World Mental Health Day

Were I a more courageous man than I am then we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd be dead, my life taken by my own hand. Lucky for you, then, that I don't have the required level of courage. It leaves me here to write blogs for you to read.

Today, I learn, it is World Mental Health Day. Apparently, this is on October 10th every year. I chuckle a little because only last night I fired off a sarcastic tweet about "every day being something or other day" these days. Lots of those days are mere advertising campaigns and none of them are really official days for anything. Its marketing and you are being sold something. But then, irony of ironies, the next morning World Mental Health Day turns up. If today is the day that mental health is being sold then I'm all for it because today I'm here to tell you that lack of mental health is no walk in the park. 

And I can speak from some considerable experience. I can't say exactly when my life began to go out of shape. Maybe it was as early as age 10. Maybe even before. But certainly by ages 14-16 I was disturbed enough to have appointments with an educational psychologist. I treated it as a game in which my task was to convince the doctor that I was a normal boy feeling fine. I guess I did a good enough job because I only saw him a few times and no further action was taken. But one morning when I woke up, aged 19, I thought, genuinely and completely, that I was about to die and then I might have wished that there had been some more rigorous investigation at an earlier stage. I was experiencing my first full blown, thorough-going panic attack. I was leant over the kitchen sink, cold tap running, sweating like a pig as I dry heaved. I really did think I was going to die. My head was racing. I had no idea what was happening. I felt terrified for my life. When the moment passed, as I've learned through multiple episodes since it always does, I spent the rest of the day a drained zombie, unable to think or eat. 

That first panic attack was over 28 years ago. And I'm still very aware as I write today's blog for you now that I could have another at any time. One does not become immune to them. I did, for a time, have a few good years in the intervening period when the fog that descended on my personality with that first attack cleared a little and a bit of sunshine shone into my life. But circumstances change and you can find yourself back at square one. In that intervening period I learned many things, not least that the attack I'd suffered and repeated many times since was not just about "external circumstances". It was quite likely very much something to do with who I am physically as a person too. There is a history of mental health problems in my family and so its more than possible that I was vulnerable to such problems even from my very birth. Since that first attack I've had many more. I've found myself terrified on trains, buses, planes and just out in public. Its worse if I'm in public because people might see me and stare and wonder if I'm mad. I've seen the look in their eyes as they shy away. But I'm not mad. I'm just scared and asking myself "Why is this happening to me?" And sweating like a pig.

Having such anxiety problems changes your life. When told you've been invited to a party, for example, you might be thrilled at the idea there's fun to be had and laughs to share. I would be worried in case I felt a panic coming on. I'd be asking what I might do if I started to feel bad. I wouldn't want anyone to know. Probably best I make up some excuse not to go, I'd think to myself. That solves all the problems that I'm imagining and anticipating in my head. And experience would back this up because I've been in so many places at so many times sweating my balls off and not wanting to be there, a rising fear filling my mind, my guts churning, just wishing I could get out, run away and escape. Because I know if I could only step out of that door and leave this situation the symptoms I'm experiencing would disappear just like that *snaps fingers*. But, knowing all that, it turns you into a person who takes the easy path all the time, the path of least resistance, the path that doesn't lead to horrible feelings and mental struggle with yourself. Could you really blame me for becoming a hermit, a recluse, one who just wants to live without the gaze of others?

But there's more. Life doesn't stand still. I read in an article for World Mental Health Day that "mixed anxiety and depression is the most common form of mental disorder in Britain". I can well believe it. I suffer from it. I can feel it now in the regular headache I've developed over the last 12 months. (I'd never had a headache in 47 years before that.) I've become so very attuned to every twitch and burble of my body. I've become over-sensitive. Every pain I fear might turn into an agony. Every twitch might become another problem. I live daily in fear of pain and agony and physical struggle. Each day is turned into a waiting for something bad to happen. Imagine just that burden on your mind besides anything else you might have going on in your life. And its this sense of always having things "on my mind" that becomes a problem too. I'm never free. There are few moments in which care is abandoned and the moment becomes one of enjoyment. You become a person who is constantly monitoring themselves, always on watch, forever on the lookout. "When is the next bad thing going to happen?" is always on your mind. You try to negotiate your life around all the perceived problems of being yourself in the world. And there's never an off day from this job. Its 24/7/365. And the question keeps rearing up in your head "How do you escape a problem when the problem is you yourself?"

