Within the Mind

A description of living with a mental illness.

There is nothing more terrifying in this world than the feeling of losing yourself to the monster that inhabits your mind. You are in a constant state of disarray and the impending doom that has nestled itself in your stomach becomes heavier with every breath taken. I have barely survived through my depression at times, clinging on to the slight hope that things may get better, praying to a God that I don’t believe in that these times will pass, and noting the fact that my parents have only one child. 

It was hard for me to believe that I could ever crawl out from the hole that my depression had thrown me into. It felt as if every time I managed to grab hold of a sturdy ledge to hoist myself out, it would collapse under my fingers, sending me deeper into the hole and farther away from reaching the surface. Every time I got close, I would get a faint scent of those roses everyone has been told to stop and smell. But as I would fall, yet again down the hole, the aroma was replaced by the smell of decay. It was my mind rotting away, at what seemed like a bottomless pit that made every thing surrounding deteriorate along with it. 

There was nothing anyone could do that would help me reach the surface once and for all. Any time someone threw down a life line, the hole would absorb it into its cold, wet walls leaving me to believe that no one threw it down in the first place. I don’t recall the sun ever shining when I was below the surface. I don’t think the wind ever blew through the willow trees that I love so much. I am not even sure that the sky was ever truly blue. I missed a lot of the world from the crypt that I was kept in. Note that I say kept, not stayed. I didn’t want to stay there. I didn’t want to be taken away from the world that I had barely even experienced, it was simply not time to go yet. But when my depression threw me in that hole, he made sure that it was as low as my self confidence, as low as my self worth, as low as my standards that I had of myself, as low as my depression made it. 

But thankfully, with time and the realization that I could mould the soil beneath me to my benefit and the many life lines that continuously had been thrown down over and over again, I reached the surface. The sun kissed my skin for the first time in years and those roses smelled so much sweeter than I could have ever imagined. 

Reviews

[khyss]

Very intense, yet very good piece of writing. Experiences like that are hard to go through and come out of.

[Kayla Amaro]

Wow. This is very deep and very personal. I appreciate you writing this: addressing this issue is important. I know what it is like to live with depression as well, and I can say that I 100% concur with everything you've expressed here.

Beautiful writing style.

[Aleena DeHaas]

Thank you for your kind words!