Monochrome World

One thing you might notice if you stop by my blog regularly is that I try not to take life too seriously. I've always used humour and I'll be very honest here, it is a useful shield. That is what makes the contrast with my illness and depression so stark and painful.

Humour is levity and light and I can find little wrong with the world when I am laughing with it, or at it. However, when a bout of depression strikes, it is like a shadow descends over everything and emotion is drawn out of the world as if it were a poison. It is worse than sadness, it is the absence of sadness or happiness, an empty yearning for some sort of emotional response, but the emotion will not come. I have sat and stared blankly at the TV screen when a comedy I would always enjoy is showing, but even classic gags that would have me rolling on normal days wash over me without registering. My face will contort into a phantasm of a grin, a cruel mockery of real enjoyment. Or I will catch something sad on the news, or a moving film and watch dispassionately. At times I have felt a tear run down my face but inside I have no feeling of it - it is merely condensation.

People seem unfamiliar and drab as I desperately scramble to build a cocoon to hide in, they have no impact and are empty shells, vessels drained of all content. A collection of words and movements I long to hide from. Open the window and everything is coming at me through a muffler, the clarity of individual sounds rolled into a constant dull hum, even noise cannot escape the bleakness, it is being strangled. My surroundings are the same, but the colour and vibrancy have fled, leached out by the depression, a pencil sketch of what was a magnificent watercolour.

That is how it is, day after day, living a film noir, forcing myself to do a bad impression of emotional investment into conversations and all the time feeling hollowed out, ruinous. The irony is, I can't even get angry about it as emotions are stuck on the event horizon, inaccessible. In the world but not of it, distant and utterly alone. Then it passes, and I wake one morning as if the previous days hadn't happened and the colour, sound and laughter flood back with the tears.

So, that's really why I use humour - self-diagnosis. If I can laugh, then I'm OK for today at least. That's something I guess.