I’m pretty sure most of us have behaviours and signals that things are going well or badly at any given time.

For me, it’s the length of my beard and hair. Generally speaking, the more unkempt I look, the worse I am feeling; in other words, the length of my beard and hair are directly proportional (inversely proportional?) to my current state of mental health.

I trimmed my beard to a somewhat more manageable length this evening. It wasn’t necessarily because I’m feeling any better about things than I have done, but it felt like something of a symbolic gesture if nothing else: the desire to see things change and get better. To put it another way, I trimmed my beard in anticipation of an improvement in my mental health. If it happens, great; if it doesn’t, well, I have a somewhat neater beard than I had when I woke up this morning.

The length of various hairs growing out of my body isn’t the only indicator of my mental state, though. The tidiness of the rooms in which I spend the most time is, too. Specifically, when we’re talking about the lounge, which is where I’m writing this from right now, the amount of crap there is on the coffee table is generally directly proportional to how miserable I’ve been recently. There’s a fair bit of crap on there at the moment, though at least part of that is down to the takeaway curry we had for dinner this evening.

I say all this, but it’s entirely possible that it all works the other way around, of course. Perhaps my hair and beard being long is what causes my mental health to decline. Perhaps the messiness of my environment causes me to feel bad.

Or, perhaps, it’s the more likely situation: both sides contribute to each other. I feel miserable, so I let things slide, then I see how much I’ve let things slide, and that makes me miserable, so I let things slide further because it doesn’t feel “worth” doing anything about them, then I see how much worse things have gotten… you get the idea and see how this works, yes? This is, broadly speaking, how depression works, and how it can get you into an endless spiral, circling the Drain of Misery but never quite — in most cases, anyway — getting completely sucked down it.

I’ve been in worse situations in my life. Things could be much worse right now. Certain aspects of my life are fairly positive. But on the whole, there are a lot of influences making me a bit miserable at the moment. Not exactly how you want to be feeling going into the festive season, for sure, but all I can keep doing for now is looking forward and hoping for better days ahead, I guess.