This blog is not really about me and its certainly not to say "Poor me, look at me, have sympathy for me". But I think that sharing personal thoughts and feelings is helpful because maybe it jolts one or two people into realisation to know that people suffering from mental health issues might feel this way and, for some others, it will make them realize that there are other people out there who feel this way too. Mental health issues are not uncommon, whether temporary or of the more permanent kind, and the Mental Health Foundation estimate that 1 person in 6 likely experienced a common mental health problem in the last week alone. Expand the time frame and more and more people will know what it is like to have experienced such things. One of the immediate thoughts people have having experienced a mental health issue is that they are alone and no one else understands how they feel. Having once sat in a support group for people with similar issues to mine I realized that's not remotely true. Indeed, what I realized is that many people might feel a hell of a lot worse than me. I sat down in that group with people who could barely walk without shaking, people who seemed terrified to exist and locked in a prison of the self. I myself have lain in bed unable to stop shaking and it wasn't because I was cold. It was because in some way it seemed like my soul was mortally terrified of the conditions of its existence. Such is life for some of us. We can become prisons for ourselves with only our own painful emotions for company.

But, of course, its one thing to recognize this and another to do something about it. For some people, people lucky enough to have someone who cares enough to take the risk of stepping in, doctors and possibly pills and therapies will help them. I'm glad for them but I also think that's not the case for everyone. For some people, lucky people, a friend is enough, should they be lucky enough to find one. That's good too and it goes to show that caring about somebody in a genuine way really can and does make a genuine difference to someone's life. But, again, this may not be true for everyone. My experience of mental health issues is very narrow and limited to my own experience. But there are many kinds of mental health problems and they aren't all experienced as the same and neither do they necessarily have the same solutions. Or, indeed, any solutions. However, I do struggle to imagine one in which no one giving a fuck about you as you suffer with it will help. Of course, as I've tried to show, with some common mental health issues it can cause the sufferer to isolate themselves as a defence mechanism and this can give further opportunity for their afflictions to attack them all the more. That said, I personally would respect anyone's right to deal with their situations as they feel able to. I have certainly isolated myself out of self-preservation. If trade offs have to be made to accommodate myself to the things I must suffer then to suffer them without outside interference seems a reasonable trade to me.

So today is World Mental Health Day and if you were someone who thought that you didn't know anyone who had mental health problems, well, now you do: me. But I would wager someone more close to home than me whom you already know does too. The purpose of this blog is really just to say "be aware". We really do not know what goes on in the minds of others nor what they have had to suffer or how it affects them. Maybe you or someone you know is that person who avoids things "in case they feel bad". And maybe the feeling that motivates that response for them is something more than just not liking groups of people. Who knows? We are complex beings who react in diverse ways to things. The events of life affect us all differently and, for some, become problematic and even a life-long struggle.

Be aware and have a little understanding. Help if you can. For some people its life that is the hell and death that will be the blessed release.

Life, Existence And Being A Ghost

"Wir sind geboren um zu leben, nicht um zu funktionieren."

"Das Leben ist zu kurz um es mit Warten auf das Wochenende zu verbringen. Jeder Tag kann schön und der Letzte sein."

"I feel so non-existent.... I feel like I'm dead and a ghost."

What I've quoted above is three quotes from my Twitter timeline. They are all, in their own ways, related thoughts but, more importantly for this blog, related to thoughts and ideas I regularly have or think about. The first two, written in German, suggest that life is to be "lived" and not merely to be functional. The similar English thought is to differentiate existence from living. The first is simply being but the second is thought of as more. And as better. The second German quote above says that life is too short to wait for the weekend. Every day can be good and could also be your last. So its recommended that you enjoy and get the most out of every day by implication. And as for the third quote above... Well that interests me the most and it has since I first read it. For what exactly does it mean? Even the person who said it does not seem to know. But it seems negatively related to my first two quotes.

