The Black Dog
An essay about... well, you know. Whatever.
I planned to write a different essay this week, until I got sucked into a familiar mood of apathy, inertia, and almost-but-not-quite despair.
I’ve always liked “the Black Dog,” in the British tradition, as the metaphorical mascot for these episodes. Not just because I’m a pretentious romantic (which I am) but also because the metaphor differentiates it from other forms of depression. Some depression is like a demon: it’s there as soon as you open your eyes in the morning, sitting on your chest, and rides on your back for every waking minute of the day. That’s not what this is like. These episodes don’t seem to be anything clinical. While I have a more saturnine disposition than most people, I don’t think it’s a persistent chemical imbalance—or at least not anything debilitating.
I just get visits from the Black Dog sometimes.
The Black Dog seems to like the cold and rain, although it’s just as likely to show up on a warm summer day. It scratches at the door and whines, asking to be let in. There’s no use in trying to ignore it. The Black Dog is patient and persistent. It won’t go away until it gets what it wants.
Once it’s inside, it lumbers around and flops down in the middle of the floor, stretches its paws out as far as they can reach. It always seems to be right where I’m walking: watching me morosely without lifting its head, eyes upturned, waiting to be acknowledged. It stands against me and pushes its bulk into my legs while I’m washing the dishes. When I’m sitting down to work, it rests its head on my knee and gazes up at me plaintively. Taking the car out to run errands, it somehow manages to hop into the backseat. I can hear its toenails clicking behind me as I walk around the store.
The kids can’t see it, yet.
The Black Dog doesn’t think much of time. What good are all these hours and days and weeks and months, it seems to say with its sad, empty eyes. It’s not like you’re doing anything important. Lie down here on the floor and listen to the sand run through the hourglass. Maybe give me a scratch behind the ears. Won’t matter much anyway. It’ll all be over soon enough, one way or another.
It seems significant that it’s a dog—a domestic animal. It’s not the Black Wolf or the Black Bear. Not some terrifying predator that can do its own hunting out in the wild. This is a creature that we bred ourselves. Something habituated to the human world.
Maybe it’s a kind of gateway spirit. The Black Dog seems to like writers, historically—people who spend a lot of time trundling back and forth between the material world and the imaginal world. Maybe it’s a kind of metaphysical hitchhiker. These things have been known to happen.
But I’m sure it’s not limited to creative types. If it’s a gateway spirit, then it finds people in the liminal spaces between worlds, and we all travel through those spaces at some point in our lives. Artists tend to have dual citizenship in those other territories; they’re more inclined to treat the Black Dog as an occupational hazard, part of the landscape. Normal people (and I’ve never been one, so I’m only speculating here) seem to think that they only inhabit one world throughout their lives, and are more likely to get overwhelmed when the Black Dog shows up unannounced.
Those liminal spaces aren’t just for weirdos like me. We all pass through them at transition points in our lives, the births and deaths of other people and of different parts of ourselves. Thinking too much about the past or the future, in my experience, is enough to put the Black Dog on my trail. Unpredictable, chaotic times are when I’m most likely to hear the soft pad of shaggy feet outside the door. And there’s been no shortage of chaos and unpredictability in the world lately.
Again—this is a completely different animal from full-on depression. It doesn’t completely stop me from functioning. It doesn’t make me think about suicide. I’m not trying to romanticize or diminish clinical depression.
At the same time, I don’t think it’s useful for me (or for anyone) to treat depression as just the one thing, or even all on the same spectrum. For me, it doesn’t make sense to think of these episodes as “poor mental health.” Compared to what? I’m not sure if the people who don’t have these episodes are necessarily healthier. Luckier, maybe. But I think everybody goes through something like this at least a few times in their lives—and maybe it’s worse when they’re not used to coping with it. Is that healthier?
When I’m feeling particularly indulgent, with the Black Dog lying across the tops of my feet, I absolutely believe that melancholy is a healthy response to a dysfunctional world; the jaw-clenching artificial cheer that modernity expects of us (Progress! Optimism! The Manichean triumph of Good over Evil!) seems pathological.
I think that’s what differentiates the Black Dog from a clinical case: I don’t want to relate to it as something to be treated or cured. Unless I’m ready to go on some heavy-duty medication—the side effects of which are probably much worse than the condition itself—the best I can do is find a way to live with periodic visits from the big fella.
What does the Black Dog want, then?
This puts it in the realm of a practice borrowed from Buddhism. I’m only familiar with the Americanized version, but the logic seems sound: rather than rejecting the things that persistently trouble us, we might better treat them (and, by extension, ourselves) with compassion1. Recognizing these things as part of our inner world, and perceiving them as beings we can relate to, seems more effective than trying to cut them out or smother them (unless we really need to).
I wouldn’t presume to know anything about anyone else’s depression. The Black Dog I’m familiar with seems to want some food and some company—an acknowledgment that, yes, the world is probably going to hell in a handbasket, and there’s not much I can do about it. But there’s still a little bit I can do. And after a few days of being underfoot, maybe a week or so, the Black Dog usually saunters off to find somebody else. If it decides to stay for longer, someday—maybe decides to move in—then I might have to take more decisive action. For now, it’s just something I have to live with, and learn to relate to with a bit more compassion.
Speaking of which—I hear something scratching at the door.
While I’m not up on my Jung, I think this has a correspondence with his “shadow work.”
One of my stranger friends taught me to recognise the days (or weeks or seasons) when what's called for is to lift the oars out of the water. It's a different metaphor, but I think there's a lot in common with your way of coming to terms with the black dog. Where my younger self would read back from the sense of uselessness and futility that comes on those days, to draw conclusions about my own fundamental nature and character flaws, or the nature and flaws of the world in which I find myself, my friends advice was to take this as a thing that happens, a kind of weather that blows through now and then, never wholly predictable. The important thing, he went on, is to recognise when it's one of those days (or weeks or seasons) and not try to go anywhere, not try to add any forward momentum, because your little boat won't be pointing in the right direction, and you won't be able to find your bearings. So lift your oars out of the water for a while and wait, because the weather will change soon enough. I've found this to be good advice.
I refer to it as the "vampire squid" because it clings to me with too many arms to shake free and sucks the life out of my day.