Ask Your Doctor

Season 10, #3: ...If Nightwalking is right for you. It's generally safe and non-habit forming

Nov 14, 2025

IT ALMOST GOES WITHOUT saying that Nightwalking is not clinical depression, at least as defined by the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5-TR.

Admitting to Nightwalking—or a history of Nightwalking—might instantly label you as a self-absorbed melancholic or a glum and plodding loner.

Or you might just need to stretch your legs in the middle of the night and have no fear of the dark.

Or you’re just a ghoul, standing in front of another Nightwalking ghoul, asking for its soul. (Apologies to Richard Curtis for that.)

How should I know?

I bring this up because I saw my doctor for a regular check-up last week. Dr. Sharma has been my primary care physician for oh, probably 20 years now. He’s seen me at my best—and at my worst.

No, this is not Dr. Sharma. He’s more Hyderabad than Liverpudlian (image by Jo Rockley Art from Pixabay).

The best? Well, I’m older and creakier now, but after blood labs and a check-up, I’m in the clear for another year (or another six-month check-up).

My worst?

Bouts of depression in the 1990s and early aughts. In 1995 it was so bad I contemplated suicide and threatened my late father over the phone. I was quickly put on Trazadone for sleep, and a series of dosage experiments with Paxil, Prozac, Wellbutrin, finally settling on Zoloft.

I keep these as a reminder of what I’ve been through (photo by StoryShed Media).

Some good news? Well, that’s what my doctor wanted to hear. At last week’s visit, I could see he was angling for a better glimpse at my current mental state.

I was more than happy to oblige…

It looks gray here, but it’s turning true blue (photo by StoryShed Media).

—the Mood Ring don’t lie, doc!

It was a bonding moment between me and Dr. Sharma.

The last time I was on antidepressants was eight years ago. In 2016 I’d come off the roller coaster of a decade of career and relationship trials and needed the medicinal support to get through to the other side of a persistent depressive episode. Since then, it’s been odd not feeling so low. My saddest points nowadays are more along the lines of disappointment or a tinge of regret, but I spring back much more quickly. I can tell my mood is upbeat when I’m riffing ideas in the shower or while running errands or out on a walk.

Now off medication, I gauge my moods more quickly, stay hydrated, and get back into absorbing work—like writing and making art.

Writing Is My New Antidepressant

It might not be fast-acting, but it’s as easy as dropping your ass in a chair and laying your paws on the writing instrument of your choice. Like Nightwalking, it’s generally safe but might be habit-forming—at least for some people. And maybe that’s a good habit to have!

When I’m feeling at a loss for words, I revisit the well (at the bottom of which I first discovered Daytalking, Nightwalking, and Stargazing) and that helps prime the pump. That’s what happened with this essay. I dipped into the old WordPress blog and searched for “Nightwalking.”

Here’s what it gave me back—pure medicinal gold:

…I walked all the way to the Spring Park 7-Eleven. ‘Randy was working,’ I wrote in the diary, so I ‘got a Pepsi and a bag of M&Ms, just like ol’ times. Started home. The farther I walked, the colder it seemed to get. I enjoyed the time I had then—to walk and think.’
—from “Briarwood” Completely in the Dark (CITD), about March 1979

Yours truly in the summer of 1979 (photo by Completely in the Dark).

—That was an incident of Nightwalking from over 46 years ago.

Like it happened yesterday.

Or revisiting writing about writing in 2017 (when I was likely coming out of a depressive episode and picking up the pen again):

The transformation took place in Dr. Buzzard’s laboratory, complete with cast iron electrical personality transformer helmets, a Marshall amplifier set at the highest level, and K.C. and the Sunshine Band cued up on the turntable. Tony (from West Side Story) became the rock star and Buddy [Holly] worked for the corner druggist. A few years later Buddy was still around, but Tony had died in a plane crash. You saw Buddy everywhere: as a bellboy at the Plaza Hotel, then as a carhop, at the grocery store, years later, bagging your stuff, then carting your golf bag around the links, or bringing you and your Schnauzer up to the fifth floor. He was just ‘that polite young man down the hall…’
It’s a rainy, cold night and you’re driving down Highway 61, south where it gets really winding, you turn a sharp corner and suddenly your headlights fall on the ghost of Buddy Holly in suit coat and tie with rain-spattered, dark-rimmed glasses. You have no choice but to slam on the brakes and go screeching off the road…
My young author Matthew J. Durand is, of course, me. His Model of a Binary Universe Set to Music almost presages the Internet—like someone happily Googling random stuff for the sheer fun of it. And like Durand, I wanted to be a cultural bomb-thrower. The character of Dean McLeary (based loosely on songwriter Don McLean), by 1975, seemed too safe. Matt Durand, less Boomer and more Xer, was proto punk. Matt wanted his writing to deliver more than words. He wanted fire-in-the-blood stuff, rock and roll with a fucking flaming typewriter. He wanted his story to be as electrifying as Jimi Hendrix onstage.
And he wanted something he could stuff in a knapsack for later down the road.”
—from “Keepsake (Part 2)” CITD, originally published March 31, 2017

But the best thing about Nightwalking through old writing is discovering how pertinent it is—even if, as in this case, it’s eight years later:

These days I’m thinking about gender roles. What does it mean to be an aging white male in early twenty-first century America?
I wish I felt hopeful about that, but I don’t.
Men have so much to learn from women, but there’s been a major communication breakdown.
To begin with, I probably wouldn’t have become a reader, writer, diarist, or wannabe musician without Mom. She was the one who set that tone. Dad was the taskmaster, but he also wanted to be an artist. It was his in-the-closet occupation, all the way up to the day he died.
But wanting to be an artist and making art are two distinctly different things. The latter is a natural extension of who you are, other than wishing about it so you can become someone else. In that regard Mom was probably more of an artist than Pop. For my part, I’m not sure I want to be an artist, which confuses some people, not the least of which is me. Modern artists have résumés, curriculum vitae, gallery showings, and followers on social media. My artist friends just make art. It comes from them organically and I acknowledge them as artists—even when I run into them shopping at Target.
In seven years it will be 2024. I can’t even imagine.
…Adopting a seven-year plan (with the ramp up here, now, in 2017), would mean the five-year core begins in 2018, with solid strides toward a goal I wouldn’t have dreamed about in 1967. Back then my inner 8-year-old talked to a “mysterious other” in a Maryland backyard (Daytalking), moodily stalked the streets after dark (Nightwalking), and went home to study National Geographic magazines about Jacques Cousteau, read up on American history, and pore over the Encyclopedia Britannica (Stargazing).
My first seven years remain the endless mystery.
But having a book that memorializes them gets me thinking: ‘How can I best spend the next seven years?’
How would you do something like that?
—from “The Seven-Year Plan” CITD, originally published Oct. 6, 2017

So my friends, I ask you…

How would you do something like that?

If you had a seven-year plan, with a core of five years framed by a ramp-up first year and follow-up re-calibration, what would that look like? What might your world look like?