Dealing Depression

My depression is starting to get the better of me

Dealing Depression

 It is getting harder and harder to deal with my depression. I have no one really close I can talk to honestly about it. I am afraid if I truly tell someone my deep feelings they would not understand and just go away forever. I often think my friends are just pretending they are my friends and I am deeply afraid of losing even them by revealing my true self and thoughts. That is why I only show them what I have discerned they want to see in me. I get deep feelings that I am the last person on earth even when other people are around. As a matter of fact I am truly the loneliest when I am around other people. However, they see my facade of a smile and hear my well rehearsed laugh and think that there is nothing wrong with me. How could there be? I look so happy all of the time. Behind the jolly mask is the face of a well worn weary man of disgraceful solitude propped up by years of tears. 

The dragons teeth has slashed my dreary wrist with its foul tempered edge once again. Muttering the red voice screams out in pain. Half a league it runs through the village of the damned that resides in my inner demons. Always thirsty for more as it drinks its unquenchable taste of desire. Left unsatisfied with only destroying the little morsel of happiness I am able to detect among the undetectable. It slowly grinds my will of resistance until it is rotted away to a mere fine miserable dust blowing quietly unseen in the cold wind.

When you think about it, it really is a simple thing. Wake up alone, eat alone, go to work, come to an empty home, sleep alone, wake up alone and repeat. The sheer simplicity of it is brilliant in its diabolical scheme of control. To me depression is a growing and living organism buried deep in my subconscious mind. Just when I think I am getting away from it I can hear it subtly whisper "not so fast there, you will never get away from me." Once again it wraps itself around my burdened soul and drags me back down to the quagmire of the battered and dead.

My real life nightmares are eroding into my dreams. I sleep more than I should because I cannot face being awake. I sometimes feel like I am asleep when I am awake and that I am awake when I am asleep. There is a dusty quality to my life that makes me feel like I will never come clean. I was born from dust, live like dust and soon will return to dust. The lion's eyes stares at me like an elk on open range. A snack for its dinner table. Eaten then forgotten until hungry again. Mixed in with the rest of the dust to be blown away to unforgettableness. 

I do things that later I wish I had not done. They haunt the deepest recesses of the hauls of my mind. Like ghost from the distant past haunting the history of a burned down ransacked house of antiquity. At the time it feels so right but later, oh later the dusty rose of regret blooms on the stringent stem of reality. Like a forever nightmare bounding through my startled awaking dream. I am unsettled by the reflections of the dim lit faces of my watery memories of times long ago. Are they real pathogens or made up composites from the heaps of masked charades?

The people I want to know are growing ever more distant from me. It is like we are from two different planets set apart from each other by an ever expanding Galaxy. Is it because I take the slightest perceived kindness that I am shown and build a foundation of imaginary love with it? How do I find something if I have no perception of what it looks or feels like? I have never felt or seen true everlasting love so it is an unknown to me. I feel it always will be because to me what always has been will always be. I want someone to notice me even after I am not around. I want someone to still feel my presence hours after I have left.

The only real truth that I can see or know is my own. The light of a small match slithers its way through the vast space that exist between my two truncated ears. It keeps awake the voices that are hidden from the front half of my brain in the back half of my brain. The train of thought that left the station did not arrive at its destination. It was derailed by the molecules of the last hope of salvation.

I do not want to be "one of us, gooba-gobble,gooba-gobble" but I do not want to be one of them either. When I try to fit in I do not. When I try not to fit in I do not. I am caught between the middle of who people think I should be and what I actually was doomed to be. Trash dogs root through my desperation until they are full and then they move on to leave me bare boned and alone as they found me.

 Every little mistake I make I blows up to a catastrophe in my mind. Sometimes it feels like the last breath I take will be the last breath I take. Often when my mind goes idle I start thinking suicidal. The stark terror of falling off a high cliff into a bottomless pit is something I feel every other minute of every other night and day. It is as if I have been lifted upon a high flying cloud only to be dropped like raindrops of tears on a deserted island. Abandoned to be left to my own decay. When I look at myself in the mirror I hate what I see outside and inside. Every day I sink deeper in the hole I dug in my past.

The last follicles of depreciation envelop me like a burial shroud. I am smothered by my own misunderstandings until I am choked to the point of degradation. I go forth into a world of complete unknown interrelationships. Never taught the proper functioning of one on one interpersonal skills. Talking to myself has not trained me to talk to others as I wish I could. The shelter of my life has not allowed me to flourish in an un-sheltered world. I fondly appreciate what was but deeply regret what it has turned me into as I try to survive in this world I now find myself in alone.

I hear the echoing of the laughs behind my front of me. The attempt to disguise it no longer escapes me. From their advantage point it is only realistic for them to play with me for what they can get from me. After all who am I to say that I would not do the same if I were not looking at me from their optical delusional perch? Their cryptic under tones of secret meanderings fall on my ears deciphered in ways they may or may not mean. What really matters? Is it what they actually say or what I think I actually hear? 

Which is worse? The times I know why I am the way I am or the times I do not know why I am the way I am?

The momentary lapses of lucidity are rare for me lately. They bob and weave like a once mighty boxer in the ring fighting for his life. As time passes quicker and quicker they get slower and slower. They then fade into oblivion never to be seen again. Sad is the life of a depressed and undernourished brain. Left to its own devices in a cloud of gloomy confusion. Trickles of well meaning stupidity seep out from time to time. When it dries up what impression is left behind? Scattered precepts of false illusions built like fortress walls.

I wonder if not being would be better than being what I am now. I try to change who I am but I cannot do it no matter how hard I try. I think I am on the right path and things are going to change but something in my head knocks me back down to my depression. I try writing about it and that helps for awhile but then the sadness comes back again like some misinformed  consciousness in my brain. Even my writing, which is if I exam closely and objectively is no breath taking piece of art, helps less and less than it use to help. I can only imagine what the few people who actually read my pathetic attempt at adding to the ethos of a crowded literary world think of me. That is one reason I even hesitated to share these brain infected ramblings of mine. It may not add to the world but I hope it subtracts from my depression even a little for a microscopic second of my expanding and contracting lifelessness. 

Reviews

[D]

This piece reminds me so much of the book Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig! If you haven't read it, I REALLY THINK YOU SHOULD! To say I am fascinated with depression sounds a bit off but that's the closest word I can seem to find at the moment. Just reading about people's experience with it has been eye opening to me. From the obvious struggles to the good parts about it that people rarely speak of. Winston Churchill suffered from depression and many believe that it is what made him a great leader. People have said the same about President Lincoln. Great work. All the best to you on your journey.

[Rogerh]

Thanks for reading and thanks for the comment.