AROYO 18 // Library of Depression

This week's episode will be an unusually personal one for me, on a topic that has been centralto my life and the lives of so many other young people.

I'll be constructing an imagined library for someone suffering from depression.

I recently came through one of my worst ever bouts - that took me off work for months and in the end completely changed my life. It was at times crippling, desperatley terrifying and all-consuming.

Creating and imagining a private safe space filled with everything you need to pull you out of your current situation can be such a great mental tool. It was one of the things that in a small way helped me to claw my way out.

I've decided to reconstruct my personal imagined space, and hopefully will demonstrate the tools you can use to create your own.
I also share some of what I think is some of the best writing to approach the subject - some of it to inform, and some others that do a great job of articulating what it really feels like, so that you might be able to relate to bits and pieces and feel understood.

I hope this could be useful for anyone suffering froma period of depression, or anyone that is worried about a friend or a family member.

So to start off with, I always imagine this as an annexe. For me its tucked away in some woods and you can’t ever see it until you’re basically there. To get there, I can imagine a cold wintry evening after it’s rained, and everything is just about visible, but feels quite close in. 

After a few twists and bends down a path, just as you start to feel a little bit lost, there is a one and a half story barn made of stone and wood that’s slightly tucked into a small copse of trees, so you don’t realise it’s there until you’re within about forty feet. So far I realise this is all very woodsman’s cottage fantasy, but there’ll be some odd surprised when you get into the main space. 

So at this point you’d be standing in front of a fairly simple, low, a-frame farmhouse with slatted lengths of wood that extends back into the trees that surround it. You can’t get any strong sense of what’s inside, but you know that it’s ready to be settled into, because there’s some warmth that you can just about feel from outside, and you’d know that inside there’d be nothing you’d have to change to settle in.

There’s a big heavy wooden door that’s all knotted and gnarled, and it would need a fairly heavy tug and pull to swing it open. 

Once inside, you can see by looking up at the ceiling that it is one continuous room - the frame of the roof extends back in wooden slats, and is supported by occasional simple wooden beams that span the room about seven or eight feet above head-height.

The light is full but not too bright, and fills the roof in patches. The ceiling is crossed with shadows of the beams and other objects and bookshelves at ground level. Down from the the ceiling to take in the room in front of you for the first time, it’s difficult to take it all in at once. At certain angles, you can glimpse a far wall, wooden again, with a stone fireplace that is surrounded by soft furnishings and low, deep chairs - but between the entrance and that far wall there are small nooks and hide-outs, and little rooms within the room blocked off by bookcases.

 What you can see is several open compartments, each roughly ten feet wide and ten deep, that feed into each other, so that exiting each one means going either back into the last or forward and across to the next. Each one has to be passed in a sort of vague slalom to reach the back. These compartments are marked out by a series of bookcases,  slightly over head height, of different materials and styles, all matching a different kind of comfort.

 Each one feels slightly different. The first, for example, might be filled with small lamps at different heights, and has a small, deep chair that nestles back deep into the far right-hand corner, as if it is built into the surrounding shelves. There are piles around the chair legs with different titles scattered about, and the spines  are cracked and split with use. The shelves on either side are chaotic and tightly packed, with all kinds of your favourite comfort reads packed in. Yet the compartment you enter into after that has a different feeling.//////

 It’s a light space, with brighter wood, and has a single, orb-shaped light that you can alter the warmth and brightness of, set on an oval-shaped table. It gives the impression of being like a clean, pared-back cafe, with everything in there carefully curated and organised. The volumes on the shelves, and in small neat magazine-baskets, are neatly aligned, and you won’t have to search or scramble around for what you’re looking for. Everything is generously layed out with its own space, and the wood is clean and bright, with a dark rug spanning the floors right up to the foot of the shelves. There are seven compartments as you work your way through the room, each one open to the one you’ve just left, and also open to the next.

Ultimately, what you’ll notice is the space is completely adaptable. To close in one compartment, there are panels that slide out from the wall, and can block off to make the open plan suddenly enclosed. I think there’s a real appeal to being able to choose at any point just where your boundaries are, so you can make a large space suddenly feel small and contained by changing almost nothing. There are also old-styled dresser concealers that can be folded out, and moved to adapt and change the shape within the rooms, so you can always close yourself in tightly to whatever space you feel comfortable in. 

