If you struggle with depression, then you know that happiness is a fleeting moment followed by intense darkness. Depression is like a rollercoaster where for one moment you feel giddy and excited but then comes the quick plunge into fear and despair (if you can’t tell I am currently in a depressive episode and hate rollercoasters). Typically, I can feel when a depressive episode is coming. I get more tired than usual, take longer naps, and my laugh feels forced—almost like my brain is happy and amused, but my body is prevented from communicating it. The world in general just dulls. The excitement I felt about seeing my friends vanishes and turns into reluctance. I tend to pull away slowly from my friends, not responding to texts for a few hours, then a day, then for weeks on end as the message notifications are drowned out by my sobs that are silent as to not wake up my sleeping family. I turn my phone over, so the bright screen doesn’t burn my sore eyes and I hug myself even tighter as I rock in fetal position on my bed. My messy room becomes a trap for anyone who wants to rescue me from this pit.
Kind of like a video game where to save the princess you must climb over the mountain of dirty laundry, race through the closet of forgotten clothes, get attacked by the swarm of flies coming from the week-old food. Just be careful to not slip on the river of split water and energy drinks. Instead of a princess, the winner gets a depressed, malnourished girl that hasn’t showered in four days. That is what depression is like. It’s lonely, dark, and smelly. At the end of a depressive episode you emerge from it with two new cavities because you couldn’t get up to brush your teeth, three pounds lighter, and you lost half your friends because they ignored you. That’s what gets me all the time. The fact that people think I’m disgusting, lazy, rude, or immature because I am behaving a certain way, but these people don’t realize that it is because I’m knee deep in depression and don’t have the motivation to even blink. I don’t have the motivation to fucking blink. My eyes literally water and burn as I stare at the ceiling because my brain and body are too tired to close my eyelids. My whole body feels as heavy as a rock and I cannot physically move it. I don’t have the motivation to talk or think or even kill myself even though that seems as though it’s the immediate and only answer. I know it isn’t, but in that moment, I want it to end. God I just want the pain to end. Numbness and pain are the only two emotions I feel, and I don’t know which is worse.Â