As far as the first two ideas go my instinct is to critique and reject them. "This day could be your last," its said, as if that were some kind of motivation to do something good, worthy or fulfilling. But if I knew that this day was my last I wouldn't do anything. And knowing it was would be the major motivator in that fact. The fact I'd have one day left would guarantee I did absolutely nothing on that day. Because being brutally honest with you I'd be damn happy that it was. You see I see life differently from very many other people and often I imagine that these people don't think very deeply. I may be right or wrong about that, of course. I think they just swallow ideas such as that "life is for living not existing" without really thinking about them or doing the hard work of asking what they mean and if it is experientially true. This, I take it, is the most important truth of all, the truth that you feel.

And so I ask myself why the fact this might be my last day should matter at all. It would matter to me merely, and with relief, because it would mean for me that the burden of this fleshly existence is finally being removed from me. Yes, that's genuinely how I feel overall about life and one can only be honest for there is no wrong answer here - just your answer. When people say to me that life is for living and not existing or, in German, um zu leben, nicht um zu funktionieren, I sort of think I know what they mean but I don't really. Perhaps I've only ever existed and never lived. And, if that were true, how could I be expected to know the difference anyway? The difference here is one of experience not book knowledge. Its not a matter of facts but of having lived. And, whatever you might say, its somewhat arrogant to imagine that everyone's experience about life, or thoughts upon it, are the same as yours. But, and this should function as a warning here, its also dangerous to think that you are the only person feeling like you do or that no one ever has before. We all walk individual paths. We must for we are individuals. But we are the same species and can share and have things in common and we need to remember that. "You are not alone" is both true and not true at the same time.

So you can take it that I'm not buying any feel good horse bollocks about "life is for living" without a heavy dose of experience-funded cynicism. Life, in many respects for me, is for getting through and I have earned the right to think that having struggled through forty seven and half years of bullshit to get to today. That individual struggle earns me the right to talk about life as I have lived it and experienced it. Some of this may be relevant to you and some may not. But, I repeat, there's no wrong answers here anyway. So be bold enough to think what you really want to think and say what you really feel. 

As I've said before, I have come around to the view that life is less about external circumstances, which is the obsession of the masses, and more about internal ones, which seems to me to be either ignored completely by people or brushed over with lip service. Without going into details its fair to say that as the world sees, a world all about possessions and status, that I'm pretty much as far down the pile as you could get. I am in many respects a hermit. I don't fit in and rather than struggling to do so I choose to accept my fate and not do so. I don't own very much. The money I have is inconsequential. I have no friends and the vast majority of people I speak to in a day are online. If I couldn't get online I might go for days without talking to anyone at all. And yet, in a way, none of this really bothers me very much because, as I say, life for me is not about externals. Its about internals and these internals are things I've struggled with too ever since I was really even an adult.

I have not known a lot of peace in my life and this is because I've had to deal with internal trauma for a lot of it. Perhaps now you understand why superficial, external things mean so little to me? Its because what good is stuff or status when you are fighting against your own mind and feelings? They are no use and of no help. Your own mind is literally something you cannot escape and to fight against yourself is probably the hardest battle of all. There is a history of mental health issues in my family. My mother and her twin sister suffered from various maladies and to a certain extent still do to this day. This has for them been a lifelong battle throughout adulthood. Every day for them can be full of surprises and not the nice kind. Imagine waking up and immediately you feel afraid. They don't have to because it has happened to them. Its happened to me many times too. Both of them suffer from a fear of traveling and my mother recently took a short break away with a friend. She was as white as a sheet waiting for her friend's car to arrive. For some people simple things are major hurdles.

But unless you know someone like this I imagine that it would never even occur to you. We all have a tendency to think that everyone else thinks like us and I've written about this before. The truth is that some people do and some people don't. We are all a strange mixture of shared thoughts, feelings and emotions. We each have our areas of experience and areas of lack of experience. I remember once having a panic attack in the street near where I was living. My first impulse was to speak to someone and I saw a neighbour from across the street who I had seen many times before. I still remember the look of complete fear on her face and I can only imagine that I must have looked like some crazed axe murderer walking towards her from that look on her face! I just wanted human contact as a means to get control over how I was feeling but for her it seemed to look like something terrible. 

