Blame it on the sunshine…
Depression can be caused by all manner of crises
I have recently been suffering from depression. Although I’m about to make light of it, this was not a comic depression, but three weeks of low-self worth, a constant listlessness, violent mood swings and a general feeling that everything is rubbish and shows no sign of ending – a bit like Eastenders really.
I have been at a loss as to what is wrong with me. Could it be a Mid-Island Crisis? This is to do with the realisation that you’re no longer living in a proper country with real people who really don’t care about your private life and what car you are driving. No, it wasn’t that. Was it a Mid-Lunch crisis? That moment in life when someone else is buying you lunch in an expensive restaurant, you’re perfectly happy, and just when you are getting happy on your second Chardonnay, you look at your watch, realise it’s school pick-up time and all illusions of being single again put you off your food. Could it be Seasonal Affective Disorder, brought on by the endless sunshine in my case? Well, I believe in the concept, but, in practice, I’m with Billy Connolly on this: there’s no such thing as bad weather (and for me the sun means bad), just inappropriate clothing. Do I have status anxiety? Just three years ago, I was fronting a successful business with a great turnover, and then I sold the company. Semi-retirement at 37 is unusual, but the upsides are manifold: I can watch The Sopranos on Sky whenever I want, have coffee with friends in the morning, fit my work in between and still have time to be a mum. Maybe it was a sense of impending middle age. I’ve just bought a Prada twin-set that would look good on my granny, and I have developed an interest in gardening.
No, it was none of the above. Nor could I blame it on my other half for moving to the other side of the earth to work for a year. Nor could I blame it on the fact that it was only the beginning of November and that the Christmas lights were going up. There was a clue to my malaise though. My son spotted it after I came home from the office. The highlight of my work is when I unpack next season’s fashion collections from the boxes and hang them up in my showroom. The upside of working in fashion means you get to see next year’s trends a year before anyone else, the samples usually come in a model size 10 and if you are lucky, you get to try them on and keep the pick of the crop at the end of your sales meetings. That is where it started. ‘You are in a bad mood because you couldn’t fit into the samples, right?’ he said, with an ironic little grin on his face. ‘Mum, face it, you will never be a small again’. I was suffering from a Mid-Size Crisis. I was powerless over a metabolism that used to eat anything and everything and never put on an ounce and instead of accepting it I was letting it get me down.
My mood swings, underlying grief and sense of desperation stemmed from the fact that I was no longer able to fit into that size 10 crochet pencil skirt. There I was, always taking my body for granted, constantly slagging people off for going on stupid diets and messing up their metabolisms and it had finally happened to me. The scales were the same, but I had obviously spread somewhere.
I have eased my problem by rejoining my yoga class, where the atmosphere is too calm for me to walk around sulking. I have hidden my Champagne truffles and put the Bolly at the back of the fridge. After a week the weather has changed (slightly), and a wolf whistle at a building site on the way to work has put me back on cloud nine, depression banished, a middle-aged woman’s delusions of body beautiful neatly restored. Who needs Prozac?