One other feature that’s important for me is the number of quilts scattered around - some folded over chairs or sofas, and some hung up around to cover patches of bare walls or on the sides of bookcases. I love quilts because they’re so expressive and add so much to a place’s atmosphere - and it’s also just amazing to have art that you can touch and wear and cover up in. They’re also such an amazing way of telling stories and I think they’re so expressive of emotion. I’ll actually be speaking to an expert in a future episode in a couple of weeks - Ferren Gipson - whose writing on the art of quilts and fabric history is absolutely amazing. Definitely having her book ‘Women’s Work’ available to look through. 

So diving back into the fabrics and art in this library, it is scattered throughout, both exhibited over walls and folded over furniture and spread around. There are intricate, colourful and complex fabrics that show the people and scenes that represent your life in symbols and stories. They can be found all over in unexpected places to be discovered by chance. They can be intricate and detailed, or they can be patched together. They come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and surround you hung up on walls or folded as blankets to use on the sofa. 

So once you make your way slaloming throught the different compartments, you come after about 70 feet to an opening-out. There are chest-height shelves that make a sort of horseshoe that comes at its centre to an open fireplace. It’s open and warm, and there’s always a big fire that needs to be maintained with piles of wood stacked on the sides and with lots of old weird-looking instruments.

In the centre of the horseshoe, lying about 5 feet before the fire, there’s a really big stone slab that acts as a sort of coffee table/ perching spot. It’s warm to the touch, and scattered all over it are cotton blankets and pillows, as well as all kinds of different magazines to flick through. One special feature of this stone is that there are little clefts and curves in the stone so you can curl or prop yourself in different positions. There’s one particularly large central dip that you can sit across like a hammock, or lie with your body along it so you’re rolled into the middle like the filling of a taco.

I know that for different people this space will look very different. Some might want plants hanging down from the ceiling down to the floor, so getting to the shelves around you means ducking and weaving through curtains of leaves and roots. Others will want a completely minimal and light space with squared angles, that feels clear and uncomplicated.  For me, it’s dominated by dark reds, light brown wood, and old brass features that catch the light. Around the large stone central area and standing around in front of the horseshoe of shelves are chairs, day-beds, and little wooden stools to perch on. 

The fire needs almost constant attention, and demands regular prodding and blowing and poking. I can imagine extended periods perched next to it, making sure it’s healthy and stoked with kindling and logs. 

Ok, now for some of the stupider, funner aspects of the space. So far we have something that I think you can describe as mellow, warm, generous and familiar. For me, these final touches are non-negotiables. So firstly, built into the floor a couple of feet from the wall on the left-hand side of the fire, if you lift a light wooden lid, there’s a half-sunk bath-tub, that comes up about a foot above the ground, but which then seeks deep under the floorboards around it.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a half-sunk bath before but I just think it sounds amazing - I think I like the idea of having my eyes at floor-level so I can keep an eye on what’s happening down there. 

One really strange feature is that - dotted around the space there are points where you notice it creeks and sounds hollow under the floorboards. That’s because, built in at a few different points around, you can lift up the floorboards and find sunken day-beds like big wide soft pits built down into the floor. I realise that a depression library that flirts with the idea of built-in coffins might sound a bit mad, but I promise they are nothing like coffins, more like day-beds for lounging, but where you can also hide away. 

And finally, to top it all off, and I don’t think I’d get any protests about this, there is a massive screen for a projector that rolls down from the ceiling. You can do with letting go of pretty much anything from the outside world, but I am NOT retreating back here to unwind if I can’t keep up to date watching football (as a treat on saturdays) and films. To be honest, you don’t always want to read, and whatever your parents, or your partner, or your well-meaning friends say, sometimes it really does do to just settle down in you sunken bath or your sunken built-in-coffin-day-bed, and just spend a day happily staring at a giant fold-out screen.

So what we’ve had so far is very much a blend of what’s personal to me, hopefully with space to imagine how it might be different for you. If you do have any different ideas on how it would look for you, or think I’m missing a feature that would be amazing, please do send in a voice note or just a description in an email to aroyo.podcast and we can include it when we recap on our next episode. Equally, if you want to share some ideas for what you might want to include in your dream library, I’d absolutely love to hear from you - I plan to have a dedicated part of the podcast where I bring together some of the funnest and strangest imaginings from listeners. 

Anyway, so now I’ve covered what this space looks like and feels like. After the break we’re going to turn our attention to some of the books that we’ll need to include - these are things that I’ve read that have helped me out of periods of depression. It’s most likely not everything will hit everyone in the same way - but it’s amazing after so long feel alienated and disconnected - just having one thing that feels like it’s connect. It can be a really special moment.

