What would someone who wasn't depressed have for lunch?

On getting better, healing and rest

Mornings at Kew Garden

The other day, I walked into the kitchen at lunchtime and the automatic thought came into my head: what would someone who wasn’t depressed have for lunch?

It made me smile, and also made me a bit sad, because four or five years ago, that was what I thought every lunchtime.

Back then, I was dealing every day with a gnawing longing for connection to others, to neighbours, to family. I ached for a life where I might go to see my parents on a Sunday, be able to help others, or ask someone for help myself. I used to think: ‘What would someone who wasn’t depressed do now?’ because I didn’t trust my own judgement.

What time would someone who wasn’t depressed get out of bed? What would someone who wasn’t depressed enjoy about her job? How would someone who wasn’t depressed spend her weekends? How should I be?

Could a depressed person do this? Well yes, she probably could, and it would feel utterly joyless, like it does for you.

I tried so, so hard to mask those blank feelings. Batch cooking, doing baby bath time, going for nights out with friends. All the while I felt completely grey inside.

I remember reading this article about Hugh Laurie where he described feeling not scared or excited by seeing stock car racing, but just feeling bored, and it being a signifier of his depression.

The day the Temperate House at Kew Gardens re-opened after a makeover, they had hired a cellist and some aerial acrobats to spin around on aerial silks, leaping from the rafters to land with their noses inches from the ground. We went along to see, and my infant daughter dozed off during the performance, as we stood right next to the cellist, the glass and high ceilings bouncing the noise around the glasshouse. Looking at her snoozing, thinking, ‘Yeah, I know how you feel, kid.’ I knew I should be feeling something, but it was a void.

I made a shell of a person who coped and tried to look after myself on the inside, feeling like liquid nerves and anxiety within.

The first inkling of an answer came, as they so often do, by reading a book: Playing Big by Tara Mohr. I didn’t want to play big. I wanted to play small. I wanted to have a cup of tea in bed in the morning and not worry about everything, all the time. But one element that my personal-development-loving self adored was her concept of ‘self mentoring’. You visualise (GREAT self-help word) your older self and see what she’s got to say for herself.

I remember so clearly, so unbelievably vividly, starting to do the Future Self Visualisation, politely asking my older self what it was I supposed to do to be happy, because whatever I had done to date clearly wasn’t it. I was weighing up the pros and cons of staying, keeping the busy London life I’d wanted as a teenager, whether to stay and make things better and to heal and yet still find a bit more balance, or try something new, start again in the north where I’d grown up but where my husband would be starting again.

I’d barely put my pen to paper before I could hear my future self bellowing down the lines: ‘JUST GO.’

With shock, I thought about all the things that would be needed; a new job each, to sell this house we’d scrimped and saved to get and put so much work into, the unsettling of our daughter, leaving loved ones here. And thing number one - persuade my husband, who loved London deeply, to leave.

Just go. It seemed so simple.

Yet the urge was infinitely stronger than the plan.

But as I began to plot out a few ideas, something very odd happened. Call it synchronicity (Julia Cameron absolutely would), or luck, but one by one, as I started to nervously look to the future, things began to sort themselves out.

The chaos didn’t last for long. In fact, once the maelstrom of movement began, inwardly I felt the calmest I had in years. It felt like that old saying: Leap and the net will appear.

A job, a neighbourhood, a future. A house with a For Sale sign outside.

A viewing on our house from a friendly family where the woman was so pregnant that she could barely fit through the tiny doorways of our small house.

A knock on the door from her partner after we’ve waved them off into the November night: ‘Listen. We’re honest, straightforward people. We just want to move in before the baby arrives. How soon can we do this?’

Five weeks.

We packed up and moved five weeks and two days after they had come round for the first viewing. They did a Hindu new home ceremony with us the week before they moved in, because they wanted to move on a particular day auspicious to their calendar. As they lit candles and stuck incense sticks in bananas and put images of Ganesh in the kitchen and sang and prayed and invited us to join in, I thought, this is their home now.

Our future is elsewhere.

We moved, and whether it was just time, or lockdown, or lifestyle changes, but the days where I had to wonder what a non-depressed person would do, or eat, or say, became fewer and fewer until, standing in the new kitchen, I realised with a grin that it had been months since I wondered what a non-depressed person would do.

Because I was doing it. She was me.

— Alice x