Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.
Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron … Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come.
It is not pleasant to experience decay, to find yourself exposed to the ravages of an almost daily rain, and to know that you are turning into something feeble, that more and more of you will blow off with the first strong wind, making you less and less. Some people accumulate more emotional rust than others. Depression starts out insipid, fogs the days into a dull color, weakens ordinary actions until their clear shapes are obscured by the effort they require, leaves you tired and bored and self-obsessed—but you can get through all that. Not happily, perhaps, but you can get through. No one has ever been able to define the collapse point that marks major depression, but when you get there, there’s not much mistaking it. Major depression is a birth and a death: it is both the new presence of something and the total disappearance of something.
My depression has been a sucking thing that had wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I. It has a life of its own that has bit by bit asphyxiated all of my life out of me. I have moods that I know are not my moods: they belong to the depression… I am compacted and fetal, depleted by this thing that crushes me without holding me. Its tendrils threaten to pulverize my mind and my courage and my stomach, and crack my bones and desiccate my body. It gluttons itself on me when there is nothing left to feed it. I can never kill this vine of depression, and so all I wanted is for it to let me die. But it has taken from me the energy I would need to kill myself, and it will not kill me. If my trunk is rotting, this thing that fed on it was now too strong to let it fall ; it has become an alternative support to what it had destroyed. In the tightest corner of my bed, split and racked by this thing no one else seemed to be able to see, I pray to a God I have never believed in, and I ask for deliverance. I would be happy to die the most painful death, but I am too dumbly lethargic even to conceptualize suicide.
Every second of being alive hurts me.
