Why I’m no longer fighting the depression.

The dream starts off pretty normally.

I walk down Rochester high street. I pass the pubs I usually drink in, the restaurants I usually eat in, the shops I usually spend my money in. I keep walking.

I pass the people I love. My mum is there. So’s my dad. My late mother in law. My late uncle. The best friend I lost when I was 11. All the people I’ve lost. All the people I’ve mourned.

I find my way to the bridge. Rochester bridge. Google it. It’s not very high, but the current underneath it is wicked. People have died in that body of water.

I take a moment. I climb over the railing. I think about it for a minute. Consider the consequences. And I jump. Then I wake up. Every time that dream happens, my day is just a little bit worse.

And that’s not the worst of it.

Sometimes I dream of the hospice. Rachael and I, we get ourselves ready, we smile solemnly at each other and then we’re in the room. Her mother is attached to all sorts of tubes even though, in real life, that didn’t happen; in real life, she was peaceful until the end. In the dream though, she’s hooked up to all sorts of things. I’m pulled away, I find myself almost reversing. And then Rachael’s mother starts pulling the tubes out, violently, so she bleeds, and Rach is crying, and is trying to stop her, and I can’t do a single thing to stop it. I try to move forward, to intervene, but there’s something stopping me. And there’s blood everywhere, and tears, and then I wake up.

That dream has been ever present for some time. I was having it even when my mother in law was alive. It remains the kind of dream that I cannot shake. Sometimes, when I’m lying there, just about to drift off, I wonder if I’ll have the dream again. But I wonder if I’ll be able to change it. I never can.

It must, surely, be about a loss of control, a fragment of emotion causing my subconscious to rewind the clock, to try to get back in that room and to stop this from happening. To stop it all. Just to give us a moment’s rest.

I’m in therapy now. I speak to someone twice a month — it was four, initially, but progress has been made and we both mutually agreed to move to two sessions a month instead — and we’ve tried to unpack these feelings; to take them out of the box and examine them, pull them apart, try to work out exactly why I’m still having these dreams.

I actually started writing this piece about four months ago, when I was stuck in a really deep pit of depression and anxiety, but it wouldn’t come to me. I kept putting swear words in, or just bashing the keyboard to see what would come out. It didn’t form a cohesive trail of thoughts, because my brain couldn’t do that either.

Now, I’m still depressed. Still anxious. I guess that I always will be to an extent, and the dream remains. It is so vivid, so violent, so horrifically real, that I just cannot find a way to make it leave my head.

I don’t even know what I need to do to get over it, but with Christmas coming, and the decorations up, I feel an acute sense of sadness, more so than before. I miss those people I mentioned at the top of this. My nan also died recently, and I’ve been trying to support my father through that; he lost his mum and I don’t want him to slip down that slope into depression like I have done so often.

I think there’s something to the fact that this dream never alters, never even has a flicker of variety, and that it always makes me feel the same way. I wake up feeling that little bit more broken than I was the day before. And it makes me wonder about the whole. The sum of the parts. The overall effect that depression has had on me these last few months.

Overall, I’d love to drop an Alan Partridge reference here, to lighten the mood, and to say that I had the last laugh. But I don’t feel like that’s ever going to be the case. I think my depression is going to be with me always, and that I’m constantly going to wonder when it might not be, and I’m going to grab on to those days when the dark cloud isn’t over my head, and there’s some sunlight dappling the floor, giving me hope that I can move on.

I’ve begun to wonder if my depression, actually, is with me to ensure that I remember those days, regardless of my brain trying to ensure I only remember the bad bits.

I can sit down and think about a multitude of those decent, sunlit days: When I got married to my soulmate; our first date, when she saw a painting of Matilda holding that newspaper that is way too big for her, and swooned; her birthday that year, when she unwrapped that very painting, that I had phoned eight different shops trying to track down; the days with my mum, in the stands at Tottenham, watching ‘our boys’; meeting Rachael’s beautiful niece, who is still a toddler, and falling pretty hopelessly in love with her; spending evenings with my family playing card games and Monopoly and seeing my dad get angry when I buy Mayfair ahead of him; those unexpected conversations in pubs, where it gets a bit too deep with your mates, but you end it with a hug, and an ‘I’m here for you mate’, and you mean it.

I guess at the end, when we look down the barrel and realise that this might be it, the aim is to have accumulated enough of those days to be able to say, ‘that was alright, that’, and then slip away peacefully, a smile rather than a frown on your face.

Over these past few years I’ve lost too many people close to me and it has very nearly ruined me, but I choose to view these years as a testing ground, an examination of character, a view into the man I want to be; if I can get through this, I can get through anything.

And if you read this, and you identify with the subject matter, or just find yourself nodding along, know this: You can get through it too. Trust me.