In Blackest Night – The Realest Thing I’ve Ever Written
This will probably be the realest thing I’ve ever written.
I wrote about what depression is and again here but I don’t think I truly captured it. Apparently I write my best at my lowest. The sweet irony. Depression is more than words. Depression is nothing. But, at the same time, it means everything. At the moment, I feel no value. I feel like an insignificant speck in the cosmos. I should be the centre of my universe. I should be the best I can be. I should live my life like many people have their online profile by-lines as – I get one shot at life so make it count.
At this point in time, I’d gladly give up this life. I’m in too much pain and fed up of the stress and strife that it entails.
Depression is me and I am it. For those that don’t get it – depression is the Upside Down. A mirror image of life, only…lifeless. Dark. Cold. Empty. Infectious. Like a cancer, it spreads. As I write this, my plagued mind is also considering the assorted ways I could end it all. I feel my life slipping through my fingers. I feel like a failure.
I have so many things I want to say but I can’t let my emotions run high and say something that puts me in a position where there’s no coming back. I literally feel like I am being stripped of choices and there’s only so much I can take and only so much I can give. Trying to please everyone and meet folks’ needs is spreading me so thin that I feel like I am no longer there. I lack substance. If I keep spreading myself so thin, maybe I’ll just fade out of existence?
Depression isn’t necessarily wishing you were dead. Depression is often just wishing you ceased to exist. Just blinked out of existence and cast drift into the ether. I thought I was fine. I thought I was better. But life has a habit of reminding you that it isn’t that simple.
Depression is everything and nothing, simultaneously. Right now, depression is me perched on one end of the sofa with my legs curled up to the side of me so as to “sit” comfortably on the sofa as I write this whilst fighting back the tears that so desperately want to come out while I have my earphones in, listening to “sad songs” and blocking out what’s going on around me. I am depression.
I want to scream but instead, I sit here in silence with the tippy-tap of the keys on my keyboard and the sound of my laboured breath as this position is no longer comfortable but I don’t want to move lest the pain flares up and lets out the inevitable groan or stifled yelp of pain. I want to cry but I’m too ashamed to let the tears fall. I want to just disappear but instead, I just sit here tucked up against the wall on the sofa typing away.
Depression is having a point but losing it part way through what you’re doing so you become a jabbering mess.
Depression is wanting support but, at the same time, wanting to be left the fuck alone.
Maybe if I pretend I don’t exist for long enough it’ll become a reality. Maybe if I take these pills the pain and everything else will go away. Maybe is depression.
Depression is and it isn’t suicide. Suicide is a word of seven letters and sometimes it is reduced to one letter; a letter of apology, remorse, regret and shame.
And Anxiety? Anxiety is depression’s accomplice. Anxiety is what makes the ethereal real.
Anxiety is what makes the what ifs, buts and maybes take hold. Anxiety is the false promise of hope and the constant reminder of insignificance, inability and ineptitude.
Suicide. Anxiety. Depression. A three letter word that translates into something much greater. Something so great that everybody else fails to comprehend it and reduces it to something less than nothing. An unheeded sign that inspires regret and questions as to how the signs could be missed but the lessons learned become so easily forgotten.
Depression is the greatest lesson life can teach you but most of the class isn’t even paying attention, apathy being on the lunchtime menu. And the rest? They became the anecdotes and side notes scrawled beside the message.
This is not a suicide note. If it was, it would be blank.
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