Kathleen Jowitt

This journal has now closed. You can find me at KathleenJowitt.com.

The trees outside my window are so very green,
leaves bright (the sun flows through their veins),
the buses very red, their white roofs
(did you know their roofs were white?)
zig-zag zig-zag until the lights,
their secret numbers only secret
from the ground. Up here they’re bold and black;
it’s changed, and I, I bounce, I bounce, I bounce,
I bounce back faster now, I bounce
back higher now; I go up
(whoomph) and everything’s
on fire; this world
is good to live in; this world
has people in who make it
worth living in this world
if only for the grace
of living in the same world
as they do, and besides
the trees are so very green.

One of my colleagues has been talking about me.

'Kathleen's going through a bit of a rough patch. Let her alone.'

'But maybe I can do something -'

'No. Leave her alone.'

'But I don't want her thinking that she's upset me...'

'Doesn't matter. Leave her alone.'

And so on. It is the best thing that anyone has ever done to help with my depression.

‘But I was just going to ask her if she was OK!’

'Don't. No, seriously, don't ask.'


‘Are you OK?’ is a terrible question. At least, it is a terrible question to ask me, and people whose brains work like my brain does.

(There are probably people for whom it is not a terrible question. Depression works differently for different people. This is how it works for me, which is why I am writing this.)


'Are you OK?'

There are various possible answers.

‘Yes, I’m fine.’ This is usually the easiest option. It is a lie. Lying is tiring, particularly when you have to keep doing it.

What I really mean is, ‘No, I’m not OK, but I do not want to talk about it.’ Or, possibly, ‘No, I’m not OK, but I do not want to talk to you about it.’

It can backfire, particularly if it’s obvious that you’re not OK. ‘Yes, I’m fine, I just happen to be crying. Onions. That’s what it is. Onions. Don’t worry.’

Some people will see through that. They will say things like, ‘Oh, but you’re clearly not OK. Tell me what the matter is!’

I dislike dealing with these people. I do not want to tell them what the matter is. I probably do not even want to tell my closest friends what the matter is. I don’t even know myself what the matter is. These people are not my closest friends. They only want to help. But they can’t help, and I would just like them to accept that and go away.

Some people will see through both layers. They will see that I am not OK, and they will also see that I do not want to talk about it. They will then drop the subject. I like these people. The only way they could improve upon this would be to have not asked the question in the first place.


Alternatively, there is the Typical British Understatement, gently implying that things aren’t very good, but no, you don’t really want to talk about it. ‘Oh, you know, mustn’t grumble.’ ‘Could be worse.’ ‘Surviving.’ ‘Don’t ask.’

This can work. In my family, for example, 'X is a bit down' is widely understood to mean 'X is finding it difficult to get out of bed without crying, and this is why they haven't phoned for weeks'. But it relies very much upon everybody knowing the code.

The trouble is, the people who only want to help interpret understatement as an invitation to delve deeper. ‘Don’t ask,’ you say, and you mean it, but they ask. ‘Surviving,’ you say. ‘Only surviving?’ And then you have to go into the whole bloody thing.


Or there’s the plain truth. ‘I am feeling absolutely rubbish. My mind is working at the speed that stalactites form, and I am convinced that everybody hates me.’

And people just don’t know what to say to that. Why should they? I don’t have anything particularly useful to say about it myself. They want to make things better. So do I. But they can’t. And it is a terrible truth to have to tell them.


I am an introvert. This does not necessarily mean that I’m shy (though sometimes I am) or that I’m anti-social (though sometimes I just can’t face it). All it means is that interactions cost me energy.

In the ordinary way, this isn't a problem. I can keep talking to someone for twenty minutes or so and feel no ill-effects, the same way that I can keep cycling for twenty minutes or so. Depression knocks that out. Depression kills the auto-pilot. This morning, cycling to the station, I found I was getting slower and slower. I had forgotten to pedal. I have to think about every pedal stroke.

Same with talking. The automatic processes that go into a conversation, which usually happen without thinking, reveal themselves in all their complexity, and have to be done manually. Where in the ordinary way I might say 'Good night - hope you enjoy your day off!' without thinking, today I had to a) remind myself that the appropriate thing to do when one leaves the office is to wish one's colleagues good night; b) remember that it is Thursday; c) deduce that tomorrow therefore must be Friday; d) guess that it's therefore probably someone's day off; e) remember who has Fridays off; f) say 'Good night - enjoy your day off!'.

Extrapolate the corresponding effort required to answer the question 'Are you OK?'

Talking is an effort. Talking about how broken my brain is can be impossible. And yet people will not stop asking.


