Depression is: mind-sludge, brain-filth, thistle-thoughts, thorns jagging and tearing, barbed-wire in the skull
Depression is: being home to a leprous toad, a putrescent rat, squatting in your soul, seeping foul, noxious fumes into your thoughts
Depression is: pyroclastic flows of misery, magma chambers of broiling fear, lava beds of scalding terror
Depression is: lying entombed in abyssal sediment, rusted and corroded; becalmed and beached on a grey and desolate shore
Depression is: seeking womb-warmth, foetal safety, amniotic comfort, the maternal shield
Depression is: craving monastic solitude, cloistral serenity, turning your face away, hiding under the pillow, loathing the world and its bruised beauty
Depression is: seeing the world through a steel mesh, a black gauze; seeing your life on a film screen, alienated and uninterested, fast-forward to the end.
Depression is: brutal, cosmic loneliness, alone in the Universe, cries fading, unheeded, across the inter-stellar emptiness; galactic grief
Depression is: being flayed alive, eviscerated, exposed to cruel scrutiny and malevolent laughter; nerve-ends quivering in torn, harrowed, scraped flesh
Depression is: limbs encased in concrete, body pressed by iron weights, soul mangled and crushed by geological boredom
Depression is: abject humiliation, avoiding the stranger’s gaze like a wounded animal, imposed servility, crawling abasement, shame-riven, guilt-tossed
Depression is: searching for healing herbs to strew in the chambers of the maimed brain; for aromatic balms and soothing lotions to smear on mind-wounds, soul-lesions
Depression is: the lozenged sunlight on rippling water, the blackbird’s song in the summer warmth, the bluebell’s vibrancy in the woodland glade: seeing all this, recognising all this - but feeling none of it.
Depression is: cupping your hands around the frail, flickering candle-flame of hope, sheltering it from the gusts and tempests that would blow it out and extinguish all light and all hope.
I'm lucky enough to only suffer from mild depression but there were times after my mum died (before the doctor put me on anti depressants) when I could definitely relate to some of the above.
ReplyDeleteNow, on my worst days, I can feel like two people functioning in the same body at the same time. One is on the outside; logical, functional, outgoing and efficient. The other is inside telling me I'm a completely useless and pointless failure.
The problem is that no one else can tell.
Descriptions like yours help people to understand how it can sometimes feel to suffer from depression. Thank you for sharing it.