“What’s your name?” the priest asked, and put his hand on my forehead.
“Iskandar,” I said.
“I wasn’t asking you,” he said. “I was asking the devil.”
The devil didn’t answer. I didn’t answer either. The silence started to thicken into something social.
It was ten at night in the cave church carved into the Mokattam cliffs above Cairo—above Manshiyat Naser, “Garbage City,” in the shorthand of outsiders. The balcony floated in yellow light. A cold wind came in off the desert and hauled up the smell of rotting trash from below.
The people behind me—the ones who’d come for the same reason, or for reasons that looked the same from the outside—began to complain. I glanced back. The woman directly behind me in line had a particular brightness in her eyes, the kind you see right before someone decides to make their private misery public. She was stamping her foot, as if impatience could force the unseen to show itself.
I didn’t have time to say anything. The priest uncapped a huge plastic bottle and poured holy water straight into my face. It caught me clean. He didn’t ration it—my head, my shirt, even my pants. I stood there soaked, humiliated, like I’d pissed myself in church.
The priest saw my confusion, drew a quick cross on my forehead, and gently pushed me aside. The angry woman lunged into my place. He put his hand on her head. Her body jerked as if someone had run current through it. Her hissing bounced off the rock walls. A titanic struggle between good and evil was underway behind me as I walked up the steps toward the exit.
I didn’t care. The honest reason I was there was that, at that point, I didn’t care about anything. I wanted to get rid of the black dog, and an exorcism felt like a rational experiment. At least it couldn’t hurt, I told myself—like a man trying to sound reasonable while standing under a cliff at night.
Outside, I paused, hoping for something theatrical: a lift in the chest, a loosening, a sudden moral clarity. Nothing. Not a thing.
At the entrance the ugly big dog was waiting for me, its eyes lit from inside.
“You could always jump,” it said. “Right off the cliff.”
I didn’t answer. I started down the switchbacks.
You don’t have conversations with metaphors.
If you took anything from the opening scene, you’ve already guessed what this is about.
Depression has become a literary commodity. There are self-help books with friendly covers. There are prestige memoirs with calibrated suffering. There are sleek “dark night of the soul” narratives that end in a high-functioning morning routine. There is, as always, demand.
In Hungary, the figure people like to cite is seven percent. Which means: if you step onto a Budapest streetcar at rush hour, you are almost certainly sharing air with several people who are fighting—quietly, stubbornly—to find one reason to keep going.
You won’t recognize them. Gloom is basically our house style; it doesn’t look suspicious on us. The difference between them and the ordinary sad bastards is that you can’t cheer them up. The illness has kept their heads under water for so long they’ve forgotten what breathing feels like. During an episode—weeks, months—you don’t merely suffer; you lose the memory that joy ever existed, and the conviction sets in that it never will again.
The present doesn’t need commentary. It’s enough that it’s there.
I’m writing this for the usual two reasons. First: I’m not immune, and on good days I still have the childish wish to be relevant again. Second: my editor called to ask where the hell the column was that we shook hands on.
A few things, for the record. Depression is serious, and it hits too many people. I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m not a doctor. I’m coming at this through literature and personal experience, which is another way of saying: don’t take this as advice. I’m writing it because right now the animal isn’t clamped on my throat—but also because it is under me, over me, and all around me. This isn’t a harmless subject to put into sentences.
Anything can happen to you when you start writing about depression in public. You might finish the column, announce you’ll never write another book, wander into an Abrahamic religion, and by the time you’ve learned to pronounce your new name you’ll be on a paid tour producing apologetics—disguised as reporting—for this or that Middle Eastern slaughter. I know a Hungarian writer that happened to.
So yes. Caution seems appropriate.
Which is the part where the writer is supposed to pivot to meaning. I can only pivot back to a night in Cairo.
You don’t have to believe that I took part in an exorcism where a priest asked the devil inside me what its name was.
It happened anyway.
There’s no video from that night. There is footage from a similar ritual two years later, when we were filming a Coptic “prayer for the sick.” By then I understood why the priests carry plastic bottles: it’s not symbolism; it’s logistics.
From a distance it’s funny. Me, standing in a church cut into rock above a slum, drenched in holy water like a schoolboy who’s had an accident.
At the time I didn’t find it funny.
I moved through the world like the living dead. The problem wasn’t sadness. People get sad. The problem was that I couldn’t see the point of anything. Not getting out of bed. Not showering. Not making coffee. Someone had shoved me into a dark room inside my own head and locked the door.
When you’re exhausted by the act of standing up, when you can’t find pleasure or purpose in anything, death begins to look like a solution. Not everyone with depression becomes suicidal. But it’s hard to find suicide that isn’t tangled up with depression somewhere. These are the kinds of facts that don’t console anyone.