I’m going to cover three real sections - and three different types of book that will provide support in different ways. First is maybe the most important, and that is the section on naming the beast, tackling it head on. This’ll include the best titles that really delve into depression head-on. It’ll include, controversially, some self-help, which I know isn’t everybody’s thing. For me, I found it so useful to just read about it. Not to take everything as gospel but to just cover it all and see what resonates. You might be surprised with what you can get from unlikely places. 

After that I’ll be covering some of the essentials from literature. Some of them deal directly with the experience of depression, and others either skirt the borders of it with their themes, or just have a quality of darkness that you might recognise and that might speak to you. 

Then I’m going to have a bit of fun going into some unexpected inclusions - particular writers that I like or that really just resonate in dark times, along with some music recommendations.

So the first section to add in to this library - a part that is absolutely essential, is the section that I’m going to call ‘Naming the Beast’. This will deal with things that are written specifically with depression in mind, or by depressives about their condition - about the experience of living with it. Personally I have always found these to be incredibly useful - there will be a moment when you come across a description of your condition in one of these, or the way you look out of your eyes and see the world at that moment, that will touch something that you recognise. 

That moment, from my experience at least, is intensely powerful. It has the ability to make you feel seen, which might not appeal when you’re down there, but to feel seen in the most profound way at least for a moment eliminates some of the loneliness and confusion that comes at the worst of times. And once you find one of these moments, it’ll just make you want to dive straight in and just hungrily feed off this new feeling. I think because of how key this is, the collection should be housed somewhere central, maybe in that central horseshoe, near to the fire. 

So firstly, what is the beast that we’re talking about? Luckily there are hundreds and hundreds of descriptions and analogies that you’ll read, some of which won’t speak to you at all, but others will. Most often when you read about it or you talk to friends or family, they’ll reference the  ‘black dog’, that’s the one that I hear repeated the most. It was popularised by Winston Churchill when talking about his own bouts of depression. For some reason that’s never really resonated with me. Somehow I’ve always related more to the idea of some kind of large, heavy bird, like an albatross or a cormorant,with its wings spread across you and drooping down over your shoulders like something limp and dying.. I’ve always loved the image of cormorants with their wings spread out to dry like a crucifix. There’s something really haunting and sinister about it and how it kind of mocks that image of the crucifix. There’s a brilliant section in Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry which talks about how Milton puts Satan in the Cormorant’s body to come to the Garden of Eden in Paradise Lost, because it is “from the other end of being, troubled and shadowed, inwardly complex, dark, embroiled with death”.

But some of the best and most moving descriptions I’ve read describe what comes over you as much less there, much less present. It’s a change of atmosphere, or a shift in the chemistry of your blood, like a chilling. I love Mervyn Peake’s description in Titus Groan, which is utterly brilliant - he has a genius for world-building, and he puts you into this very dark, gothic world that he really obsesses over, and takes the time to make vivid. He embodies as a thing without a body, creeping into a room and overwhelmit it. 

He wrote … “The Thing scraped the ceiling with its head and moved forward noiselessly in one piece. Having no human possibility of height, it had no height. It was not a tall ghost - it was immeasurable; Death walking like an element.”... There’s something so chilling and insidious about that description, and I think particularly reminds me of how depression can seem to slink into your life like something strange but complete and overpowering, without any kind of obvious physical change. 

The other description I wanted to just put in here is from ‘An Unquiet Mind’, which is an absolutely brilliant personal exploration of suffering and the mind, and is something that seriously is worth reading. It’s primarily about the author’s experience of bipolar disorder, but there is so much to take from a depressive perspective, including what I think is the most complete description that gets right to the core that I have ever read. She writes that … “In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and deadened state. . . Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enough to allow a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings are lost; all things are dark and drained of feeling. The slippage into futility is first gradual, then utter. Thought, which is as pervasively affected by depression as mood, is morbid, confused, and stuporous. It is also vacillating, ruminative, indecisive, and self-castigating. The body is bone-weary; there is no will; nothing IS that is not an effort, and nothing AT ALL seems worth it. Sleep is fragmented, elusive, or all-consuming. Like an unstable gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action.” … 

So one thing that stands out on the shelves, right on the top left like the beginning of a sentence, is a box of three leather-bound volumes. This is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. This is where it all begins. It’s an expansive, unique, strange and completely incorrect attempt by a doctor in 1621 to tackle depression, and he does it, … , in a very 1620s way, trying to understand it through anything he can, from astrology to demonology. I suppose one thing to be grateful for is that you don’t have depression AND live in 1620s England, if you needed something new for your gratitude diary. It’s not something to turn to for advice, but I think it earns its place if only for its strangeness and its reminder of how far we’ve come. It also has lots of nice etchings of demons, and of very upset looking men wandering around gardens.

