I used this photo earlier, posted it as number 350 of my 366 days of delight.
If my difficult day is today, it’s because 2020 has been kinder to me than it has to many other people I know, or know of. And it’s because I can be sad and slow even on beautiful sunlit afternoons with clean blue skies. If this is as bad as 2020 gets, then I will have got off lightly. And I would also have liked to have been able to take a shower this morning without crying about it. No morning walk for me today. No morning prayer. If today has not been very difficult, it has not been easy.
It may be that strange thing that depression does to memory, by which I can only bring to mind a very narrow now and the current emotion convinces me it’s permanent. I went back through my diary, looking for other difficult days. There were plenty in which I felt more or less like this – 16 July, for example, reads:
presumably this day happened? (i was not happy)
reading all of the internet
Zoom mimealong to Steal Away
I didn’t write, but I remember, that I had to go and cry on the stairs halfway through that.
On 17 June there’s:
FEELING ABSOLUTELY AWFUL
which I think was fatigue rather than anything to do with mental ill health.
There was a Monday in which I broke my phone and a kitchen knife and received an unsolicited review request for a deeply distasteful lesbian Nazi mystery novel followed by a Tuesday in which I had to deal with an ant infestation. There was the week clouded by worry when my father was in hospital back in March.
(And I know all of that’s very small beer compared with what some people have had to deal with, this year in particular.)
But today, because I’m in it, feels like a difficult day, if not the most difficult day. A slow day, a sad day, a day in which it took me an hour to get out of bed and tears to get me into the shower. The first day in a long time it’s been as bad as that. A day in which I did some little work, but also read a lot of irrelevant Tweets.
A day in which I wore silver shoes to go to the postbox. A day in which the sky was a clean clear blue and the trees were as lovely without leaves as they were with them.
Kathleen Jowitt 