Maybe my first episode wasn’t in 2012. But that’s the year I count as the beginning of the pattern: every year, three months spent fighting for my life.
2012 does not make the highlight reel.
My relationship was over. My child’s mother wouldn’t let me talk to my little boy. I wasn’t a father anymore. I wasn’t a provider. I sat in a cockroach-infested hotel room and had no idea who I was, or what I was supposed to do with my life.
That was bad.
It still wasn’t depression yet.
The black dog came with the weather.
The sky washed out to white. Rain beat Cairo. Water pooled in the streets like shallow lakes.
Black mud sucked at my shoes when I crossed to the café on Sudan Street. It was a bare little place—no windows, no decoration, just plastic tables and men in white galabiyas drinking bitter coffee. Upper Egyptian day laborers came there, the ones who rode into the capital before dawn to look for work.
In summer they sat smoking on the curb in weak sunlight. You could tell they were waiting because they laid their tied-together chisels and hammers in front of them like a sign. When the weather turned, they all retreated indoors. They were poor. They came in their best clothes. They couldn’t afford to ruin them with the soot the rain knocked out of the air.
In winter the café had no heat. The waiters solved that by lowering the metal roll-down shutter—the “door”—halfway. The desert wind couldn’t run through the plastic tables. True, neither could oxygen.
You drank your coffee half-dizzy in the warm choke of cheap tobacco, human bodies, and hookah charcoal, and watched the men hike their robes up to their knees so they could duck under the shutter. It was filthy, damp, and moldy, but I’d rather suffocate than sit out in the cold.
I have never been colder than I was in winter in Egypt. On paper it isn’t that cold—the temperature rarely drops below fifty degrees—but the buildings aren’t insulated. You spend all day in rooms that hover around sixty, and the cold works its way into your bone marrow.
In Europe it doesn’t matter if it’s freezing outside. You can take the wind in your face because you know there’s a warm room at the end of the street. In Cairo there often isn’t.
There are places like that Sudan Street café where you can choose: freeze or suffocate. Even if you find a heated hotel lobby, you don’t properly thaw. It takes hours to feel your bones warm again—and the moment you step back outside, the cold climbs right back into you.
You freeze from the inside out. The cold radiates from your bones into your trembling flesh.
The black dog loves that weather. The faceless cold. The soot-black mud. It always comes then.
We call it a black dog because it’s easier if the enemy is outside you.
A person wrestling with himself is always a little ridiculous, because even in victory he’s only beating his own skin. Depression has nothing funny about it. If you haven’t lived it, it’s hard to grasp what’s happening inside someone else. From the outside it looks like laziness. Like indifference. Like a moral failure.
When we talk about illness, we imagine an added thing: a virus, a bacteria, an imbalance—something you can remove and then you’re done. Depression is the opposite. The black dog doesn’t add anything.
It subtracts.
Mood. Joy. Purpose. Anything that makes life worth the trouble. You can’t “fight” depression in the way you fight a fever, because depression is not an invader with a shape. It’s a kind of vacuum.
Still, we say we fight. We use metaphors because we want the uninitiated to feel something like pity. It sounds nobler to say you wrestled a snarling hell-hound for months, its teeth snapping at your throat. It sounds active. Like effort. Like heroism.
Society doesn’t tolerate passivity. It marks anyone who looks like they’re doing nothing to get better.
So we dress the nothingness up in a monster costume and hope people will respect the struggle.
In the English-speaking world, “the black dog” is shorthand for despair. In Hungarian it lands a little strangely. Part of the reason is simple: the British have a long folk tradition of supernatural black dogs—hellhounds—haunting roads, crossroads, churchyards, stormy nights.
One of the famous stories is a storm in the sixteenth century, in Bungay, Suffolk, when a black dog was said to burst into a church during thunder and chaos. The legend collected its own literature. An old verse about the incident runs like this:
The church appear’d a mass of flame,
And while the storm did rage,
A black and fearful monster came,
All eyes he did engage.
In Western imagination, a black dog almost never means anything good. It’s too easy to flip the domestic image: loyalty turned into persistence, protection turned into predation, devotion repurposed into something that follows you because it wants you gone.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Gothic fiction makes the black dog a celebrity. Conan Doyle sends a spectral hound to stalk a family across the Devon moor. The image becomes shared mental furniture: a thing you can summon in a sentence and trust the reader to feel it.
If you’re thinking in Jungian terms, you can call it the shadow: the suppressed parts of the psyche, the urges and fears you refuse to face in daylight.
“Nothing to worry about,” Jung would say. Embrace the hidden parts. Integrate.
In my case, that meant integrating a strong desire to end my own consciousness with a blunt object. We would have made a charming family.
