Losing it
Yesterday I burst into tears in the middle of Sainsbury’s.
‘Burst’ is perhaps not the right word. I found myself
somewhere in the region of the pasta and rice section with tears running down
my cheeks. There was no one around to see, thank goodness. I was upset because
I couldn’t find what I was looking for – a common occurrence, especially in a
unfamiliar shop, usually and quickly resolved by hunting down a person in a
brown uniform – but for some reason this time I found I couldn’t cope.
There was a deeper reason for my upsetness, of course. It
had been a bad week, I’d had a professional setback and then my purse was
stolen out of my bag. But there were other causes, deeper still, behind my mini
breakdown.
It is often said, quite rightly, that if you have a roof
over your head, enough to eat for the time being and can get about, that you
have no right to feel sorry for yourself in a world where so many millions have
none of these things. But that doesn’t mean that for those of us who are lucky
enough to have all those things and who don’t suffer from depression or other
forms of mental illness, that life is by definition a breeze. I along with many
others have bounced along over the years doing all the right things, keeping
active, getting out and about in order to stem the awful loneliness, which is
partly self-imposed – an occupational hazard for a writer – looking for new
interests, new friends, all in an effort to find reasons to exist. If that sounds
melodramatic it isn’t meant to. It’s only when you stop and wonder what on
earth you’re doing that those dark feelings edge into the back of your brain.
And once they’re there they are difficult to dislodge.
It’s not like me to declare myself quite so blatantly, and
in an open forum. So why am I saying all this? To purge myself of course,
partly. And because I feel ashamed that such trivial mishaps can upset me so
much. And because perhaps perversely it’s easier to confide in a computer
screen than a friend.
But also because I suspect I am not the only one who feels
this way. We are fragile animals in a fierce world.
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