On the inside cover of my old edition of Winnie-the-Pooh is a map. Down in the lower right hand corner is Eeyore’s Gloomy Place, Rather Boggy and Sad. Dear Eeyore is gloomy and sad.

Pooh sings and Eeyore is silent. Eeyore thinks quietly to himself. Eeyore gazes sadly around himself and emits long sad sighs. Pooh and his friends know Eeyore is gloomy and nobody diagnoses a mental health problem or mentions depression.

On reflection friends could see that Mottsu had been rather boggy and sad. His silences, if long, didn’t appear longer than his usual silences. Changes weren’t sudden, it seems he sank slowly into a boggy place, declining into a droop. He wrote of a “..constant internal brooding soundtrack…and overall gloominess that intrudes into my consciousness…. I can be thinking quite positive or lighthearted thoughts and then a blacker harsher thought will come in.” As I recall there weren’t good days and bad days, there certainly were quiet days and there was no weeping or visible angst. Any change from the usual everyday Mottsu was slow and subtle enough to be barely detectable to those surrounding him.

The inner turmoil of a depression sufferer might not be apparent. I didn’t see it in him, except perhaps in retrospect. From the inside he wrote “…I know what is going on and I am aware of all the facts of what is happening and going on but I feel no personal connection with it. This is at the heart of my problem. I seem to have no purpose or spark from within that drives me forward to do something. I fit into the machinery of my place in the world but it is like cogs driving my inert form forward.”

A very gloomy place…and I didn’t see the struggle of what he couldn’t fathom. “It’s the mix of guilt and inability/unwillingness to overcome it that intrigues and panics me – how can I be like this?” he wrote.

I don’t know.
I am trying to understand…