We hear a lot today about people with mental health problems but it is not usually in a positive connection. Maybe its because someone has been killed or there was "a crazy person" on the bus or in the shop or in the street. Very few of these people are in any way dangerous and, of those that are, most are more likely to be dangerous to themselves much more than anyone else. But, for those who don't understand about the many forms of mental health issues that abound today, it can all just seem dangerous and threatening - as the unknown usually feels to most of us. It is striking that it is in the most developed nations of the earth that mental health is the biggest issue, as if modern society had created its own casualties. And I must be honest in saying that I think it does. I'm probably one of them for I find a so-called modern way of living to be utterly crazy and contrary to more natural means almost to the point of total frustration sometimes. This is not just as a matter of its physical circumstances but also in relation to its guiding philosophies. How can it be promoting of good mental health, for example, that we are all in theory competing with each other for wealth and prosperity? It seems to me that if you wanted to make some people sick that's the first thing you would do.

"Life is to be lived not just experienced" we are told though by the prophets of superficiality. I'm not sure they would say that if their "experience" was as dark as it is for some people. Life, for them, might be more something to be escaped. "Living", whatever positive spin that is being given, seems more like a fabled Never Never Land, a thing which some people say they have but which, for those with dark personal experiences, seems false and unreal. And, indeed, if "living" is merely about having stuff and earning money to buy the stuff and maybe having a status which gets you the money to buy the stuff then isn't it false and unreal? I would argue that the real riches such people have are never waking up soaked in sweat or never being worried about feeling deathly afraid as they board a train or carrying a feeling of dread just about the fact that you are you and being you is like an uncomfortable coat that you can never take off. For some people being who you are does not come easily.

And this is the sense I get from the quote "I feel so non-existent.... I feel like I'm dead and a ghost." For what must it mean to feel like you don't exist? It implies an absence of feeling, an inability to inhabit or enjoy things, as if everything is only observed but without being able to take part. It doesn't sound very pleasant to me but it does sound very genuine and I value that fact for I value those who speak truthfully and not in the words of conventions or cliches. But from my own experience I think it must also be somewhat contradictory for the more I have felt an outsider to my own species the more personally aware I've become just how much that makes me one of them. This entire blog started with a search to discover humanity and what "being human" is all about. Eighteen months later its still on-going but its only a sub-section of my so far forty seven and a half year investigation. I have been exploring it in words, thoughts and music. Sometimes I feel like I touch something meaningful and at others it feels like none of it matters anyway because "all things must pass". 

The recently deceased Italian genius, Umberto Eco, wrote in his book, Foucault's Pendulum, that life was a meaningless enigma made worse by us because we had a desperate craving to infuse it with meaning and have it all add up to something. The plot twist was that it does not. We are just left with the feeling and idea that it must. I very much go along with this thought and my life seems to be a sort of validation of this idea up to this point. This is one reason I've felt the need to cast off very many human conventions which, ultimately, buy into the idea that things MUST mean something, something overarching and over all. But the truth is they mustn't and that they can mean whatever we want them to mean. And that can include nothing at all. But, be warned, what you think and feel must have consequences for you if you do it genuinely and authentically. Life is not a game and you cannot fool yourself. That is to say you can fool yourself but it leads nowhere good.

For me, life is about being at peace with myself. I've said this before. If you are at peace with yourself I think this means you are stronger, more able to deal with things in general and more able to set things in context. I think its partly a spiritual thing, whatever that means, and partly philosophical. I have found that in life I've had to do a lot of reading and much thinking to achieve this peace. It is not won cheaply and it is not bound to happen. You have to work for it and earn it. But I genuinely believe its the greatest prize a human being can have. But then maybe that's because I have to fight for it every day. I do not know what it would be like to not struggle in my existence. I've hardly lived a day where I didn't. But, in a way, I'm not remotely sorry about that because when I look out and see people living what I regard as empty, pointless lives acquiring stuff I feel glad that my struggle grounds me. Existence itself is not a small topic but at least I'm connected to that in my existential struggles as maybe you are in yours. It is good to step back and situate yourself in some greater context. If life is for living and living is a daily argument over who has what then I find that nihilistic beyond imagining. Life may not be merely functioning but living isn't mere selfish acquisition either. It must be about sharing, understanding, situating yourself in something more than yourself. It must be about everything of which a human being is capable and can experience. 