Unlike most metaphors, “black dog” has a modern biography. It’s often linked to Winston Churchill, through the accounts of the doctor around him—though the story is less clean than the legend and, like most legends, it improves itself in retelling. What matters is the outcome: the phrase escaped into public English and never came back. Today it’s everywhere—from serious memoir to cheap self-help. The metaphor won. The dog went global.
My biggest problem with the black dog that moved in with me was that it talked.
It’s one thing to be drowning in hopelessness, to have simple actions—like leaving the apartment—feel like an athletic event. But it was the voice that did the real damage.
After a week or two in total darkness, you can’t reliably remember light. That’s when it starts speaking. It tells you death would be better than this. Death is nothingness too, it says, but at least you won’t be aware of it.
The logic is clean. No gaps. No easy rebuttal.
It doesn’t matter what you were raised on—the inherited ethics of grit. In the part of Hungary I come from, the folk wisdom is basically: you keep going as long as there’s bone in your body, and when you fall, you fall standing. Depression doesn’t argue with that. It doesn’t need to. It erases the part of you that believes it.
A depressed person who kills himself doesn’t do it to send a message. He isn’t composing a moral fable for the survivors. He doesn’t care what prizes get named after him, what deluxe editions come out later, what people post online. He isn’t bargaining for sympathy.
He’s trying to get out.
I knew that if I listened long enough, sooner or later I’d accept the dog’s conclusion. So I did what I could: I tried not to be alone with it. I wandered cold Cairo like a half-dead man, staying in motion the way you stay afloat.
The animal followed. Patient. Relentless.
I ended up at the exorcism because a Coptic Christian kid sat down at my table in that Sudan Street café. I don’t remember what I told him, but it must have sounded like something had moved into me and was pressing me toward the ground, because he crossed himself and said: the devil is tempting you.
In Europe, “the devil” is usually a metaphor—another costume we put on misery. In the Middle East, the devil is an operating assumption. Muslims and Christians may disagree on plenty, but neither side doubts that unseen forces are real and active and hostile.
Black dogs, though, are not a normal sight.
There are traditions—religious, folkloric, practical—that assign a special kind of danger to the jet-black dog. In that part of the world, metaphysics is not a hobby; it’s a public language. If a black dog is “following” you, then the diagnosis is obvious and the remedy is communal.
At the cave church, after the evening service, they hold a weekly ritual that can be described politely as a prayer for the sick and more honestly as an exorcism that happens in public, on schedule, like a bus.
The kid told me to come. He looked genuinely afraid for me. So I went.
It can’t hurt, I thought.
And, more honestly: anything was better than sitting alone in an ice-cold room while the dog spoke like it owned me.
By the time I got down from the church into the neighborhood, I was freezing.
I slogged ankle-deep through mud in the dark, dodging little trucks loaded with trash. The smell of rot sat everywhere. I stepped into a café to drink something hot. It was a Christian café—a huge picture of Jesus slapped onto filthy tile, just so nobody missed the point.
I sat near the brazier. I ordered tea. I don’t know how long I stayed there. I only remember having to swallow down the urge to cry because everything felt hopeless, like the world had been hollowed out and no one had bothered to tell me.
I didn’t even notice the priest until he walked in. He sat next to me with a broad smile.
“Do you feel better?” he asked.
“Not really.”
“Then come again next Thursday.”
“I don’t know if I can. And I doubt this helps, because I don’t believe in God.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “God believes in you.”
“I don’t believe in the devil either.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “The devil believes in you too.”
“Does this ever help?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “But you have to take faith seriously. My experience is: once the devil tempts someone, he comes back. And he comes back stronger. Pray. Come to the congregation.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really don’t believe.”
“If you give yourself to Christ, it will come on its own,” he said. “Community helps too.”
“How?”
“They know you’re fighting the devil,” he said. “They know nothing is ‘wrong’ with you. A person needs people beside him when the devil comes.”
He looked at me like he was looking at a future conversion.
“I’m sure you’ll be a good Christian,” he said.
The old man was wrong: depression didn’t turn me into a Christian.
I carried it through on my feet. And it doesn’t vanish overnight. Climbing out of it feels less like a breakthrough and more like slowly turning the color back up on a black-and-white photograph. Winter was hell. But when the ultramarine sky returned and the air softened under hard sun, I felt better.
The priest was right about one thing: it comes back.
When the leaves fall and the light thins, I know the black dog is on its way, and I’m afraid. Every year the bastard is stronger. I don’t know how long I can stand against it.
I’m not completely alone anymore. I have a wife who loves me. The summers that flew over my head turned my son into a tall young man.
And still I know how this ends. In the end, I’m going to lose.
So be more forgiving in winter if I don’t answer the phone. If I miss deadlines.
I don’t have time.
I’m fighting for my life.
