The Last of the True Believers

This is a piece about mental health based on the author’s own experiences. I have no learning or insight about mental health beyond my own experiences so, for God’s sake, don’t rely on anything in this. If you think you might need help, see a professional. I’m just an idiot on the internet. 

The comedian Steven Wright described depression as "anger without the enthusiasm", and I think there's a lot of truth in that. But as a high functioning depressive, I've found some energy left over for that.

High Functioning means you have plausible deniability. You carry on seemingly okay, outwardly normal for most of the time, apart from the times you are not. For a long time, I denied it existed. Because I was fine, doing well, striving through life with a job, mortgage, family and everything. Wasn’t I? Those times I used to sit in the front of the car, with my infant son strapped into the back, weeping because I was terrified of letting him down. Of him finding out his father felt like a fuck up most of his working life. Because I wasn’t depressed. 

I spent most of the next ten years throwing myself into the process of parenthood by cutting myself off from the outside world: friends, colleagues, family beyond the immediate. Not maliciously or deliberately. Small things like stopping sending Christmas cards because it was bullshit. I spent the time I wasn’t working travelling to and from work, so there was no point in joining any social activity in the town in which I lived. A social life was bullshit. And, anyway, weekends were the only time I would see the children. 

By the time Lockdown came along, I was exhausted from the need to keep moving, because otherwise it would catch up. And it does, when you stop moving. But I wasn’t depressed. I spent every night after work in the summer of 2020 playing solitaire joylessly for hours, listening to The Beatles’ “White Album” on repeat. Because I wasn’t depressed.

But I had noticed something: when I was in danger of spiralling into this Not Depression, I would retreat into a cyclical pattern of behaviour: listening to a narrow range of music, performing a narrow range of tasks, watching the same TV shows again and again. Cutting myself off in a different way.

I spent the first two post-pandemic years being angry at depression. I was furious and was determined it was bullshit and most of the ways of treating it were bullshit. I got referred for 10 weeks therapy – online because the wait was shorter. Text-based, like a two-person chatroom, with a therapist. There’s nothing like a total lack of visible human contact to make you feel like you’re being listened to. I found the easiest ways to get through the sessions was to tell the therapist what I thought they wanted to hear. I could even stay on twitter at the same time. Therapy is bullshit.

And exercise. Exercise seemed like the sort of thing non-depressed people could advise to sound helpful. Like taking a walk was going to solve anything. You’d just be a few miles further down the road with the same problems. Exercise is bullshit. 

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In life, not enough attention is paid to the role of dumb luck. I suppose because it is hard to quantify and explain. In science, for all the rigours of the method, very often a starting point, or breakthrough, happens as a result of a random incident. As with science, so with people.

This summer has been one of the finest in recent years for solid sunshine, and so in early August I decided to take a walk. I honestly can’t remember why – it was a nice day, I guess. I walked down our street and took the cut-through to the Country Park, a local area of several acres of woodland and grass, leading down to a fishing lake. I walked through the woods to the lake, up the opposite hill and out of the Park onto back paths that led to home. I picked an album to listen to that would be good for walking – Nanci Griffith’s Last Of The True Believers. I’d rediscovered it, after 30 years, a few months earlier and it fit my mood. This in itself is unremarkable. Except I did the same thing the next day. With the same music. And by the time I got home, I felt good.

Through sheer dumb luck, I had come up with a way of turning my use of narrow, repetitious behaviour into positive change, though I didn’t know it at the time. By the end of the first week, I had understood the importance of the relationship between the walk and the music. The songs on that album broke the walk into a series of stages, like episodes of a favourite TV show. Soon, individual lines were cues to look up and spot that tree, cross that stream. I realised that I usually timed it so that I arrived at the lake at the album midpoint, a favourite song called “Goin’ Gone”. I took to pausing at that point – to sit by the lake and look at the trees sway, at other people and the view – before heading up the hill to “Back Where We Belong”.

I didn’t understand why it needed to be that album, those places, that route. I didn’t understand that I was creating a world to step into – a safe and consistent place I controlled where my mind could race, my thoughts could spill and my emotions could slop and sway like dregs in a drunk’s wine bottle. But it was only for a couple of weeks – soon summer would be over. But August became September became October, and the sun continued to shine and the trees continued to sway, Nanci continued to sing about Rita and Eddie, and I continued to walk. I walked every day – and still walk every day I can, despite the setting sun, for up to an hour. Sometimes I’d arrive home with a chest full of feelings I couldn’t put down, other times, quietly calm. If it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to walk, I’d start to get fractious and irritable – and my anxiety would go through the roof. It turned out to be a safe space for me to replay thoughts and feelings, sometimes let them bubble and burst, other times fizz and leak out gradually. Exercise was bullshit but that wasn’t what I was doing. I was moving.

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Nanci Griffith's music is about being at the crossroads between staying and moving. Moving in space or moving in time. Almost every song is either someone staying or going, and usually being caught between the choice – unable or unwilling to move, or promising that one day… That tension is the restlessness of America, always looking at the horizon and wondering. People in the UK often get distracted by the rhinestones and clothes in Country music and they miss the point about its popularity. As Paul Simon put it, everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance, everybody thinks it’s true.

Back in the 80s, Griffith was part of a scene known as Alt Country – artists who enjoyed a cult following, but were unlikely to trouble the C&W Top 40, much less the mainstream. The enduring appeal of the likes of Griffith, Lyle Lovett, John Hiatt and Tom Russell – ‘country music without a cowboy hat’ – proved the tropes and the tunes could stand updating in both time and place. Though they regularly performed to packed halls on the ‘folk circuit’ in the UK, there are strong cultural reasons why this country resists even these updated troubadours in large numbers: we think it sounds hokey.

Mainstream British audiences don’t listen to country music because they think it is trite and sentimental. We are famously unsentimental as a nation, of course; look at how we react to animals, historic sporting memories and famous military victories. Definitely no sentimentality there. But trite? What we mean is, it’s too direct. We prefer our messages filtered through ironic detachment. Dolly Parton can headline Glastonbury because we’re all in on the joke. Irony is not so much a way of thinking as a reflex action for a nation too often scared to say what it thinks. 

For a long time I was also in denial about Country music, that it was something I liked despite, as a teenager, owning actual records by Bob Dylan, Indigo Girls, Counting Crows and Michelle Shocked. As a Brit, I was afflicted by the embarrassment – I hadn’t yet learned that if you wore a black polo neck jumper and called it ‘Americana’ on BBC Four, then it was okay.

When I heard Nanci Griffith and listened to her properly, there was an authentic directness to her songs that touched me deeply. Of course, they were witty and smart, with singalong choruses and a rhythm you could comfortably walk to. But they were true, too. You can laugh and maybe cry – certainly, I do at times. Because when she tells a story, you believe her.

Griffith had her own long struggles with mental health, partly, it seems, as a side effect of cancer treatment medication. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996 and thyroid cancer in 1998. A case of Dupuytren's contracture caused her to lose flexibility in her fingers, curtailing her performances after 2011, until her death in 2021, at the age of just 68.

The wing and the wheel are gonna carry us along

And we'll have memories for company, long after the songs are gone. 

She continues to move through me, as I move through the Country Park. Going once, going twice, going gone.