So to balance this out, sitting next to it might be the most important and wide-ranging study of depression that exists - or at least the most readable complete study, and god knows that’s important. This is Andrew Solomon’s ‘The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression’. In it the author really tries to get to the heart of the disease. He starts straight and direct with his central point - that “Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.” What I really like is that he distinguishes clearly and early on between depression and ‘sadness’ or what he calls ‘grief’. I feel like this is one of the most common and frustrating experiences of depression - that well-meaning people will try to relate to how you’re feeling with how they’ve felt, and try to explain to you what they’ve done when they’re sad. It’s sweet and it’s the best they can do but it’s just so so incredibly far from helpful. I love how Andrew Solomon describes it when he says “Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory… Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.” In the rest of the book he goes on to try to make order out of the chaos of all the voices that have something to say about depression - all of the different fields and experts in those fields who feel they have the answers. He delves into and explores depression from every possible side, trying to understand it not only through his own eyes as a sufferer, but also through how our culture and world-view approaches it. It really is an essential for anyone going through it. 

I think alongside this I’d want a number of other more modern approaches to depression. These will come from a range of scientists and doctors writing to try to understand and explain it, and then from fellow sufferers who have a gift for trying to relate the experience. Both are incredibly valuable, and will help you to feel seen and understood. So alongside some brilliant medical approaches to the science and thinking behind depression, like - just naming a couple - Johan Harri’s Lost Connections and Edward Bullmore’s The Inflamed Mind - I’d definitely expand with more personal accounts of the condition. I think this balance between information and relatable experience will be the key to building this section of the library. Particularly helpful to me recently have been William Styron’s Darkness Visible, and Matt Haig’s Reasons To Stay Alive - which just as a warning, might cause some concern if you take it out in front of friends or family. I found it relatable and full of lots of really good practical experience and wisdom. One thing I didn’t really relate to which is actually something worth bringing up, was his approach to anti-depressants. The big topic. So from my experience, the one thing WORSE than people trying to compare their sadness to your depression, is the people who are smug about having an anti-medication mindset. Fuck off. Just - fuck off. Get in the dustbin. Not everyone is the same, and some people can get by without medication - good for you, I hope you have a lovely life. Please please do not feel the need to impose that on people who take pills because they help. The one time i’ve ever snapped when talking to someone who was asking me for advice was when this guy - he’s a rapper - and he said really smugly that he’d never consider taking pills because it would disrupt his artistic process and that wouldn’t be worth it, and kind of looked at me like I was selling out. I literally shook with anger. I was so upset and annoyed at him. I think I said something like ‘well you go on with your artistic process and I’ll take my pills and we’ll see in a couple of years won’t we’, which probably wasn’t that helpful but made me feel a little better.

Anyway, clearly not all of these books will speak to you, and not all of them can be right or helpful for your unique experience. But this is about searching for connections, and looking for something to relate to. Equally, there is so so much more on this train of thought than just the eight books i’ve mentioned. Please do go online and look at my more comprehensive list on www.aroyo.org if you want further recommendations.

So now we’ve filled some of the shelves around the fireplace in our central sort of ‘internal courtyard’ - the heart of the library. Building out and around will be our next collection, the things that you will want to find when you get up and wander and kind of visually flick through what’s around you. This is where we really flesh out on the subject. Things that might not talk about it directly, but have been influenced by or reflect a depressive mindset or view of the world. We’ll be delving into the literary world here, because when you start looking, there are so many works that have this sense of darkness and disconnection from the world at their core. Now the potential for things to talk about here is vast, so I’m really just going to focus on a few of the things that I’ve found that have personally seen me through. 

