‘My depression ate me up and stopped me doing the thing in life I loved the most – cooking’

Three months into my second round of intensive cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), I was describing to Joanna, my patient and forgiving therapist, an argument I’d just had about doing the washing up. I was trying to explain the enormity of it, how crippling it was, the gut-wrenching aversion I had, not to this task in particular, but anything that wrought me from the insular, lonely cocoon I’d slowly fashioned. It was a punishing, tearful argument, fought over three pans, a chopping board, two bowls and some chopsticks. We’d cooked a ruined ramen. We’ll come back to ramen.

Describing to Joanna the expletive-filled row, and after exhaustive descriptors of feeling lost, misunderstood, alone and sick, she calmly responded: “Well, of course you feel like that. You have depression.”

There’s a common analogy when dealing with depression and addiction: the two boats. You awake on a small boat in the middle of a tumultuous ocean. You possess no oar and there is no land in sight. You have no recollection of how you ended up here but here you are, destined for oblivion, inescapably alone, adrift on the choppy sea. Two dots appear on the horizon and slowly, like an approaching mirage, they morph into the shape of two boats. Stranded, you can only board one of the vessels, and herein lies the choice. The first boat will save you, the second will tell you how you got here.

Broadly, CBT is the first boat, and Freudian analysis the second. It’s obvious I’m not a doctor, but having undergone a few rounds of both, including one mixed with the other, what you really want is to board the first boat and then tow the second into port with you, for a long drink and a chat at the bar.

This isn’t a story of advice or salvation. This is how depression can drastically alter how and what and why and where one eats.

On cooking generally, most enter the profession because they love food. Others do so in search of a home, fraternity, father figures, authority, achievement and, frankly, easy money. A bank won’t give you a loan if you’re unemployed and the world needs plenty of kitchen porters (I don’t write this to disparage kitchen porters; I was one). Entering a badly run kitchen at 16 with undiagnosed depression (it would remain undiagnosed for a further 13 years) is hard. Entering multi-Michelin-starred restaurants – with the intensity and pressures that come with that prestige – is harder.

Depression and cooking seemed, for a long time, to go hand in hand. It’s a misfit, ragtag bunch who cook. Some are drug addicts, or ex-cons, some are underachieving lonely people who think that if they can just cook this thing, it will all be okay. There’s immeasurable wonder in the act of cooking, the transmogrification of meagre ingredients into something remarkable. But often it is done by people seeking something they are lacking.

This was also me.

Self-pity is the least admirable, least attractive of traits, and so stiff upper lip Britishness prevailed throughout my short-lived kitchen career, through restaurants and for a considerable time afterwards. Then I needed help.

Depression takes many forms. For some it begins in anxiety and incubates. Others find it collapses on them like a felled oak. Mine came in waves. An ocean of sustained low mood that over the weeks would gently recede, then return, each time with ever more strength and potency.

I derive a greater than normal amount of pleasure from food, but one day I just stopped cooking.

I loathed myself for it. I felt incapable, underqualified, inept, idea-less, motivation-less and worst of all ashamed. How could I – depressed, useless – make food for more noble and capable people? Or even myself?

Food and cooking habits were abandoned. No more baking every other week. No more ploughing through the piles of cookbooks to earmark pages and no more experimenting. It went from revelling in the joy of cooking to an irrational fear of it. I was reduced from dinner party host and cooking for eight and Christmas dinners to sheer incapability. I was at the point where I had to ask my girlfriend to hide all the knives in our flat. That was tough.

My depression ate me. It chewed me up and spat me out – somewhere between bread and butter and eggs on toast.

I have a notes app on my phone full of – thankfully – unpublished poetry. It’s blunt, broadly s*** prose that helps me feel better. No topic rears its head as repeatedly as toast. I have countless bad poems dedicated to it. It’s my Proust’s madeleines. (Actually, Coco Pops are my madeleines, but since Kellogg’s reduced the sugar, they aren’t the same.)

Toast was the new benchmark. If I could just make it out of bed, put on clothes and make toast, I would last the day.

Toast was comfort. The pleasure I could derive from warmed, toasted bread, with a lash of gently melting (proper) butter topped with flakes of Maldon, was unbounded. Toast was poetry manifest. In toast I could taste an absolution. The shame was, I couldn’t bring myself to make anything other than toast.

open image in gallery

Depressives can be fantastic liars. At home I was a mild, meek, ill, ill-tempered lump of a person. Out in the real world the charming facade never really slipped. I’d shave and comb my hair and wear a shirt and venture intrepidly to seek toast-level comforts in dining rooms across town. I sauntered into great restaurants and with sleeves down no one would have caught the ruse. I ate sushi of special magnificence and the finest, most archaic of French classics and all of it was wonderful and all of it was terrible.

One guilt of depressives is continuing a life where you never fit in, never feel you deserve what you receive, never feel you belong, and you resolve to think, why carry this on?

Toast was why, and eventually so was ramen. Addicts sometimes replace the booze or the needle with the gym. For a few weeks I replaced everything with ramen. Tare took over my life. Broth was my Prozac.

Finding better quality toasted sesame oil (spoiler: it’s hard) and miso paste was more important than getting dressed. At the time I had a remote working role where, if I’m truly honest, I worked very hard for a very short period each morning to give the perception of a solid eight hours’ toil. I spent the rest of that time depressively and obsessively researching and cooking ramen. A lazy one I could knock together in under 25 minutes, but for dinner, for ceremony, I’d spend an hour or two on the broth.

I’d need ginger, the best soy sauce I could find, seaweed, miso, homemade roasted chicken stock, sake, rice wine vinegar, katsuobushi, dried shiitake, dried porcini, lime, lemongrass, garlic and chilli. And noodles. And good eggs, Burford’s, or the nice ones from the butcher, which I’d marinate.

Painfully, comically ironically, my necessary avoidance of sharp things came at a time that medical types might call “at risk”, when a rediscovery of the kitchen and its mystic alchemy beckoned its loudest.

I took the long way round with therapy and spoke to Joanna again. Things were getting better. Time and therapy and support. That’s probably the cure, if you’re in the market for one. Again, it’s drastically obvious I’m not a doctor.

Obsessing, keeping up appearances, cravings for toast at every hour of the day: these were my hallmarks. The shift from bourgeois eating habits to a Gollum-like existence, and back again. I needed to be wrapped up in warm toast and cosy broths and noodles. I needed the presumption of being okay when dining out. And therapy.

The weight of depression can crush any pre-existing ability into self-doubt. What you eat changes slowly. How you eat changes quicker. The desire for any kind of absolution through food is perhaps indicative of overeating: the rush to induce comfort, satiety, reward centres in the brain lighting up.

Depression can take your eating to its most core, most structural. It throws you back decades and tells you to s*** or get off the pot. Discovering that you actually don’t want to get off the pot just yet, that’s cooking. It’s moving on, and action. It’s the nucleus that CBT is rooted in.

Eventually, the washing up gets done.

If you are experiencing feelings of distress, or are struggling to cope, you can speak to the Samaritans, in confidence, on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email [email protected], or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch

If you are based in the USA, and you or someone you know needs mental health assistance right now, call the National Suicide Prevention Helpline on 1-800-273-TALK (8255). This is a free, confidential crisis hotline that is available to everyone 24 hours a day, seven days a week

If you are in another country, you can go to www.befrienders.org to find a helpline near you