Of sorrow

I wanted to write a little today about one of the facets of depression I find it hardest to deal with (not that any of it is a particular breeze to be fair). Specifically I am talking about sadness. Not the sort of sadness that comes with bidding farewell or anything by Dido, but a deep, underlying and seemingly permanent sadness deep within that seems to afflict everything once depression takes hold.

It can take many forms, one of which is to colour everything black. When in this frame of mind I have no need of the Stones to tell me to paint it black, everything is already there. The world is in a permanent sepia picture from long ago, faces are contorted into false smiles or grimaces, and everything, but everything is forced, false and unsatisfying. I hate it when sadness is this overt, it is a world where the good guy never gets the girl, heroes go unheralded and all of life is conducted under a cloud, a looming threat of disatisfaction, with whispered promises of ruin on the breeze.

For me, when things are overt like this, I find myself seeing sadness all around. The tears of a child that has lost their bear, the hackneyed ending to a drama on the box, whatever it is, it becomes to me a painful sorrow that is hard to take. It is as if the depression within me reaches out to feed on the sadness, I can feel the loss of the bear, it touches me. No, that is not right, actually it assails me, the sadness invades me and sets up camp. In the end I become like a sponge that has taken on too much water. I am drenched in sadness and inevitably it floods back out again in tears or worse in fevered mania, a state of being I desperately try to avoid inflicting on the world or those I love.

However, it is when sadness is not being overt that it is at its most pernicious. There is a core of sadness, hidden within that corrupts all other feelings, perverts normal, natural reactions and mocks the fleeting joys we have in life. It is as if sadness will not permit me to experience other emotional responses in the raw state, and wants all interraction viewed through its prism. So it is that I find myself laughing at a joke, but choking inside that humour is built on misery, or smiling at a photograph and yet within in a world of pain that I can no longer feel the hand I am holding in it or experience that day again. It becomes a second voice within that counters my reactions. The last word on the matter is taken by it, and of course that last word is sorrowful and bitter. I said it was pernicious, and so it is, for when I am under its spell, it will not let me enjoy the simple pleasures of emotional reactions.

Sometimes I read through my blog, and other writings I have jotted down in my life, and there is a thread. I see it everywhere, I see it in almost every poem I have ever written. There is a wistfulness in what I write, a wistfulness for the hope that is shut away behind the sadness, a deep regret that I struggle to feel the emotions I set in poetry, a longing to experience them without taint as I do when depression has subsided.  Those poems read very differently when depression is in town and the sadness takes control and I forget what it is like to love and laugh untrammelled, uncorrupted by sadness.

This is why joy experienced outside the confines of depression is so very precious to me. Indeed, if I tell you you have made me happy or make me happy, believe me that you have given me a gift I treasure above all others. You have given me true joy, something that in those dark times of depression I find myself wishing for every single day and yet always feels just out of reach. I couldn't ask you for anything finer.