9/6/2018
This is depression for me:
I'm walking along in the beautiful world, enjoying my beautiful life, when suddenly: I'm in a dark deep pit. So dark, so deep, I can barely see a tiny pinpoint of light far above, out of reach, nearly out of sight. I don't know how I got there, I'm just there. The air is stifling and rotten. There's something cold and sharp, heavy and evil on my shoulders, it's sucking every last ounce of sunshine out of my blood, my memories, my soul. When the demon has sucked me dry, he doesn't leave me, curled up on the icy hard floor, shriveled and empty, he clings harder to me and pours his poison into my ears and heart.
"You're worthless. You're evil. You're stupid. You are a bad mother. You are a screamer. You are a terrible wife. You are impatient. You are dirty. You are worthless and being around you makes other people feel worthless. You are a mistake. You are ruined. You are a burden. You are evil and everything that comes from you is evil." The poison pours in, the torrent goes on and on.
I can't feel anything except rage, disgust, exhaustion, hatred. Hope and joy are distant memories. Every mantra, every beautiful picture I pull out of my pocket and raise up in my feeble hands as a weapon or shield is quickly covered in the demon's slimy spittle as he continues to pour all his death into me with violent eagerness. I feel the shape of the beautiful things I brought with me under the muck, but everything that was wonderful feels blurry and far away, just a delusional dream, an ungraspable, silly, childish, fairy tale.
My heart is ice, every sense is tuned only to pain and death. With great effort, I can see beauty still, but it's like holding a warm cookie hidden in an ice block, I can see it's blurred form, but all I can do is hug the ice block to my chest and know the cookie is inside. My memories of warm gooey cookies, the taste, the texture, the comfort, is so distant, it feels like I've only been told about the experience and have never experienced it myself; and I know I never, ever will, because I can't live in the world of light, I am darkness incarnate, I am a black smudge across a rainbowed sky, I bring my own darkness with me, shielding me from anything good. The only thing I am good for is destroying, hurting, breaking.
I want to get away, but I am so exhausted I feel that not even the rest of death could give me peace, I'm a black hole of desperate tired emptiness.
If I can will myself to to my shriveled, curled feet, I drag along slower than a slug, my brittle limbs dragging thick chains tugging at giant balls of lead and the demon, with his claws in my flesh, crouches on my shoulders still pouring into my ear, drowning me in poison.
I try to make it to the wall of the pit, but I fall, over and over again, every time I fall I have to fight back tides of poison ice shards in my mind, trying to make myself believe I have feet to get back up on.
On my journey, I lose my way often, it's so dark, my senses are fading; all I know is how brittle and worthless and stupid I am. Confirmations rise up out of the darkness like the giant flashing neon signs of a casino: YOU CAN'T DO THIS. YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING WORTH SHIT. YOU CAN'T EVEN STAND ON YOUR FEET YOU STUPID LITTLE TURD. And the demon purrs in my ear, urging me to believe what I see and feel. "Just fall" he urges "and drink, accept, guzzle down the death I want to tenderly drown you in."
If, I somehow find the edge of the pit, find the side of the long tunnel up, if I somehow find the strength to raise a shriveled crooked arm to its dark mucky sides, and if I can muster the spark from somewhere, deep inside, to try and pull at the wall, to raise myself towards the distant speck of light above, that may only be an illusion, I find that the walls crumble and slide under my desperate, weak fingers. Any time the wall holds, it's only to let me fall down further. Every time I drag my weary self up a few inches, a few feet, a yard, I know that at some point, I will find myself grasping at loose mud, my body free falling to the icy rocks below, shattering over and over and I begin to wonder: what is the point?
I vaguely hear people saying things like: 'I love you', 'things will get better' but what does that mean? I start to believe it means: lie down, drown, stop hurting us, we would better if you were gone, see our looks of pity and sadness? You're smearing your stinky mud across our beautiful lives, please lie down, and if you can't die, at least whimper more quietly, you're ruining our heaven.
Nothing gets better. Somehow I keep getting more empty, even as my broken, shriveled body swells full of demon venom. My swollen, broken fingers can no longer hold onto my beautiful tokens, that are probably really just rocks and shards of bone I stole from someone else's corpse to try and pretend life was beautiful once.
This goes on and on and on and I can't make it stop no matter how hard I fight.
Then suddenly the demon venom is fading, the light above is growing, I am rising. Soon I am walking through a beautiful world in a beautiful life again. The dark memories are so horrible and terrifying and twisted, they seem like just a bad dream. I shove it away and run into the lush meadows, surrounded by a flock of butterflies and tell myself, it was just a scraped knee, a bruised elbow, it wasn't that bad.
Perched on the back of my neck is a tiny black imp, sleeping, empty of poison. He slumbers and waits, gathering more poison, getting stronger, waiting for the next time he gets to gorge on my soul fire
That is depression for me.
ΔΙΑΒΑΖΕΙΣ
Windows Into (My) Depression (Poetry, ongoing)
ΠοίησηPoems and short written works that talk about how I experience or battle depression. Some will be hopeful, some are extremely depressing. If you can't tell, there are major triggers on...pretty much everything. This is your only warning.