The first is something that, kind of astonishingly, I hadn’t read until my latest episode. But I am so so glad that I read it when I did because I’m not sure how it would have resonated if I wasn’t in that state. It’s absolutely beautiful to read any time, but something unsettling matches with the sort of disconnected mindset you have when you’re low like that. I’m talking about T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I think part of what’s so amazing, and you have to remember that it was properly revolutionary and new to write poetry like this, at the time - that was so haunting and fractured and dissonant. It’s the mental landscape that he creates - this image of a Europe that’s been broken by the war, and crowds of broken and dead bodies bustling around him through familiar places. There’s such a sense of dread throughout, and so many bits that I could pick out, but I think to give you an idea if you haven’t read it, this kind of illustrates the way he can flip from something gentle and familiar to something really foreboding:

 ((“Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song// Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.// But at my back in a cold blast I hear // The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.”)) Also just a shout to say that the reading by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins on the audiobook is absolutely incredible. I literally couldn’t count the number of times I’ve listened to it over the last four months, it really has been a life-saver. And I’m very jealous of you if you’ll be reading or listening to it for the first time. 

Another amazing writer who has kind of come to, unfortunately, characterise depression, is Sylvia Plath. I’m not sure it’s going to be a surprise for anyone that I’m going to be talking about Sylvia Plath on an episode about depression. She’s become probably the dominant poster-girl for the condition, and actually also for something else which I want to talk about - which I sort of mentioned earlier when I talked about that rapper who didn’t want to treat his depression because he thought he would lose his creative spark. I’m talking about this tendency to see the suffering that comes with depression as some sort of ‘necessary step’ in the making of an artist. Now I think all kinds of different people are guilty of this for all kinds of different reasons, but I come across it all the time. Actually in a way I made my recovery so much harder because I fully believed in it. I actually remember telling my therapist at one point, because i don’t really feel like a very ‘creative’ person a lot of the time, I said “I feel like if there was some kind of purpose to my suffering, like if I was making something amazing out of it, then I might feel better. But I feel like the cruellest thing is that some people can turn this darkness into something amazing, but I’m just not capable of that, so this is all for nothing.” The thing is that creativity takes energy and imagination, but depression is the absolute obliteration of those things. It just smothers any kind of intention or will to create. It’s the absolute opposite of it. I mean, clearly, the emotional intensity and depths that people who suffer from mental health issues experience leave you changed and scarred, and able to see the world differently. But in the real lows I don’t think that aspect is even within reach, you’re just smothered. It links back to that Andrew Solomon quote that I referenced earlier, that  (“Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled”). I think this leads back to this misconception of depression as some kind of ‘mindset’ or character trait rather than a disease. 

But to get back to Sylvia Plath, it really has been hard to narrow this down to give any idea of the range and scope of her work. It’s just so utterly alive with dread. It fizzes and pops with malevolence, it really actually feels evil sometimes. Like how people talk about horror movies when they say there is actual evil ingrained in the celluloid. Her semi-autobiographical novel ‘The Bell Jar’ is well known, but I think I much prefer her poetry, kind of for the reason I just said, just that it’s so dense with feeling. Of course we all re-interpret what we read to make sense of it in our lives - and her poem ‘The Jailer’, while it’s clearly talking about her awful marriage and the torture of being trapped, feels relevant for this. So this is just one little section from towards the end of the poem: 

((“And he, for this subversion,// Hurts me, he// With his armor of fakery,// His high cold masks of amnesia.// How did I get here? Indeterminate criminal,// I die with variety -// Hung, starved, burned, hooked.// I imagine him// Impotent as distant thunder,// In whose shadow I have eaten my ghost ration.”)) 

By far my favourite poem though is Lady Lazarus, which I learned in school and has stuck with me ever since. It’s just so disturbing. I think there’s something really eerie and horrible with how it uses really simple, playful kind of nursery rhyme rythms and childhood sayings to talk about suicide, it really plays with you and catches you off guard, a bit like that section I read from the Waste Land with the ‘smile from ear to ear’. So this is from around the middle of the poem, and she’s talking about being ‘restored’ after an attempted suicide:

(“Peel off the napkin// O my enemy.// Do I terrify?// The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?// The sour breath// Will vanish in a day.// Soon, soon the flesh// The grave cave ate will be// At home on me// And I a smiling woman.// I am only thirty.// And like the cat I have nine times to die.// This is Number Three.”)

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Right, I think that’s probably enough of that for the moment. I want us to return back into this space that we’ve built up. We’ve filled that horseshoe of shelves that circles round with a great collection that’ll help you relate to and speak to your experiences, and help you find solace in understanding what you’re going through. I can see this as somewhere to settle down, for days and nights at a time, watching the fire and flicking through this amazing collection. But unexplored we still have those slaloming, interweaving compartments that we passed through earlier on. Primarily these spaces are going to be unfocused, surprising, and jump between each other. I think they should be playful without being jarring. 