If you would like a musical commentary on all of this it can be found on my Bandcamp where the best of my last 8 years of music is now available, a musical commentary and testimony on my thoughts about life. Its at elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com 

Depression Awareness

Scanning The Guardian my eyes fell on a piece about Depression. Its a subject close to my heart and so I clicked the link. In truth, I was compelled to. I knew that there I would find descriptions of an illness I know far too well and some kind of company in the way commenters below the article would describe their own situations and experiences. I was not disappointed. This week, so the article says, it is Depression Awareness Week. I don't know who arranges such things and I have my doubts about their usefulness but, thanks to whoever, you are now going to become aware of my own experiences and understandings of it. Depression is not a pretty subject and there are many who shy away from it as from some unpleasant, contagious disease and so, if you are one of those, now is the time to stop reading.

So, for those remaining, what does it feel like to suffer from depression, depression as a condition of life and not as a passing moment? The article, and the comments, give some powerful testimony:

"The oddest thing is the degree to which it clouds your judgement, makes you think differently, experience everything differently, even move more slowly, not just 'feeling sad'. Only when not depressed and looking back can you see how truly broken your brain was in that moment."

"I wouldn't wish depression on anybody, mine is frightening."

"At the time you lack the capacity to realize that anything is wrong. Coming out from under it is like slowly waking up, or thawing out. Then you realize six months of your life went by and you did nothing but exist in a wretched state."

"I always thought it was a personal hell, and everyone being different, I found it impossible to describe to anyone else."

"The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment."

"For me, the opposite of depression is peacefulness of mind. Depression felt like the prolonged absence of that peace, a constant sad agitation of discontent."

"When I'm not well, I have to lever myself out of bed, my eyesight isn't good enough to get me to the bathroom without feeling around for the walls; I ache, limping and stumbling, all while feeling disorientated and confused - every night."

"Like being in a dark tunnel where no light can be seen at the end of it. The oppressive nature of depression is tangible, even exerting physical influence as tiredness, headaches and stress. Like being on a futile treadmill to nowhere but you can't get off."

"Sometimes nothing makes sense, even loved ones encouragement and everything becomes somewhere to escape from, to an extent that thoughts are only of methods of suicide. "

"It reduces the world, and the wonders in it, to mechanisms."

"When I'm depressed I'm constantly awaiting the apocalypse - convinced that catastrophe is just around the corner. The feeling hangs heavy over my head and cuts off any fleeting feeling of pleasure."

"The loneliness is really difficult."

"I am in a deep depression because of the situation I am currently in. Pure and simple. For the past 7 days I have barely stopped crying. I wake up and all I see before me is more of the same."

"At the time, I didn't feel sad, I didn't really feel anything but a grim emptiness and bitterness. I couldn't motivate myself to get out of the armchair in my sitting room and do...anything. I barely ate, and as described my memory of those days are extremely fuzzy. I became caustic and angry and hard to be around."

" The condition has all but destroyed who I was, emotions are very difficult to control, and I have very regular suicidal thoughts. I don't take medication as I couldn't stand the way it made me feel."

".. the crushing feeling takes your breath away and curling into a ball does not help. Accompanied by not being able to breathe brings panic attacks and i have had them in multi-storey car parks, shops and out to dinner. Your head feels inactive and not your own, it is hard to capture any thoughts. This can last from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours.."

"I'm struggling. I can't see any positives and I'm a crushed by a terrible sense of guilt."

"My bright, funny, sensitive, deeply thoughtful fifteen year old was diagnosed with depression last autumn. His grades dropped, he found social activities challenging and he became frightened and confused by his illness. We sought help and applied all the usual 'sticking plaster' parenting devices. We tried to make his life as easy and as enjoyable as possible but failed to address those deep, scary thoughts of his head on. My beautiful child took his life in October of last year. Our world is now upside down and we ache with sorrow. Depression feeds off sensitivity and intelligence and needs to be confronted with love and understanding."

"I always thought of it as being enveloped, stifled, constricted in a dense black cloud that would crush one's spirits and sap all one's energy; like the insidious stench that would follow one around and not go away."

"Sometimes when I'm not in it I'm aware of it as a black thing sitting beside me, that I can look at, but it does not reach out and engulf me. Or as an abyss which I know is there but I don't go down."

"I didn't really understand what it was until I experienced it myself, just a thousand days of darkness."

"When I am with the 'black dog', one of the characteristics of my state of mind is a sort of anomie - an utter rejection, a repulsion, of all empathy, all positive relations, with other facets of society. I suppose there's a paradox there: I both want sympathy, and I want to repel any offer of sympathy or support, from another person, simultaneously.

