Last night I got to talk to someone about my illness. It brought home to me how I tend to shy away from discussing it, as if to voice it were to give it life. That being said, I do find it useful to write about it on here, and today I want to talk about depression. Not feeling a little blue, but the will-sapping wickedness that is depression, by whatever name I give it - be that The Black Dog, The Shadow or The Rot.
In truth, there are several different states of depression I find myself in. Different ways for different days I suppose, as if the fact of it itself were not enough. The most pervasive type of depression is when it leaves me feeling utterly bleak. When I say bleak, I should explain myself - it feels as if all the joy has been sucked out of the world. Laughter becomes hollow, tastes dissipate, nothing satisfies. It is as if I am cocooned in a thick mesh of bleakness that nothing good can penetrate. All thoughts, feelings and emotional responses get tangled in the bleakness and distorted by it and love, kindness and compassion from outside, from others cannot reach me, cannot get through the bleakness. The world pulls away and even a warm summers day to me seems grey and hopeless. It can last hours, days and once or twice has dragged on for weeks. And yet there comes a point at which it dissolves and sight, sound, taste and emotions are startlingly clear for a time. Like a man who has lived in a cave blinking at the dawn outside.
Then there is fear depression. I can become convinced that there is no solution to any problem, that whatever path I decide to tread will be the wrong one, will bring about the worst possible result. It makes me feel as if I am incapable of making a decision correctly, that each decision is the wrong one - and I drift from fear of outcomes to the conclusion that events will go against me regardless of what I choose merely by dint of it being the choice I made - my own defective choice making is the root cause of failure.
Talking of failure, another form of fear centres around failure. I become transfixed by all the things I have not done, convincing myself that because I have not done it yet, I will forever fail in the endeavour. Because I have not done X, I will never achieve X, I have failed at X, X has beaten me. It gets very easy to become maudlin and things soon escalate into anger at myself because I could have, or I should have, or I never did. All those might have beens play the fiddle whilst my depression burns on. And oh how it hurts - this borderline self-loathing, the utterly harsh and untenable line I take with myself. Self-reinforcing depression.
All of this is a feedback loop, and I can find myself in a deep depression over my own percevied shortcomings. At its worst, I am utterly convinced that my feelings are inferior, are not worthy of this world. Take as an example love. Love is a beautiful, natural and amazing feeling and yet I will not let myself express it. Is it fear of failure? Yes, partly, but it is also that I feel my love is not worthy, my love is not enough, that I could never give enough love of enough quality to deserve the happiness that comes with its reciprocation. I would not want to burden anyone with my love. And yet there is the counterpoint, the discord in the back of my mind at the howling loneliness, the emptiness of life without love. And now I have made myself cry.
Its a tough old journey, time will tell how far I have come.
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