Day fifty

Yes, I’m back. It seems I need this journal to continue. It seems I need someone to keep an eye on me.

I was having a good day yesterday. I got up in the morning and wrote for at least an hour. After lunch I got together with my play mates and recorded the play. (With no one in the house with whom I can run lines – the cats having proven incapable of the task – I’ve discovered that recording the play I’m doing and listening to it over and over and over again is the best way for me to learn lines.) Afterwards I went to the gym. (Yes, to the gym!) Then I did a bit of shopping and then I came home.

I got on the computer to check my emails. Nothing of note, certainly not anything requiring a response. Then I went on Facebook to see if I had any moves to play in my various Scrabble games. There were a couple. By this time it was four o’clock. I was ready to make myself a cup of tea, sit down on the sofa with a dunking biscuit and my book (My Beautiful Friend, the first in the Elena Ferrante Naples series which it’s taken months to get from the library and which I’d started the previous evening, quickly realising what all the fuss was about.) And then I thought perhaps I’d just do the Guardian crossword before I shut the computer down. So I did.

And then, instead of clicking the little cross on the top right of the screen to shut down the internet, then, despite a warning voice in my head that started off whispering and quickly began yelling “Don’t do it!” I opened up the Spider Solitaire site. Okay, I told myself. Just one game. It’s been over a month. You shouldn’t be doing this at all, but surely you can manage just one game? Oh, ha, bloody ha. Nearly five hours later I finally forced myself to stop. I actually smacked myself on the head. Twice.

Why, oh, why? I’ve been doing so well. I have wonderful things to which I can look forward: Christmas with friends on another island, rehearsals starting in the new year on my play. Why the fuck did I relapse yesterday?

I know what Stupid Fucking Spider Solitaire represents. It represents oblivion. And I have used it (and Netflix when I had it) for that purpose in the darkest black dog days. But the darkest days are over, aren’t they? That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m genuinely asking. Aren’t the darkest days over? If so, why the fuck would I let myself  get caught up in oblivion? And why on what was, by any standards, a good day? Why? Why? Why?

Tempting to think I have some out of control tendency to self-destruction, but that is the black dog yapping in my ear. Screw you, Fido.

I think I may have already mentioned the booklet about depression my doctor gave me the last time I was dancing to this tune. I should probably read it again. The one thing I do remember, probably because the words were written in bold italics was this: If you relapse, don’t beat yourself up. Don’t allow yourself to use all those negative emotions that brought you to this place as an excuse to throw in the towel.

It is surprisingly tough to follow this advice, as I’m sure everyone who’s ever suffered from depression knows. But somehow I will.

I shall get continue to write something every morning. I shall continue trying to get to the gym regularly. And I think I need to get back, not every day, but perhaps once or twice a month to posting what I’ve written that day in the black dog diary, because it turns out I need you, dear reader, to keep me on the straight and narrow.