Quantitative Easing

There's always someone worse off than you.

I was talking to a friend last night and stayed up till 1:10am doing so, considerably past my current Wednesday bedtime. 

I haven't spoken to him for 18 months and he was in a pretty bad way (although not for that reason alone!). 

Frankly I was worried he was dead. But he wasn't. Hurray!

He was clear enough to identify himself as OK to answer questions but not so good at volunteering information without prompts.

That's a very useful clue on how to continue with this conversation. 

So what do you say? How do you get a handle on how bad things are?

I will tell you what I did, pragmatically. You may not like my direct approach. But what do you know!

In my first casual comment I excluded pre-fatal conditions, either physical or psychological.

I was starting to get an idea of the size of the pitch where the ball was.

Things weren't as bad as I'd feared, but you can never exclude disaster 100%. It's not the answers that answer questions, it's the subtext, the unsaid.

Next up, I asked if his wife was still "on the scene". I don't think I said it much more elegantly that. But what I knew of him I thought this she was a likely player in the tale, and key to his "recovery". Silence. Sub-diagnosis confirmed. Probably a 1b  diagnosis rather than a 1a though.

I knew something of financial difficulties because he had already declined to have a pint with me on those grounds.

So two questions and 25 seconds in from a cold start, I think I'm almost there. 

I have working diagnoses, primary and secondary. Neither needed any correction over the next hour and 10 min. 

I had got away with the approach because of the way I delivered it and because I listened to his directions on how to have a conversation with him when he was pretty much at breaking point.

But the reason I chose to put this down on paper was what I'm about to say rather than tell you about how I started.

The fact that I have written down how I started is because I realised just how damn good I am at getting to the crux. And I'm just happy to share.

I started telling him about certain difficulties I had recently. I've had a couple of bucketloads poured over me in recent times.

More than I deserve? More than I'm due? Well, perhaps slightly.

I started telling him about this to take the pressure off him. I had put him on the hook. It was time to take him off for a while.

Sharing my pains was not an intent to trivialise his of course. I can imagine a critic saying that and being wrong. His problems were clearly been felt extremely acutely. It had taken me three separate forms of modern communication to get through to him. E-mail and Twitter failing, and eventually the good old sturdy reliable texts coming through on the sidelines, after a patient seven-hour wait. 

After all, some people might be on holiday but on January 21... really? 

No. In doing this I wasn't trying to give him a dose of "there's always someone worse off than you are", which apparently is one of the "worst things to say to someone who is depressed" according to a Google search. At least I wasn't quite trying to do that, although I don't agree such a terrible approach. It depends how you perform and deliver your message. If show compassion to the best of your ability, people will get you.  What I was trying to do was just give a different perspective, while temporarily taking the pressure off. 

If you're looking at a room through a letterbox, of course it's hard to see more. 

For someone to remind you that the world is bigger is useful because it is easier to see yourself in the middle of it, as a part of it.

Sometimes the world is overbearingly large, sometimes infinitesimally small. 

Sometimes you don't know which world you are going to wake to tomorrow. It might be too oppressive to breathe in the morning and yet you could be blown off a cliff by its winds in the afternoon. You could drown in endless forbidding oceans in broad daylight or you could dry, shrivel and wither in the unforgiving night.

I wasn't trying to give him a platitude because I was performing my own pain for him. 

That's schadenfreude.

I was surrendering some of my personal pain for his enjoyment. That is my realisation, in case you're wondering.

I don't mean he enjoyed my pain. He's too nice a guy. But I hope he got some satisfaction from it. I think he did. Or at least he got something from the upbeat way I performed my own tale.

Of course in order to offer it up for consumption, you have to revisit your own pain, something you should do cautiously, preferably only on anniversaries.

But a short dip in does you no harm. It might even do you some good.

There is a line that I have quoted before from Star Trek V, (and gone on about some length!). 

It is this. 

"I need my pain".

Sometimes you have to give away the things you need.

Because others need it more.

So I was a little tired and tired-looking when I went to the hairdresser's first thing this morning.

"What are we doing for you today?" said Sarah.

I looked at my tired face in the mirror. 

I saw the lines you could drive an Edinburgh tram through.

"I need to be sexed up like an Iraq dossier"

"Oh, right then",

She paused... "what's a dossier?"