The Mean Reds

A few words about depression.

Have you seen the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s? If so, you probably remember that most perfect of scenes; Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, wearing a turquoise eye-mask and the chicest (men’s) white shirt in history, sitting in a slipper bath which has been sawn in half and turned into a sofa. She’s sipping gracefully from a champagne coupe of milk and while she does, in her uniquely delightful way, she explains an extreme of ugly emotion; The Mean Reds.

Let me remind you how it goes…

Holly: “You know those days when you get the mean reds?”

Paul: “The mean reds? You mean like the blues?”

Holly: “No. The blues are because you're getting fat, and maybe it's been raining too long. You're just sad, that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid, and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?”

The Mean Reds. I must have been eight or nine years old when I first saw the film, and the line really stuck with me. It’s really Truman Capote’s line, of course — the film is based on the 1958 novella of the same name. But there it is. Another metaphor for depression to be filed alongside The Big Bad, The Black Dog, The Abyss, Melancholia.

I felt to connected to Holly in this scene. She had articulated something that I already knew to be true, and that made me feel understood. Click.

I mercifully knew nothing of what was coming in my life, good or bad, but even when I was this little I could feel something inside of me that I didn’t like. It was shifting, moving around. It was depression, and it was waking up.

For those of us unfortunate enough to have experienced the kind of depressive illness that utterly grounds you and your pauses your whole life, that renders you unable to speak or eat or work or leave the house, you will know that depression is always there, even when it isn’t.

It is so debilitating that it leaves a part of you atrophied. I imagine a part of my brain permanently unlit, soft and grey and ashy next to vibrant pink squishiness all lit up by the sparkling blue neutrons that run through it like fairy lights.

This dead part of me — well. It will always be a part of me.

It helped to write about the kind of depression I experienced in my early twenties in Bitter Sweet. Readers have told me that this element of the story has both resonated with and comforted them. I love hearing this. It makes me feel like my illness has in some small way been helpful and if you can turn something as shitty as depression into something vaguely good, then that feels like success.

But there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t fear its return. I am too busy to get ill. Or, maybe, if I come at this from a different angle, I am so busy because I worry that it might creep in if I sit still. I suspect that some of the speed and urgency to my writing comes from my fear that at any moment I could be grounded indefinitely.

I have too much that I need to do with the years I have left, and that stirs something like panic. I came to both parenting and writing late, and I want to cram as much of both into my life as possible. I don’t want to miss anything of my daughter Astrid’s life, even the big bit I know I can’t be there for, short of something truly remarkable happening in science that offers the opportunity for me to live as an animated head in a jar.

As a child, I was so hyperaware of the head-start my parents had on me, and that they wouldn’t be around forever. Now I feel it in reverse. I don’t want to live a day without seeing her. Parenting is soft and hard and bitter and sweet. You think constantly about a future you might not get to appear in.

Last time I ‘got sunk’ and had a depressive episode, which was during COVID (I mean, most people went a bit mad, but I went really mad) it was the most long-lasting episode of my life. It look me close to two years to feel well again, and the version of myself I would have recognised from before was long gone. At one point I considered ECT; I was really desperate. Once the worst of it was over, I was left with this flatness, this dull hum in my head. I thought I would never feel happiness again.

But I did. It lifted, slowly, imperceptibly so. It always does, if you can stick around and bear it.

(I beg you, if you are in it, please stick around and try and bear it. It will lift but you have to be here for that to happen.)

Like everyone, I have low days, and that’s OK. I am hypervigilant for those Mean Reds that would, given the chance, send me to my bed and leave me there, weeping, sleeping, wanting to die. I spend a lot of time giving words to how I feel day-to-day, describing the experience of being me inside my head, because I know this helps. I’m taking extra care to eat. To be sociable. To create, to write.

I understand there is a clear difference between feeling a bit low and sad and being on the precipice of a deep depression. In the past I have been so watchful and so terrified that I have run to my psychiatrist and psychotherapist at the slightest hint of extended low mood and anxiety only to be reassured that I’m OK, that I’m just feeling the natural ebbs and lows of life.

Sadness, pain, anxiety, these things are useful and inevitable. They are a part of life. They can’t be eliminated and just need to be felt and tolerated and listened to, even when they cause us discomfort.

I am not good at discomfort. I don’t think any of us are. I think this is the very root of many of our collective problems. We all want to be fine all the time, like happiness is normal!

In spite of all of it, all the sadness, the fear, the fucking inevitability of it all, I persist. I am holding on, back straight, head high. My grip on the guardrail feels strong. I am surprised by myself and by my calmness and my level head and my steady hand.

For anyone out there that is feeling less than sparkly, anyone that is ‘just’ surviving, that is living in the shadow of serious mental illness, I wish you well. I wish you sleep and a smoothie and a sympathetic GP receptionist to speak to. I wish you a bowl of buttery spaghetti that you can face eating, a nourishing time with people who love you, creativity and a good walk and a funny podcast. I wish you medication that works with minimal side effects. I wish you the strength and patience required to get through this bad moment knowing that it isn’t forever; because it really isn’t forever. I promise you.

My novel Bitter Sweet is out now all over the world. You can order from the US HERE and the UK HERE. Please subscribe and share this post if you enjoyed reading it. Thank you! Keep reading for this week’s recommendations…

BIG FEELINGS RECOMMENDS:

• I listened to my lovely friend Julia Raeside’s TV podcast Box of Delights because I’ve recorded a few episodes with her which will be out soon, when she relaunches the with a new series. It is clever and funny, as is Julia’s novel Don’t Make Me Laugh which is out now in paperback.

  

• I watched The Ballad of Wallis Island and it is really a very special wee film and I can’t find a single fault in it. Absolute perfect and this is the weather for it!

• My favourite (and most complimented) item of clothing, this cardigan made by Helen from Resting Stitch Face, has come out of the closet and I am delighted that it is cool enough to wear it again.

  

  The best cardigan. Photo taken outside the wonderful Bard Books in Bethnal Green, London, in March