Depression is full of contradictions."

"Depression is incredibly hard to articulate, but for me it just felt like a constant state of nothingness, emptiness, hollowness and pointlessness. I couldn't enjoy or feel anything. I couldn't laugh. I couldn't celebrate when my team or I myself scored a goal. I couldn't enjoy food or music or friendship. It's like I was just existing, but my quality of life was pretty much zero. It felt like I had a constant knotted, churning sensation in my stomach that just wouldn't go away."

That's a lot of testimony but only a fraction of the comments reproduced under the article. I felt it important to replicate some of it because I wanted to try and depict both the variety of experiences of depression and give an idea of its scale. So if you feel I went on at length a little bit then that is why. 

I recognize a great many of the experiences that I have related in these comments. This is especially true of the statement that "depression is full of contradictions". It is. You become locked in a world of your own and the antidote would be to get yourself involved with others. But you have no energy for that and letting others see you in the state that you feel like inside fills you with horror. But, of course, they don't see what is inside you and that is another part of the problem. You may just seem quiet or pre-occupied but in your mind there is a kind of on-going silent scream. Just recently in the last 3 weeks I have begun to endure a new depression-related issue. I now seem to have developed headaches and there seems to be pressure on my head every waking moment. Its a small thing and not acute but its another thing constantly nagging at my troubled mind. When you suffer from chronic mental health issues you try things because you are never sure if the latest annoyance is something once more self-inflicted. When I first got the headaches I thought it might be flu. I have never suffered from headaches in my life before. And now a semi-permanent one. So I took painkillers but they had no effect. And yet, in moments (and they are sadly only moments) when I can step outside my monochrome world of an empty self, they recede. It suggests these headaches are related to my mental health and not to a physical ailment. My life is full of the physical effects of bad mental health from anxiety attacks to being sick, needing the toilet in a desperate rush, sundry random pains in my joints and other things. It comes from being locked in a private world and projecting inwards rather than outwards.

For some, of course, this is all too much and 800,000 people a year are reckoned to kill themselves. This total is startling not least because this is just the people who succeed. How many more don't? How many other people (some of whom will be depression suffers too) live in a kind of hell because they can't kill themselves? A fate worse than death? I admit that death has and does seem like the perfect escape plan. But ask yourself what kind of life you need to be leading first before ways of ending it take up your thinking time. Suicide is never a casual thought or a mere trifle. If you are contemplating it its because you think you have some serious problem. The writer of the article that inspired this blog, Tim Lott, himself someone who has suffered from depression, makes this point when he muses on why some despise depression and fail to take it, or its sufferers, seriously. Its because, he says, that the depressive outlook on life might actually be getting at the bones of a point about life itself. Depressives often feel empty and lethargic, they can find no motivation for things which all seem like so much pointless wasting of time. What if, suggests Lott, this view on life might actually be right? It points a questioning finger at everyone else who doesn't suffer, and at life itself, and says "Is there really any point to any of this? Why should we be bothered?" And that is a scary thought if you are trying to find meaning in something. It suggests that our whole worldview can be invalidated. And not many people want to contemplate that thought. Those suffering from depression get no choice in the matter though.

I offer no cheerful happy ending to this blog. I'm 47 and have suffered mental health issues for probably 37 of those years. They will last as long as I do. I have resigned myself to it. I am trying to nurse myself through the suffering (which is why I write blogs, make music, run up hills and compile podcasts) but its always a coping and never a curing. God knows how many others are in a similar position to me or worse. The only point of this blog today is to say that we are out there and maybe you know one of us. We have health issues and these issues affect us daily, maybe they even change our personalities. No one really knows what goes on inside someone else's head but it might not be pleasant and maybe is even almost unbearable. It can sometimes feel like a constant state of grief but one that seems to have no context or originating point. Its like its always been there, dark and featureless. In the end you have to make the best of it. Today I have sung as I walked, looked at the blue sky and written this blog. All of these things have taken my mind off it to some degree. Of course, there are lulls in between where it must be faced again. This is life for some people. A friend can help too. If you can manage to find one. Its insidious that all too many people with mental health issues are also alone or lonely and this is a vicious circle which often makes things worse.

But what can you do? Life rolls on...