This is why I hate well-intentioned mental health campaigns that encourage people to ask other people how they are. I have no desire to disclose the parlous state of my mind to a complete stranger or to someone else’s manager. Judging by the internet-wide reaction to the Samaritans Radar initiative, I don’t think I’m the only one.

Samaritans Radar wasn’t the only one, either. It was the most egregious, largely because of the way it tried to use the internet, but there are plenty of others. There are two posters pinned up in the staff kitchen at this very moment, encouraging people to ask colleagues how they are. I might vandalise them. The posters, not the colleagues. Probably.

And if colleagues are bad, then strangers are worse. I have a thing about loud or repetitive noises. On a good day they don’t bother me. On a bad day I want to kill people who use the hand dryers in public lavatories. I remember one day last year when things had got particularly bad, and the sound of footsteps on gravel was too much for me. I couldn’t deal with it at all. This was a problem, because you have to cross a lot of gravel to get to the bike racks at Cambridge station. And it was rush hour, so I wasn’t the only person going CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH across the gravel, there were lots of people doing it, and I had no control over it, and no control over the noise, and it made me cry. So there I was, hiding behind a tangled stack of other people’s bikes, howling into my scarf, and thinking, well, at least that godawful Time To Talk thing was yesterday, so nobody feels obliged to ask if I’m OK.

I dread it. It’s the worst thing about crying in public. I have given up caring what people think about me, but I really can’t deal with their talking to me. They want to hellllllp. Bully for them, but the thing is, it won’t actually help. It will actively make things worse for me, and I resent having to have things made worse for me just so some random can feel better about themselves. The story of the heroic intervention is widespread and, at least in my case, bullshit.

People want to be that one person whose action made a difference, and they don’t like accepting the fact that actually there isn't a difference to make, or that they're not the person to make it.


It is good to know that people care, yes. And it is true that a depressed brain will make up all sorts of ridiculous stories about how people don’t care. But people constantly going out of their way to show me that they care can be exhausting and guilt-inducing. Courtesy costs nothing, they say, but that's not true. Courtesy is a currency in which I am currently bankrupt, and every thank you I have to say, every response to a Facebook u ok hun, pushes me deeper into the red.

When I come out the other side - and I will; I always have before - I will be thankful for my friends, and I will recognise the earnest enquiries for the acts of love that they represent. But at the moment the friends who are helping me the most are the ones who understand that actually what I need to do tonight is to stay in bed and reread Agatha Christie novels while they bring me a slice of cake home from the party I was too much of a state to go to, the ones who are gamely pretending that nothing is wrong, the ones who accept my laconic explanation 'brain slugs' without question, the ones who let me cry on them without trying to make it better.

You have always been the brightest star in my sky, your calm
unfading glow steady against my erratic dance,
and only lost at last
in the quiet flood, the brighter tide of dawn.

Wednesday lunchtime, and a little group gathered to eat in the canteen. I made my excuses, deliberately vague. Going out. Didn't say where.

They probably knew, but they didn't know. I didn't, not really.

A rendez-vous. Meeting a new lover. Or, if you prefer, a meal with an old friend. Both. Neither. More.

I know a place. Secluded, set apart up a few broad stone steps. The door closed, and noise of the traffic melted away. A siren pierced the quiet, but it didn't disturb us.

Half an hour, that's all we had. And then I left. (Leaving, but not parting, not alone, you come with me, you are part of me, I am part of you). The traffic stopped for me. How could it do otherwise? Dashing back across the road, trailing sparks behind me. Sneaking in through the foyer, both relieved and disappointed that the receptionist failed to look up and see my shining face. For in that moment I felt luminous.

I pull back the curtain and I see the ruled-out Venetian blind. Blurred white lines. The light gets in, but not much else. A sliver of damp drive, a laurel leaf or two. There's nothing much to see, really.

Never mind the curtains. What about the blinds? I love being the first one in the office. Last night the sun will have sunk low enough to shine directly into the eyes of my colleagues who linger until six or seven, and they will have shut the blinds.

When I raise the blinds the next morning the light washes in, and I, four floors up, have the trees at my feet. Resilient London planes, stolidly breathing in all the foul fumes of the Euston Road, spread a lush green carpet out before me. A church spire rises from the mass of leaves as if it were a freestanding pyramid.

I look across to the other office blocks (nobody there, yet), down on the roofs of the other buildings. Way down, below the trees, the buses line up in neat queues and swing around the corner each in turn. Buses aren't just red, seen from up here. I see their white roofs and their fleet numbers writ large across them. Pedestrians swim in and out of the green canopy, some swift and purposeful, some trailing unwieldy suitcases behind them.

