damage limitation

someone said to me today that it's really hard to ever explain what it feels like to suffer depression to someone who hasn't experienced it. what words will suffice, will capture the darkness...

having spent a good many years of my youth living with someone in a sustained phase of depression, i can still remember the frustration. to have gone through the experience myself, i feel empathy now like i never did. a kindred sense of, i get it now. i get why you couldn't find the will, the vitality, the more-than-just-functionally-exist essence in you...

people mean well. they love you and they desperately want you to "be positive". how? if i could just, be positive i wouldn't be depressed in the first place. and i appreciate the sentiment of those who phrase encouragement in terms that reflect an understanding, i hope you are surprised by hope, knowing when there are better days, when it comes from somewhere if only briefly, for a glimpse, it's not something one has just magicked up from the inside. that's why i pray. that hope will come find me. not once but many times over. and eventually stick around for a while.

in truth, it's not a sustained same feeling, this darkness. it has nuances... it's morphs and moves...

some days it's numbness. i came across an email today, a note of love. short but romantic. and i realised i couldn't remember what it felt like to receive that email... i know i would have felt suffused with thrill and desire and longing and wishing they were nearer and not far away but also sparked by joy and grinning that someone had stepped out of their busyness to tell me they loved me and wanting to share a moment of their life far away. but i couldn't conjure up that feeling. i know it as a thought memory. but i didn't have the bodily memory to match. it was as if it had been written to someone else and not me. i don't say that with self pity. just as a matter of fact. an is: i can't remember. i guess my body doesn't want to...

for as much as it destroys, it also protects...

there are the foggy unvital moments, hours, when one has to actively work at being present in a room, to actually have mind and body let alone heart all in sync together, concentrating on conversation, afraid to come into the present for fear of the rush of pain that comes when one feels oneself return. for depression is conflict and anger turned inward. kept on the inside so as not to disrupt the outside.

it kills joy. and sometimes just unfathomable. or abstract.

there are moments when one feels at least comfort, safety, connectedness. and in their wake comes that rush of hurt. one starts feeling. and it can take days to swallow it back down. hours spent on train journies or walking down streets fighting back tears that come unbidden.

for to reach joy one can only bear going first through sorrow. giving voice to all that is silenced, unsaid...

i am moving to seek safety. a space where the world can't get to me unless i let it in. because as much as i can't remember those feelings, i know it is the vital me that is hurt. so i want to be someplace else. where i can step out of the depression and refind whatever that vitality was, but elsewhere. where i have a mimicry of control.

people are kind, supportive. they say, you have so much to offer, so much spark. can't you re-find it? but yes, i reply, that was the me that has been hurt more times than i care to count. if that me comes back to life i want it to be someplace else...
i choose to go to be alone and no doubt lonely, than stay and find vitality returns, hope returns, knowing just how much i can be hurt. i don't want that risk anymore. not here.
not where there are constant reminders of why i keep the conflict on the inside.

in this space, i'm not excited about moving. i just want to be away. and on my own. no longer part of something. and in peace. where those that have hurt me can't find me, where i don't have to keep pretending there's no conflict. a simple existence. no fanfare, no ambitions. completely ordinary and pedestrian...

with only a fragile empty prayer that it'll all get easier. that things will work themselves out. and i'll busy my days and in the daily routine i'll forget it all. the good and the bad. the joy and the sorrow.

the desire to be someplace else where i don't need depression to contain the painful feeling of being part of something called community that's always going to be broken and failing.

let's call it damage limitation. and i don't need anyone to tell me it's futile. but i don't have the energy to come up with an excuse for walking away.

LB