I’ve been thinking about Vic’s comment on my last post, about “having achieved so much out there”, and it’s made me realise that my list of Things I Want To Achieve Out Here is actually pretty long.

Off the top of my head, it includes, but is probably not confined to: to get to know a new place and its culture, to have fun, to become a better musician, to become a better performer, to pass on my musical knowledge to the musicians I’m working with and help them to grow as musicians and performers too, to make friends, to do alright without B in my life, and to get myself in better physical shape.

Very important, that last one.

I do think I can achieve all these things; in many ways it shouldn’t be a tall order. But in terms of not feeling overwhelmed by wanting to achieve them all, it probably serves me (on days like today, at least) to remind myself that it’s a gradual thing, and I can’t possibly achieve all of the above overnight. It would make this trip fantastically short, for one.

In terms of becoming a better musician and performer, last night’s gig was evidence of the learning curve I’m on here. Well, I suppose every gig will be, one way or the other - but last night, my challenge was not so much a quiet night in the bar, but a quiet audience.

I read an interview with the comedian Richard Herring in The Guardian this week (or should that be on The Guardian, if it’s read online?), in which he talked a lot about his nervousness about performing, including what can make a bad gig. He said:

“Tons of things are way beyond your control - the roof’s too high, they’ve got a band on before you, you’re on a boat… But mostly you can adapt. Last night’s gig was in an L-shaped room with the stage in the middle, so I sort of had two audiences - which can be confusing if you’re doing a visual gag. It’s about experience. You have to learn how to play to 30 people - that’s a really difficult skill. Once you’ve played to 30 people you can play to 5,000 people.”

Maybe the jazz equivalent is learning how to play to 3 people.

Either way, it’s fascinating to see how different audiences react differently to what is, essentially, the same thing. On Saturday, people were going crazy for me. Last night, I got barely a golf clap. And yet in theory - no, in practice - I was doing exactly the same thing.

I’ve worked long enough in the business of show - in a former life, I was a stand-up comedy promoter - to see great performers die in front of one crowd, only to be lauded by another (or indeed by the same one a matter of months later, if they’d became famous in the interim). And while you tell yourself that, as Richard Herring says, a whole host of things beyond your control can affect how a gig goes, you can’t but help but think: “I must have done something wrong. Why don’t they like me?”. You tell yourself that there must be something wrong with you; that they would have clapped another performer; that if you have left them unmoved or bored or even worse, actively not liking you, that you have failed somehow.

Maybe to some extent, that’s true. It’s good to question oneself as a performer; to hone your craft and to do whatever is in your power to make the evening go as well as it possibly can for both you and the audience.

But if there’s one thing I learned from my year working with stand-up comics, it’s that plenty of them simply plough on, dying on their arse sometimes, but sticking to their guns and doing what they do night-in, night-out to the best of their ability. And sure enough: some people will always like them. And hopefully that number grows.

If there’s another thing that I learned: it’s that it happens to the best of ‘em.

I must remember that for every couple not clapping on one night, there was, and will be, a couple dancing on another night. That for every person who meets me after a gig and doesn’t say that they liked it, there’s a fellow jazz musician telling me that he rates me as one of his favourite singers (thanks for that, P).

And I must, as my friend S so wisely said - although she might have been quoting Churchill - keep on keeping on.

I just went to the shopping mall next door to buy some blank CDs, and it seems that the Chinese New Year celebrations are really kicking off:

- including a Chinese acrobatic show:

But I found myself getting tearful, and unable to stay and watch and engage in the performance. So I walked out of the mall, and straight back to my hotel room.

I’m feeling the way I was feeling on Sunday… but in fact, today it is far more frightening to be feeling this way. Because today, this doesn’t feel like the result of being alone or in an unfamiliar place, nor the result of missing friends. Today, this is my depression.

Before I came out here, a friend asked me if this blog was going to be about the personal journey of someone who had just walked away from a relationship, and all that went with that; or the adventures of a British jazz singer in Malaysia. I said that it would be the latter; although of course elements of the former might bleed into that. What I didn’t expect it to be was any sort of account of my depression.

But just as on Sunday I could have tried to hide my mood, and not write about it; I find myself again, unable to call anyone right now, and again, feeling that I simply cannot - or should not - hide it. Not for the sake of a good story, but because as far as I’m concerned, this blog means nothing if it’s not honest.

Depression, as anyone who has suffered from it can tell you, catches you by surprise. It pops up as if from nowhere, and as quickly as it appears, grips you as tightly as a vice. It is overwhelming and suffocating and leads you to walk out of shopping malls in tears because you cannot engage with what everyone else around you seems to be perfectly easily able to engage with.

And you mourn the loss of the person who was able to engage just like they are; and are terrified that she will never return. What’s more, you’re terrified, as I am right now, that this mood will never leave you. As Andrew Solomon says in The Noonday Demon:

“When you are depressed, the past and future are absorbed entirely by the present moment, as in the world of a three-year-old. You cannot remember a time when you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future time when you will feel better. Being upset, even profoundly upset, is a temporal experience, while depression is atemporal. Breakdowns leave you with no point of view.”

I brought The Noonday Demon with me as holiday reading because, before this trip, I thought I was, well, if not over my depression, then at least coming out of it - and therefore would be easily able to cope with, and would just find interesting, a book about the subject. But I’ve now realised that I shouldn’t read it right now. Because as fascinating and beautifully written as it is, it’s just still too close to the bone to be reading about someone else’s breakdown and depression, and I fear it’s causing me to sink down, too.

As I said, I never intended - or rather, expected - to be writing about my own depression in this blog. Partly because I have found myself ashamed to be suffering from it (although I see no shame in it in others, only the hallmark of amazing and sensitive people) - and so have found it difficult to publicly acknowledge it. As a result, I couldn’t imagine in a million years that I would be able to write this. And yet, as I do, I know that it’s helping me. And that it will help me to continue to be honest about my experience out here.

And now I have to decide whether to give into this feeling today; and curl up and sleep until such time as I simply have to get ready and do my gig as best I can. Or whether I try to beat this feeling; and go to the gym, go out for a walk, take photographs, watch a film; try as I might to engage with the world. Right now, I don’t know which I’ll do.

What I do know, however, is that I don’t want my depression to cripple my time out here; that I feel a little better for having written all of this; and that both of these realisations bode well. Hell, maybe I should create a ‘Depression’ category on the right hand side here, now that I’ve taken this first step and written this post. Not just because I now feel bolder and braver - but because depression is most certainly not about ‘Nothing in particular’. It’s about Everything in particular. And then some.