Depression is so debilitating. I wish I could turn it into creativity, like the artists whose melancholy we seem to romanticize. Sylvia Plath wrote so many heart-rending poems. Rachmaninov composed music of such beauty. The best thing I’ve done when depression hit was to draw a sad face in some ice cream and then have a lie down for 48 hours. At peak performance I might even write a tweet. As a body of work, it somehow doesn’t feel quite as profound. And I suspect, unlike Plath and Rachmaninov, it won’t last through the ages. The ice cream keeps melting, for a start. Also, I keep eating it.
It is hard to work out whether you’re medically depressed when the world is actually awful. I mean, with the state of things in 2017, it would be weirder NOT to be permanently sad, right? For example, in February hyper-luxury tat purveyors Harrods started stocking bottles of water – for £80 ($100). Eighty pounds. Eighty. EIGHTY! Why aren’t you screaming yet? Eighty poxy pounds. Eighty!! (Wow, this is a great way to meet my word count. Journalism is so easy!)
