One for the Road: Bad mood rising

Of late, I’ve noticed – well, more accurately, it’s been brought to my attention – that I’m falling into far more funks of bad form than usual. Which is no craic for anybody.

Symptoms, I’m told, include: Monosyllabism, the deliberate misconstrual of well-intentioned remarks, overuse of sarcasm, an inability to decide what I want to eat, as well as lots of head-scratching, pacing, eye-rubbing, sighing, faux-yawning, fidgeting and muffled cursing.

Add to that an almost total loss of self-awareness, which, I am reliably informed, manifests most infuriatingly as a point-blank refusal to accept any responsibility for the fact that I – and, by extension, those around me – are feeling so miserable, and you can see why I’ve been pulled on it.

For the empathetic reader who is beginning to worry about me, please don’t.

It’s not that my upbeat disposition is being swallowed whole by the black moods of a serious depression.

It’s more that – in a much less excusable, slightly pathetic way -each week I’m losing hours of happiness because I’ve yet again been blindsided by another strange spell of shallow, nebulous, but maddeningly intransigent, sulkiness.

It’s hard to describe the subjective experience, but it’s sort of like being slowly consumed by a vague, nondescript, shadow of scunderedness – small, since it’s born of pretty much nothing, but still it leaves little room for generosity or optimism.

And it’s like quicksand; the more you struggle, the deeper you sink.

Thankfully, as far as I can tell, it’s not pathological.

Think hormonal teenager in need of a good cry in his bedroom rather than the person whose suffering needs professional intervention. Although I know those two examples can overlap.

Anyway, to keep this column at the lighter level of my own neurosis, here’s a transcript that provides a classic example of the sort of ingenious out-of-the-blue antagonism that happens when this kind of mood I’ve been on about comes into contact with another.

“Are you alright?”

“Aye, I’m grand.”

“It’s just, ye don’t seem grand.”

“Right. Well I am grand.”

“Okay, but you definitely don’t seem like yourself? If you’d like to talk, let’s talk… Because, I mean, are you sure you’re grand?”

“No.”

“Okay, that’s a start. Why not? What do you think it is?”

“You keep asking if I’m grand.”

This conversation is bound to be familiar to everybody, and most of you probably identify more strongly with one side than the other.

Until recently, I saw – and mostly still do see – myself as the rational, problem-solving character in the dialogue. The voice of reason; the handrail on which the wobbling party is calmly invited to lean upon so as to regain their emotional equilibrium.

But, as it turns out, I like to give the emotionally volatile role a go every so often, too.

I realise this column is beginning to read like a confessional. Worse still, it sounds like an entry from my mood journal, as to be discussed with my therapist at our next appointment.

But instead of trying to scramble for a funny, ironic ending to undercut all of this gut-spilling, I might act like a serious writer and give you a bit of advice.

For those of you – which is probably all of you – whose mind is occasionally poisoned by the toxic fumes I’ve been talking about, remember that these ill-defined, bad moods are masters of deception.

So often they are the cause of the problem, but masquerade as the effect.

Understand that and next time you might stand a chance of helping yourself out of the quicksand, rather than asking for the arm of another and pulling them in with you – and then probably blaming them for pushing you in the first place.