I was one of them, only a little while ago. Now I've gone inside, and climbed four flights of stairs, and pulled up the blinds, and have found myself in a different city.

I could see a light in the distance but I wasn't sure if I could make it that far.

Or perhaps that's an overstatement. I knew that there was a light in the distance. Not even that. I trusted that there was a light. I thought that once, perhaps, I had seen the light, once, long ago, before the fog closed in around me. I kept stumbling on towards the place where I thought the light might be. It was, perhaps, slightly less dark in front of me than it was behind me. If I considered that for too long I became uncertain.

Anyway, I had to keep on in the direction of the light, and hope that I was indeed heading in that direction. The alternative was unthinkable: to sit down, and wait for the fog to lift, knowing very well that I didn't believe that it ever would.

The fog had been around me so long that I'd forgotten that it wasn't a permanent feature of the landscape. I hadn't just forgotten what the light looked like; I had forgotten about the trees and the grass and the sea. All I could see was the sodden ground under my feet. One step, and one step, and one step, and perhaps one day the fog would lift, or I'd reach the light.

I wasn't sure if I could make it that far. I had no idea how far I had to go.

So I had a conversation with my shadow. Couldn't put it off any longer. I turned to face her, felt the sun on the back of my neck, said, 'So how come you're following me?'

'Oh, my dear,' she said, 'it's all down to you. I live for you; you must know that.'

I looked at her, lolling against the wall like some insolent chit, and I said, 'We're only joined at the feet, you know.'

'Not always,' she said, and I swear she'd have winked, if only I could have seen her eyes.

But I won't be made to blush like some Victorian miss by my own shadow, and so I agreed. 'Not always.' And sat down, to prove my point. It did very odd things to her legs, and her neck bent at right angles when she got to the wall, but she didn't seem to mind. 'Talk to me,' I said.

'I belong to you,' she said. 'Where you go, I follow.'

'You stretch,' I said, 'and you shrink. You're one,' I said, 'or you're many. You're sharp or you're fuzzy.'

'Ah, my dear,' she said, 'that all depends on you. If you go out in the morning I'm tall, and if you stand between two lamps then I'm twins.'

'You come out in the sun,' I said, 'and in the darkness you're not there at all. How can I trust you?'

'The darkness,' she said, 'belongs to me and all the shadows, and all the shadows are one. In the darkness,' she said, 'I'm no longer fixed to you, and I wrap around you like a blanket. In the darkness,' she said, 'you're quite safe.'

Sometimes I think that she's cleverer than I am. I don't quite see how that would work, but perhaps she knows.

Let me tell you what I am afraid of.

I am afraid of getting shut in. I am afraid of shutting myself in. I am afraid of closing any door, for fear that it, and only it, will turn out to have been the right door to go through.

I am afraid of shutting the door and being left in the dark. It's possible, of course, that when the door shuts I will see the cracks of light around all the other doors, the ones I didn't even know existed. But what if I don't?

I am afraid of making the wrong choice, of knowing that it is my fault that things have gone wrong, because I made that choice.

For a long time I have known, in the part of my mind that knows facts, that staying in that cramped little room is as much a choice as walking through any of the doors, that if I stay there long enough the doors will open or close without my hand touching the handle, that I will have chosen without the privilege of choosing.

It is only this week that I have come to understand deep in my bones that the house is mine, and that I am free to choose walk through or to ignore any door I like. Even though I don't know what's on the other side...

I'm scared of what might be on the other side, yes. I think, though, that it might be slightly less terrifying than finding that all the doors have locked themselves while I was stuck in the middle of the room, thinking that I wasn't allowed to touch them.

Currently reading

Beware of the Feast: the history of Robt. Jowitt & Sons (Peter Danckwerts) - Robt. Jowitt & Sons being the family firm, which is now pretty much defunct (nothing to do with me, guv; my branch of the family gave up direct involvement round about my grandfather's generation, so far as I can make out). Aside from personal connections, it's interesting as a case study of the Yorkshire wool trade, and also for the insight into schisms in the Society of Friends in the early nineteenth century. (I keep meaning to obtain and read Portrait in Grey.)


Recently finished

Fat is a Feminist Issue (Susie Orbach) - doesn't quite speak to where I am, and made me feel vaguely uncomfortable for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. Possibly it's just that the discourse around fat has moved on since it was published, or that the hybrid of theory and self-help just doesn't work.


Up next

Possibly something else worthy. Possibly Whispers Underground (Ben Aaronovitch).


Other media

I went to Cambridge Folk Festival, entirely to see Joan Baez. She was fantastic, as were Peggy Seeger, Rhiannon Giddens, and the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.