How do you write about having to live entirely in the dark? When I started in August 2010, well into my fourth extended period of total black, the result was not encouraging, reading, in broad terms, something like this:
| Monday: | stayed in dark |
| Tuesday: | stayed in dark |
| Wednesday: | stayed in dark |
Even I, a novice, realised that as literature it lacked a certain vim.
Clearly I had to abandon the chronological approach—but what could I do instead? In the end, I wrote short sections, each focused on a different aspect of my dark life. So Part One draws on incidents from different periods that I spent in the black. In this state, time alters itself, becomes amorphous rather than linear; you lose track of how long you’ve been in it, and you do not know if, this time, it will be for ever, or if or when you will ever get out.
In Part Two, the darkness begins to recede, but in a way that is partial and always temporary. I did not want to bore everybody by describing each of my slow climbs back towards the light. So I made a selection of the most significant and memorable steps.
For people interested in the actual order of events—maddening and frustrating as it was—I have included a diagram in the Appendix.
Many people have generously allowed me to write about them. Names and some details have been changed in order to protect privacy. I have taken the liberty of reconstructing conversations, to give a more complete sense of my experience, based on what I can remember regarding the sort of thing that was said. I did not know (thank goodness) what my future held, so I did not take contemporaneous notes.