Thankfully, I am feeling better, thanks to medication and psychotherapy.
Depression is both the most godawful, visceral agony, and a numbness so overwhelming you can't imagine ever feeling real again. It is an inability to feel or be affected by anything other than your own intense pain. It is frostbite of the mind. It is that dream where you want to scream but no sound comes out. Depression is the feeling of walking through glue, both physically and mentally, which reflects in the effort it takes to open your mouth to speak. Depression paints the world monochrome and muffles all sounds. Depression strips away your personality and leaves you two-dimensional. Normal human functioning diminishes; sleep dwindles to nothing, food becomes an alien notion, weight falls from your bones in a physical representation of your character and the person you have forgotten you used to be. Depression is crawling on hands and knees to get to the bathroom; it is lying in bed and wondering if you would be able to move if the house was on fire. It is trying to carry out a familiar activity and not having the first clue what to do.
Depression is all of these things, and it is all of these things for week after week, month after month. It does not begin and end at feeling miserable.
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