The Night I Stayed

10. Dont waste time being sad. Count your blessings insted. God gave us time to use it, not to cry it.

It's in blue Bic, like the rest, but the last line is a mess. You can see where I wrote "use it" and then went back to add "not to cry it," and the "cry" has been gone over twice, the way you darken a word you want God to take seriously. Under it, in a different mood and a lighter hand, I had started a list of blessings and stopped at four: Mama. Food. Makerere (soon). My shoes.

I don't know which shoes. I hope they were good shoes.

I'm going to tell you about the months after the rain, and I'm going to tell it straight, because some of you are reading this from inside those months yourselves. If that's you, I'm glad you're here. Stay with me for a few pages. There are phone numbers further down, and you are allowed to skip to them now.

The thoughts did not arrive like a storm. I would have recognised a storm. I had been raised on testimony services; I knew what a dramatic spiritual attack looked like. Women fell down. Men spoke in tongues. Somebody's auntie fainted into the plastic chairs and was fanned with a hymnbook.

This was quieter than that. It was more like a lodger.

At first it only appeared at night, after the house had gone to sleep and the generator next door had coughed itself out. A sentence would form, very calmly, in my own voice: It would be easier for everyone if I wasn't here. Then it would sit in the room with me, patient, the way the borrowed things of other people sit in your house waiting to be returned.

By the end of the first month it had stopped waiting for night. It came while I was washing plates. It came on the taxi to a job interview in Ntinda for a position titled "Graduate Trainee (Unpaid, With Prospects)." It came in church, which felt rude, during the announcements, while the secretary was reading out the names of people who had paid their tithe. I sat in my good dress with my hands folded and the thought sat beside me in the pew, and nobody asked it to move.

I want to be exact about what it was, because I have read too many accounts that are vague in the wrong places. It was not a plan. It was a feeling of weight, and a story the weight told me about itself. The story went like this: I had been given everything. A loving home, school fees paid on time even when it hurt, a place at Makerere, a degree with good grades. I had taken all of it and produced nothing, and worse than nothing. I had secrets that would break Mama if she ever saw them. I had a CV that companies didn't bother to reject. I was a cost with no return. The kindest thing a cost can do is stop.

That was the logic. It was very tidy. It had the confidence of a twelve-year-old with a Bic pen.

What I did not have, in that season, was any sense that the logic could be wrong. Depression does not feel like a mood. It feels like finally seeing clearly. Everyone else is still in the fog of hope, and you alone have been shown the accounts.

I slept a great deal. I said "I'm fine" so often that the words wore smooth, like a step at the entrance of an old church. When Diana sent messages I replied with emojis, because emojis do not have a tone of voice. I helped Mama on Saturdays at the market. I laughed when I was supposed to, a small, efficient laugh that did the job. Nobody said they missed the other one. Maybe they did and were too polite.

The thoughts got closer. I don't know a better way to say it.

There is a difference between I wish I could disappear and the thought that comes after it, the one that starts looking around the room. I am not going to describe that second thought for you. I'm not hiding anything. It's not useful, and the details are the least true part of it. What I will tell you is that it frightened me, and that the fright was very small and very far away, like a radio playing in another compound, and that the smallness of it frightened me more.

So what kept me here was not courage. I would like to report courage. I have looked for it in my memory the way you look for money in old handbags, and it isn't there.

What kept me here were interruptions.

One night it was Mama's knock. She did not come in. She knocked twice, softly, the way she does when she thinks I'm asleep and she doesn't want to wake me but also wants me to know she has been, and she said through the door, "I've put your tea in the flask. Don't let it get cold." I lay in the dark and thought about the tea getting cold. It seemed, at that moment, like a genuinely terrible thing to do to her. I got up and drank it. It was too sweet. She always puts in one spoon more than I like.

One afternoon it was a boy from next door, maybe seven, who knocked on our gate to ask if I could help him with his long division because "Auntie, you went to Makerere." He said Makerere the way I used to say it. I sat with him on the veranda for an hour and showed him how to carry the remainder, and he got three right and was outraged when he got the fourth wrong, and the whole time the thought stood at the edge of the compound like a man waiting for a taxi, and could not come closer, because the boy was there and needed the remainder carried.

One night it was a library book. I am not making this up. I had borrowed a book on development economics from a friend who was still at Makerere doing her master's, and it was overdue, and she had sent a polite message, and in the middle of the worst hour of that week I thought: Somebody would have to return Rehema's book. Then I thought about Mama finding it, not knowing whose it was, carrying it around the house. And I cried, for the first time in weeks, over a library book with a broken spine and a coffee ring on page 112.

I know how small these are. That's why I'm telling you. When people talk about surviving, they tell it like a decision on a mountaintop. Mine was a flask of over-sweet tea and an overdue library book and a child who couldn't divide by seven. None of them fixed anything. Each one only bought the next few hours. I didn't know, then, that a few hours could be enough to stand on.

If you are there now, I want to talk to you directly for a moment, and then I'll go back to my story.

You don't have to believe things will get better to reach out. I didn't believe it. You only have to tell one person, or one phone line, the true sentence instead of the fine one. You can say it badly. You can say, "I'm having thoughts of not wanting to be alive," and then not know what to say next. That counts. That is the whole job.

If you are in Uganda, you can call the Mental Health Uganda toll-free line on 0800 21 21 21. Butabika National Referral Hospital in Kampala takes mental health emergencies, and most regional referral hospitals have a mental health unit. If you are in immediate danger, call 112 or 999, or go to the nearest hospital, or wake up whoever is in your house, even if it's three in the morning and even if they snore.

