06/01/04
Depression is being lonely in a room full of people.
Loneliness is being misunderstood.
Misunderstanding is being shallow.
Shallowness is being empty.
Emptiness is being ignorant.
Ignorance is bliss.
Bliss isn't all it's cracked up to be.
You'll notice that the activity switches in the third line from the depressed person to the other people. Some people may pick up on that, but I bet a lot won't. If I were to write it from one point of view, it would run more like this:
Depression is being lonely in a room full of people.
Loneliness is being unexpressed.
Unexpression is being afraid of reactions.
Fear is being weak.
Weakness is being self-reliant.
Self-reliance is being aware of others' inabilities.
Awareness is knowledge.
Knowledge is painful.
Pain let's you know you're alive.
I don't like the parts about fear and weakness, because I don't really think they're true. Maybe it's more like this:
Depression is being lonely in a room full of people.
Loneliness is being unexpressed.
Unexpression is being aware of others' weakness.
Awareness is knowledge.
Knowledge is painful.
Pain let's you know you're alive.
I don't hide my suffering because I'm weak or afraid. I hide it because other people are weak and afraid – other people can't handle what I'm going through. It's the strong people that know me, and the strong people that I want to be with. I know far too few strong people. I'm not asking for someone to be stronger than me or to be my strength (other than God). I just want people who are strong enough to care about me. Caring about someone means striving to understand what that person is feeling. Caring is active and positive – not that it will always make the object happy or pain-free, but that it works to be close and be dependable and be supportive in difficulties. Loving someone means digging through all the walls around the person, finding the bits that are untainted and blowing the ashes to flame. Love is the opposite of blindness, the opposite of ignorance, the opposite of "cheer up," the opposite of weakness. Love isn't an emotion. The way "depression" and "mania" are misunderstood as feelings, love is misunderstood. Depression is not "feeling down" – it's much more than that. It's your insides being dragged to the bottom no matter what your outsides are doing. It's not a place of closed eyes – it's a place of eyes being too open. People just don't get that. People don't want to understand that. People don't want to know the horrors that go on around them. They'd rather chalk everything up to emotion, weakness, self-centeredness, close-mindedness. They don't want to realize the vast emptiness that lurks in every person, waiting for a moment of true self-awareness. Every person is an empty hole struggling to be covered up. Some people are aware of it enough to try to fill it. Other people are completely aware of it, and those are the people that sit in ashes, dressed in sackcloth and scraping their festering wounds with sharp rocks. There is no way out. There is no way to fill this emptiness. There is hope in the Lord, knowledge that He will one day fill this void, but such hope is like a bird flitting off across the horizon, lost from sight long before it is actually out of reach. If only hope could really spare me from this pain. If only depression were just a feeling that could be overcome by joy.
I realize now that diseases are not the true sources of pain in one's life. Diseases are a road that a person walks upon, and the pain comes from the fact that the person walks alone.
