Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head

I’ve come to the conclusion that depression is a very strange thing indeed. It’s sad and lonely and mean and it isolates you from everything that you ever once loved or needed. It burrows into your chest and then proceeds to slowly suck out everything that ever made you, you. It makes the laughter of your friends intolerable because you are unable to laugh yourself. It makes doing the things you enjoy a punishment because you aren’t able to actually enjoy them. And it makes the love and sympathetic looks of your family burn because they make you realize that something is indeed wrong with you. Depression makes you wish that your bed suddenly grew carnivorous and swallowed you whole. It makes you feel like your transparent, a ghost of yourself and a disappointment to all. When you’re depressed you become a soap bubble, so fragile and so ready to burst at the smallest sight, touch, or sound.

By far the worst thing about depression, though, is it’s ability to take over your identity. It consumes you so fully that you no longer only feel depressed but instead are depressed. It seems like a minor difference but it’s far bigger than most are able to realize until they’re in the thick of it. Depression comes to define you. Before you may have been a writer, an athlete, an entrepreneur, a teacher, a parent, a lover, a fighter, a child. After, though, all that is obliterated until the only things left are feelings of sadness and inadequacy. Soon feeling happy or even feeling emotion-neutral becomes a terrifying experience because it seems like you’ve officially lost everything. Depression is all you have, it defines you, it’s what you are and if that goes too, then what’s left? You’re just a used up husk, a demolished memorial to your former self. Because God knows you’ll never be happy again. You can barely remember what happy was, so how the hell do you expect to feel it? Or so it seems.

Depression is definitely a very strange and seductive kind of monster indeed, worming its way in and making you feel as if you need it, until you cling to it as your last proof of existence. Depression is a twisted kind of sadist. Do your best to never invite it into your heart. Otherwise, you may find that you can never fully get rid of it.