Life is about choices. You can explain your lot away as bad luck, but I face you with the possibility that your lifestyle is the result of choices you have made.
Said the therapist I went to see last week. Before leaving I made another appointment to see him so that I wouldn’t appear to have the problem with commitment that he had identified. But I don’t think I’ll go. I went to see him because, with the combination of the end of a relationship and George Osborne’s well-named autumn statement, I’ve been finding it hard to get out of bed.
I went to see Ruby Wax’s excellent show about mental illness and in it she said that when the black dog descended she couldn’t get out of bed. Then I saw Kirsten Dunst in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and she couldn’t get out of bed. Whilst in bed I started watching The Sopranos, ten years after everyone else, and it turns out Tony Soprano the violent mafia boss is also depressed, and he goes to see a therapist. And you know how else the depression reveals itself? He can’t get out of bed.
The truth is I have always found it hard to get up. One of the reasons I became an actor was specifically because you get to lie in more than people with proper jobs. Certainly in the theatre you never have to get up before 10 a.m. and when filming, though you do have to get up terribly early, you usually get to lie down a lot during the working day. I thought my semi-bedridden existence was a choice. But now I think that actually, in fact, I must always have been depressed.
Nowadays, anyone who is anyone is depressed. In recent times, the fashionable thing to be was a nerd.
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