"Saying someone who has depression is feeling blue, is like diagnosing a brain tumour and calling it a headache."
Depression. Oh dear. If you listen to most people, they’ll all reckon they’ve had depression. I wouldn’t be so judgemental to say this isn’t true. It’s not as if I [or you] can live for a while in someone elses head and feel as they feel. Are you waiting for a "but"?
But have they? I have [ and do I really expect you to believe me after that perfunctory opener!?] and I wonder if the rest of the world truly have as they claim. How can they have? How can they have ever felt so bad as I and carried on. Welcome the melodrama. Crowd round the kitchen-sink. There is no way back from depression, at least not for me. No get-out clause, no secret alley, no escape kit. No hammer or chisel or spade can tunnel me out of this one.
I’m trying to think back to the beginning, but it feels like it was only ever a vicious circle, and where does a circle start. Or end? I’m critical, cynical, bitter, angry, empty, twisted, upset, lonely, sad, anxious, exhausted, ad infinitum. I can’t remember ever being anything, anyone, else. I sometimes wonder if there is a defining moment in my past. An instant before which I was fine, and an instant after, I most definitely was not. I wish I could isolate this crucial moment of collapse. I don’t know if it would help. Surely it couldn’t hurt. But then maybe if is more of my problem. My blind blundering faith that things can’t possibly get any worse. But somehow they do. Am I sounding pessimistic? What I am going to say will contradict the image I’ve helped you create of me, but I’m actually quite an optimist. I do have a resoundingly positive take on life. It just falters sometimes.
I have many other problems that fog me. The obsessions, the self-harming, the suidical tendencies, the various disorders, the intense hatred of food. I find it hard to weed out the depression amongst all this. I think maybe the depression was the catalyst, if not the total trigger for these other side-issues. I think they caused more tangible problems which helped further and deepen my already deep depression.
“I’m watching a technicolour movie that’s slowly fading to black and white.”
Sometimes I’m a void. I used to have times of intense feeling and this could be desire, hatred, love or pain, but these times have evapourated like a small puddle in the sun. Now it’s an interminable void, a veritable emptiness of emotion. I stumble blindly from day to day trying to claw back some feeling, but it’s gone. I am gone. I am lost. I am scared. I daren’t carry on a life like this. Depth of feeling was all that ever mattered to me and now I have no feeling, deep or not. I long for things to anger or upset me. I am upset now but I’m crying over nothing, just the sad abandonment of this aching situation. I want to feel like before. I want to see a colour and have it trigger a comment of “eeeuurrgghh!” or look at a man and think “phoar! He’s a bit of alright!” but it doesn’t happen. I have lost my very senses and maybe this isn’t even depression. I don’t know. Like I said, I can’t tell where what stops and what begins.
“I don’t want directions from anybody unless they’ve been to this exact fucking section of Hell.”
So what do I want? Do I want to walk down the street again, renewed and refreshed and loving life, or do I want to wallow in this state of semi-suffering? Shit. I can’t help thinking if I were any sort of a person of any description with any character I wouldn’t hesitate to shout “wanna be normal! Wanna be happy! Wanna love life like I must have done once!” but if I’m completely truthful, I doubt I want that at all. I think that maybe I believe my depression gives me access to a higher plane, some higher level of consciousness. And yes, I know how cliched that sounds. But it’s the self-pitying truth. A more than little part of me gets off on being depressed. And I suddenly feel like a fraud, which is probably exactly what I am.
I thought I was clawing back some feeling, I thought wrong. I don't recall ever being more a waking zombie. Ever transposing letters more [ tup of cea anyone?], Ever sitting freezing outside longer and not even noticing I'm cold until shivers become seizures and I fall off the step. Ever wandering through the day and the night and the day after that with no idea as to why. Ever being more bitter and cynical and loathing of the scum floating on my pool. And I beg for a mesh bowl on a pole to weed out the dros and the crap and let me be pure. Get the bastards away from me, the fuckwits who sully and taint me, who destroy my perception of myself, who reduce me to this, and then wander away with a spring in their step, who wander away to become me. You know they bled me dry. They stole my goddamn soul. They are me. And I am a skin.
