Rollercoasters and Bungy Jumps

A feeling of sadness that is unrelated to any discernable external influence is a very confusing feeling. Naturally also, it feels a bit sad.

My acquaintance with the phenomenon known, diagnosed and perhaps often misdiagnosed, as depression; is related entirely to my job documenting parasuicides, of which an abundance are medicated for this intangible incorporeal condition.

Sometimes, and I would suggest this purely anecdotally – ‘most often’ – sadness is actually sadness and is not depression by the OED definition. People on anti-depressants might not be depressed but actually, shock-horror-and-whoda-thunkit sad. Good, old-fashioned, life failed to meet my expectations and now I’m sad, sadness.

My mate, Healy, has a solution for this. It’s ‘have a laugh’. Fair play my friend.

Now a man with my many reasons to be happy, as well as my readily experiential happiness, really has no business talking about the subject of unhappiness. I, with thanks to Healy and many good-natured friends like him, have many and regular opportunities to enjoy life and ‘have a laugh’, and this does indeed make me happy, thank you very much.

Much like the ‘insomnia’ that in only a very tenuous way links to the actual definition of the word that I spoke of in my last blog, I had a little draught of depression (depression of the sad-without-reason variety you understand) on Saturday afternoon, and as I’ve said, a feeling of sadness that is unrelated to any discernable external influence is a very confusing feeling and naturally also, it feels a bit sad.

I found a peculiar (but perhaps to some rather obvious) cure to this unreasonable emotion later in the day. The cure to the unreasonable emotion was simply a reasonable one. I suddenly realized that in an effort to curb the departing cufufflement of the person I was in the pub with earlier in the day, I had actually been cufuffled myself, and had left the most purely sentimentally valuable item I have in the pub. Now, three hours later, I was predicting I had lost the scarf that was so dear to me as it represented such tender emotions to me as it was for me, a scarf that had knitted into it, the love I had for its knitter, the sadness of my belief that she had let me down terribly, and most importantly of all, the hours of effort it took to knit that scarf that to me was a warmly-received apology and near-recompense for the heart-breaking disappointment I had previously felt.

All the way into town on the bus I nauseously contemplated its irreplaceability. You should have seen me blush and take to my heals when the girl who was thankfully sitting on it in the pub, laughed incredulously when I spontaneously declared, “Thank god. That’s such a relief. Thank you so much…” and smelled it like it was an enormous wad of cash to a successful criminal mastermind. I had also thought on the bus that I would probably part with more than €100 to get that scarf back. I asked myself how high I would bid, if I had to – in this bizarre affection-testing scenario. I know only too well that I spent much more for the sake of the knitter, knowing also that I would not ever do so again.

In the end, my paying of a reward came in a random act of grateful kindness at the bus-stop outside the pub, in which I paid for a taxi for myself and a teenage girl who was getting battered and soaked by the wind and cold rain.

But the point of the story is this: it was a little lesson for me in how real emotions, however distressing, are therapeutic and healthy in a way that such intangible emotions such as a bout of inexplicable sadness are not. But the real clincher is that it gave me a corporeal experience of what I had only appreciated theoretically before: that when a person who is suffering emotionally takes out a blade and cuts their own flesh, this, however misguided or ill-advised, can be an act of therapy and not necessarily an act of destruction.