunbridge Wells or walking around a National Trust stately home, stopping for a slice of coffee and walnut cake and either a cappuccino (if I thought I could handle it) or a mint tea if I didn't. I've only just managed to pull back from the brink on those panic attacks; they seem, by and large, to have disappeared, although, getting back to the day my sister died, the drive from Epsom General to mum's was probably the worst experience of my life. I'm amazed we got there if the truth be known and it was strange how the further I drove away from mum's and the closer I was to being home, the symptoms disappeared.

Anything I could do to chill out, I did it, including sleeping in the spare room listening to Night Tracks on Radio 3 until I fell asleep. It was like being in a space capsule in outer space and it did me a lot of good. I like sitting in a coffee shop nursing a hot drink and a pastry and either reading or writing. Both are therapeutic.

But there's something else that's never far away: futility and the notion that everything is futile, especially my efforts to combat it, like learning to play the bass guitar. Why? I don't really want to play it, it's just some kind of futile fantasy. I'm not going to form a band or start busking so why bother? In short, there's no point whatsoever, it's just a ploy to distract me, but in all honesty I think that if I did buy one I'd be even more depressed than I am now, it's not a solution is what I'm saying, which makes me wonder what is. But the whole 'futility' thing is a dangerous path to tread, because, ultimately, everything is futile. Why shave if the stubble and eventually the beard will grow back? Why mow the lawn if the grass will get longer as soon as you stop?

It's as if I'm living in two worlds (or possibly more) but let's stick with two for now, one being the world where all is bad and fluttery and not nice and then there's work where there are plenty of distractions and all the panicky stuff, therefore, doesn't exist. So in that sense perhaps I'm a little schizophrenic, living in two worlds rather than one.

You know what? There's so much to all this stuff. I've thought about therapy. One day perhaps. I'd love to be psycho-analysed but will it provide any answers, will it dish out the solution? Who knows?