Outside Uganda: in the United States and Canada, call or text 988. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans answer on 116 123. In Kenya, Befrienders Kenya are on +254 722 178 177. Anywhere else, findahelpline.com and befrienders.org will give you a free line in your own country. Numbers change, so if one doesn't connect, try the next one. Please don't take one wrong number as a sign.

You are not a burden for calling. I am saying that knowing you won't believe me yet. I didn't either.

The night it turned, nothing in particular happened. I want you to know that too. There was no new rejection. There was no anniversary. It was a Tuesday, and there had been beans for supper, and the power was on, which was suspicious in itself.

I was lying on my bed with my phone, and I noticed that I had stopped doing the things I do. I wasn't scrolling. I wasn't checking emails for the job reply that never came. I was lying very still, and the thought was not standing at the edge of the room anymore. It was sitting on the bed.

And for the first time, it didn't feel like weight. It felt like rest.

I think that is the most dangerous thing I can tell you, so I'll say it plainly and not decorate it: when the thought stopped feeling heavy and started feeling peaceful, that was the moment I was in the most danger. I didn't know that then. Some very small part of me knew something, because my thumb, without much permission from the rest of me, opened the browser and typed mental health helpline uganda.

The number came up. 0800 21 21 21. I looked at it for a long time. I thought of every reason not to call. It was late. They would be busy with people who had real problems. I had a degree; I should be able to sort myself out. Some auntie's cousin probably worked there and would tell everyone at a wedding. They would ask me why, and I would have to say it out loud, all of it, and the whole thing would become true in a way it wasn't true while it stayed in my head.

I pressed call before I finished the list. I think that is the only way I could have done it.

It rang four times. I almost hung up on the third. A woman answered. She sounded tired, and kind, and like she was eating something, and she said her name, and asked mine, and asked how she could help.

I said, "I'm sorry to disturb you."

She said, "You are not disturbing me. That's why I'm here."

Then there was a silence, and she let it be a silence. She didn't fill it. I sat up. I put my feet on the floor. I don't know why that mattered, but it did. I said, "I've been having thoughts of not wanting to be here. And tonight they feel different."

She asked if I was safe right now. I said I didn't know. She asked if there was anyone in the house. I said, "My mother." She asked if I could go and sit somewhere near her, in another room, while we talked. I said yes. Then I didn't move. She waited. She said my name again. I stood up.

I talked to her for forty minutes from the dining chair in the corridor, outside Mama's door, with the phone pressed close and my voice as low as I could make it. I told her about the jobs. I told her about the CV and the degree and the money on my phone. I did not tell her everything. There were things I had not told anyone, and I didn't tell her either, and she didn't push. She asked what had stopped me on the other nights. I told her about the tea, and the boy with the long division, and Rehema's book. She didn't laugh. She said, "Those are good reasons."

I said, "They're small."

She said, "They're working."

Before we hung up, she made me promise three things: that I would not be alone for the rest of the night; that I would tell one person in my life tomorrow; that I would go to a health centre that week. She gave me the name of a clinic. I wrote it in the exercise book, because it was under my mattress and was the nearest paper, on the inside of the back cover, in pen. It's still there, in shaky letters, beside a doodle of a house with a chimney.

When I put the phone down it was almost one. I could hear Mama breathing through the door, the small whistle she makes, which she denies. I didn't go back to my room. I took the cushion from the dining chair and I lay down on the floor of the corridor outside her door, with the cushion under my head and my cardigan over my legs, and I stayed there until the cockerels started.

In the morning, Mama opened her door and almost stepped on me.

She said, "Eh! What are you doing on the floor like a watchman?"

I sat up. I had planned a sentence in the night. I had rehearsed it maybe a hundred times on that floor. It was a good sentence, clear and calm, a Makerere sentence. What came out was, "Mama, I'm not well."

She looked at me. She touched my forehead with the back of her hand, the way she had done every time I was sick since I was a child, checking for fever.

"It's not that kind," I said. "I need to see someone. A doctor. For my mind."

I watched it travel across her face: the fear, the quick prayer under her breath, the reach for a proverb that didn't come. She stood there in her nightdress with her hand still raised, as if it might be needed for something else. Then she said, "Okay." Then she said, "Today?" And I said yes, and she said, "Let me make tea first," and went to the kitchen, and I heard her filling the kettle, and I heard her stop, and stand there for a while without turning it on.

I have a ledger for every item in the plan. This one I kept putting off. I'll write it now.

PLANNED: Don't waste time being sad. Count your blessings.

HAPPENED: I was sad for so long it stopped feeling like sadness and started feeling like knowledge. The blessings were there. I couldn't count them. My hands didn't work.

PAID: Most of a year. My laugh, or the real one. The belief that I could think my way out of anything. A night on a corridor floor. Whatever Mama felt, standing by the kettle, that she has still not said.

REVISED: In pencil, small, lower down than the rest:

Stay today. Tell someone. Go to the clinic on Thursday.

That's all of it. It's not a plan, really. It doesn't go past Thursday.

We went on the Thursday. Mama came with me, carrying a flask, and sat beside me on the bench in the waiting area in her church dress, holding her handbag on her knees with both hands. Neither of us said much. There was a television on the wall showing a cooking programme with the sound off. A man on the screen was stirring something in a pot, very slowly, for a long time, and we both watched him do it.