I’m depressed. It’s quite obvious if you look at it from the symptom part. But I’m still reading or getting comment from people who thinks it’s just a small blues – like a Monday morning blues when the week-end is done and you’ve got to get to work.
It’s like saying that the small bruises you got for falling of your bike is the same thing that getting your leg rip apart without anesthetic or – if I believe what women told me – deliver a child.
First thing is you do not live with a depression. I do not live. Living implies being able to project yourself in time. The closest thing I found about this state is stated by Buffy. In this part of the show she’s obviously depressed, she’s just going through the motion.
My depression takes this form. Time is just irrelevant, I’m stuck into the now and go forward or look backward. It’s not apathy, because apathy doesn’t removes you the capacity to make a difference between next week, yesterday and next year.
This has insidious effect. For one, I’m unable to move forward. I cannot just going better because it implies to project myself into the future. Happiness is an alien concept and I do not see the reason to live. It’s absurd and it has no point, in the end I’ll die. I could as well kill myself, it would not change a thing.
Another thing is that my depression is not a lack of feeling. It’s quite the opposite. Anticipation – meaning something I know will happen in the next few hours – generates anxiety attack. Those attack manifest by an unability to think and sort my thoughts, shacking, craving, loghorea, headache. I have pills to take to calm this down (Valium).
I feel. A lot. Too much. Reading a mail I slightly disagree with will makes me burst into rages. Picture or news of protesters shot by cops will makes me cry and fall in a near catatonic states. I’m only nerves and I can react violently to someone who touch me – even if it’s someone I love.
That’s called exhaustion of emotional bandwidth. Where non depressed people have a way to manage, delay and rationalize their feelings, I have lost this ability. This is because I have something in my brain – Serotonin neuro transmeters who don’t catch the Serotonin – that makes me in a perpetual state of stress and hypervigilance.
I’m scorched and even the lightest of the wind hurts like hell. There’s no end, no light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve got no memories of happiness – that’s another aspect of this thing. I can have some joy, some people can makes me smile. But it does not last. Soon, it’s another wave – or tsunami
- of feeling that come and overwhelm me.
So no, I’m not living with a depression. I’m drowning into it. I take drugs to help me, they gave me some buoyancy. Friends keep trying to maintain this buoyancy. But there’s always the calm of the abyss down below, under my feet. One day I’ll stop fighting and I’ll drown into the abyss.
I won’t be at peace, I’ll cease to exist, feel and think. And from my point of view it’s like heaven. It’s the end of the line. End of the pain. And it’s