I was such a moody child. That’s what my parents said.

“She’s such a moody child.”

“Why are you such a moody child?”

I don’t remember ever being called a happy-go-lucky or sunny-natured child, or feeling like one, although I certainly experienced varieties of happiness sometimes. I have a clear memory of somersaulting out of bed one morning when I was six or seven for the pleasure of getting up and going to school. Yet I’m suspicious of that moment as having more to do with me trying to manipulate the family mood than a genuine expression of joie de vivre. It looks, in retrospect, too theatrical. It’s the only really energetic recollection I have of myself, but I’m sure there were others.

My most pervasive memory of young childhood, however, is of being in ‘a mood’, which really consisted of just the one mood in several shades of monochrome: a spectrum that ranged from a comforting solitary dreaminess inside a softly enclosing gentle shadow at one end to, at the far side of the continuum, the grimmest darkness in a hard-frozen, fractured icescape. Always it was me on the inside, them out there, beyond my enclosure, unable to reach in. And me, sometimes not wanting, sometimes not able, to reach out.

“She’s having one of her moods,” my mother would say about me when my father returned from work. The words could be declined to suit the situation: I had moods; I was in a mood; I was a moody child. Being ‘a moody child’ described a permanent condition, while being ‘in a mood’ usually referred to the bleakest moods, which could last for hours, actually days sometimes. I don’t think either sort only happened as a result of being in trouble (which happened easily and often), when my first response was usually anger and a sense of overwhelming unfairness, a welling-up of outrage – probably a common experience of all children – that only later might evolve into a mood and withdrawal.

Sometimes a mood arrived when my parents were arguing or fighting and began with misery or fear – and withdrawal. Sometimes a mood just fell over me for no reason I could see at all. It would rain down on me, saturating me with its bleak, dank darkness – and withdrawal. Once it had begun it was a very specific event, and although each episode must have started at some moment or other, it always seemed to me, and possibly to them, as if it had already been in progress for ages. Always already – as if I had been born in a mood as some are born in a caul. My parents recognised it, I recognised it. I can’t remember a moment or an incident when it first happened, nor, no matter how young an age I think back to, when I wasn’t aware of being in danger of sinking into one of my fearful moods.

My parents stood over me as I huddled in a corner or sat cross-legged on the floor with my eyes focused on the patterned carpet. They stood and questioned me, always the same questions, and I couldn’t reply. What’s the matter with you? What’s wrong? Has something happened? Why are you like this? Why don’t you answer me when I’m talking to you? Pull yourself together and tell me what the matter is. What’s wrong? Why are you behaving like this? Answer me! The mood, as we called it, created a space and a blockade around me that deflected the questions, like an all-encompassing shield; it muffled them, saved me from them, but, equally, kept me apart from them and any possibility of answering them or of reaching out with my voice or body.

I can explain it up to an extent now. With hindsight. Using narrative for an experience that is, I think, entirely without narrative. (To me, then, explaining wasn’t the point, any more than a train is the point once you’ve arrived at your destination.) It is reaching some place deep inside, a physically experienced cavernous place enclosed by the barrier, as it seems, of my skeleton and skin, and something in addition that forces out the air of the room a little way beyond my physical self. It is a place where I can’t be, and where I can’t not be.

I know that this place that I enter, the inner-space surrounding me – in which I can’t be, can’t breathe, can’t exist, but can’t not exist – also itself can’t be. A room for which there is no room. A place that makes no sense, that no sense can be made of, but which is all there is when I am in it. It is negative upon negative. Blackness ever blackening. Obscurity and obstacle always increasing, arriving at a point where nothing can be retrieved, mended – and then more and further, beyond my capacity to imagine more. A struggle that only and always resolves itself into a further impossibility, to infinity, eternity; a terrifying forever, in the most inexplicably inhuman sense of the word. And this place, this condition that has me in it, while the world mouths at me on the outside, is where I am, is what has happened, is why; and makes everything, inside and out, life itself, simply, really simply, impossible. I am islanded in the impossible, and unreachable. Yet, always the impossibility gets worse. There is no end to the worseness, the tumbling of can’tness down and down, in and in, to can’tnesses that I have never before imagined, or at any rate have forgotten, that imply further depths or intensities of can’tness that I haven’t dared to fear, but I can see coming, or me moving towards. That, roughly, is what it is like being at the blackest end of the continuum. It is like living inside this paragraph, which in its speed and insistence, melodrama and bumbling words fails to convey how awful and how physical it is, and how much I don’t want to be in it.

That is the worst, as far as I know, but it is part of the spectrum we all live with. Between the contrasting blues of deep despair and dreamy oceanic bliss, there is an entire flicker-book of moods. We think of ‘moods’ as accompanying our lives, colouring them, shading them, and of events and external stimuli creating moods that tint and alter our daily existence. Something happens – we read about a political crisis, see a cat being cute on the internet, have a dream, good or bad – and our being in the world is overlain by a (usually) appropriate mood. Mood is a colour wash over that something we think of as ‘our lives’: the working out and progress in the world of our particular underlying self.

We all have a more or less deep sense of ‘what we really are’, which is buffeted and put at risk temporarily or permanently by moods, as a boat is by the turmoil of the Bay of Biscay or the dying of the winds in the doldrums. I’ve been on both of those boats and know the power the swell or stillness has over the conveyance, that sense of being a small object in the storm or the lull as it progresses. It is possible, though, that the essential self we perceive is a mirage. It might be no more fundamental, no more unitary, than the moods we want to say affect ‘us’ and change our feelings at any moment. What if our moods are our lives, if our selves are the flicker-book: that what we really are is a continuous fluxing of emotional shades created and conditioned by our biological and experiential environments – body, mind, world – and there is no more a single self, impinged on by fleeting moods, than there is that single mood my parents defined as interrupting my real self?

Nobody would have said so in the 1950s, but clearly I was a child who had depressive episodes of some sort. When they took me to the doctor, he told them what they already knew: that I was moody, that I suffered from emotional growing-pains, and he cheered them up by explaining that I’d grow out of it and by prescribing a bottle of some sweet syrup that was called a ‘tonic’.

I didn’t grow out of it.