Something I’ve found, I suppose it’s been quite a surprising journey in the end, mostly from researching this podcast, is the way that, no matter what your passion is, you WILL find people there that reflect your life too. And this really does NOT depend on what it is that you love. I’ve made so many discoveries, just by reading around the things I normally would, that I don’t think I would have found if I hadn’t been prepped to spot the signs of depression and follow them. So for me, I absolutely love birds. I don’t particularly know where it comes from - my grandad was an ornithologist so maybe somehow it was passed down, but it’s become a real obsession of mine. What I didn’t find until the last few months though was how many of the people I was reading, the big authorities, also suffered from depression. And it’s only when I saw it that I really started to see it in what they did and what they wrote. I mean ok there’s a caveat here that most people who dedicate their lives to taking care of birds do tend to be pretty wildly neurodivergent, but finding writers like J.A. Baker and Helen Macdonald, and delving deeper and actually reading what they wrote about the solace that they found in their obsession, that was something so powerful for me. And there really are just endless examples of this almost everywhere you look, whether it’s comedy with people like Bob Mortimer and Limmy, or I mean god knows music has its suffering martyrs. Finding these people in the things you love, and finding how they coped, or didn’t cope, is in the end a really good way of exploring your mind in relation to how you live and the things you love. It’s immensely empowering. 

I think it all comes back to this idea, which I only discovered really recently from reading Brene Brown and The Gifts of Imperfection. She explores the way that we try to constantly battle with the idea that we’re failing other people even while trying to overcome the battles with our own mind. She quotes the civil rights leader Howard Thurman, who said: (“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”) I know that ‘feeling alive’ is of course what we all want, and exactly what feels out of reach. But in the longer term, I feel like it sets quite a good example to move forward. Your struggle is going to cause you to think deep inside yourself, and that’s going to mean getting to know yourself better. You can use that so that when you come out of this, which you will, you can be truer to what you value and what you want, and live in a way that’s really intentional. This isn’t a call to action, or saying - you know - you should get out of the depression library as soon as you can and go start making your dreams come true. It’s saying use that time to explore, and to find something that makes you feel that escape, spend time testing and exploring those things, so that when you come out, you’ll have a real understanding of the things that speak to you and move you. 

So have a think about how you would fill these spaces. They’re small and enclosed when you want them to be, when you want to bury yourself into one focus, and you’ve wound yourself around that one thing. But when you remove the partitions and walk through them, you get a story being built of the different parts of your character - both the fundamentals that have always been there, and the prospects, the things you want to explore and learn.  Also have a think about what things other than books would make the whole thing richer and fuller.

I’ll caveat what I’m about to say by saying that it’s completely wrong to say ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, it’s nonsense and a really unhelpful thing to hear when you’re in that place because you feel like it’s someone cooking up a cliche out of your pain. What’s undoubtedly true though is that depression will change you and set you on a path that people who haven’t experienced depression couldn’t possibly relate to. There’s no coming through depression unscarred. On that train of thought, I wanted to finish with something quite hopeful from one of my favourite authors - oddball and bird enthusiast TH White - I first found him when I was reading anything that I could about falconry, but I found myself getting really absorbed by him as a person. In his massive, epic Arthurian Legend ‘The Once and Future King’,  he hits on something that struck me as profoundly true. He wrote … “The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

Actually I really just wanted to end on a few music recommendations, just because I’ve made a few recently, and because to be honest if you’ve made it this far you must really trust me. Last week I was driving back home in my car and ‘Black Dog’ by Arlo Parks came on, and I just burst into tears - it’s kind of an account of someone trying to help their depressed friend through the lows, and the worries that she has for her friend, and it’s just so disconcertingly caring and practical. Another that I really love is ‘Stay Positive’ by The Streets. This is my go-to and the one that I send people to if they’re trying to understand what depression feels like from the outside. The way the beat and how he speaks over it is so lazy and matter-of-fact is chilling, I’ve never heard something that reflects that mood so closely. Lastly, something more folk-related, my favourite band Lankum have a couple of amazing songs that have really helped me through. I’d point you towards ‘The Young People’ and ‘Cold Days of February’ to start off with, but just a bit of a warning ‘The Young People’ does reference suicide.