Depression
Depression is not simply sadness.
It is something that coils itself around the heart,
the mind,
the body,
until it begins to feel as though it has taken possession of an entire being.
It is darkness without a visible edge.
A darkness so consuming that the person inside it cannot remember what the light felt like.
It wrecks the mind quietly.
Thoughts become heavier.
Sleep becomes disturbed.
The body becomes exhausted.
Anxiety creeps in.
Panic follows.
The heart races.
The head aches.
Breathing becomes something that has to be consciously remembered.
And the mind
the very place that is supposed to be home
becomes a place of torment.
Someone can be surrounded by people and still be completely alone inside their own head.
They can laugh.
They can talk.
They can travel.
They can sit among friends and look perfectly fine.
And then, without warning, something inside them collapses.
The laughter disappears.
The tears come.
The chest tightens.
The mind becomes unbearably loud.
Sometimes it happens in the middle of a beautiful moment,
because depression does not care whether the world around someone is beautiful.
It can turn a vacation into a silent struggle.
A car ride into a river of tears.
A room full of friends into a place of unbearable loneliness.
And when the person is finally alone,
everything they held together in front of everyone else comes undone.
The door closes.
The lights go out.
The windows stay shut.
And there is nothing left to perform.
Only the sobbing.
The screaming.
The shaking.
The exhaustion.
The desperate attempt to release a pain that has nowhere else to go.
Depression can become so severe
that it does not remain confined to sadness.
It can distort thought.
It can fracture one’s sense of reality.
In some severe cases, a person may experience psychosis
hearing or seeing things that are not there,
believing things that are not true,
or losing their grip on what is real.
At that point, it is no longer simply a person saying,
“I am sad.”
It is a mind in profound distress.
A whole human being being worn down
emotionally, mentally, physically, sometimes even perceptually.
That is what makes depression so frightening.
It can take a person who once felt like themselves
and make them wonder where that person went.
It can make life feel distant.
It can make hope feel fictional.
It can make tomorrow feel like another punishment.
And sometimes the person does not truly want death.
They want the suffering to stop.
They want the noise to stop.
They want their mind to be quiet.
They want to put down the weight
they have been carrying for far too long.
Depression is not weakness.
It is suffering that has become so deep
that it begins to touch every part of a person.
The heart.
The mind.
The body.
The perception of the world.
The perception of oneself.
Until all that remains is a person
trying desperately to find their way back
to who they were
before the darkness became so heavy.
Let’s talk about depression