This Is What Depression Feels Like

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1.

Breathing deeply for once without feeling like I’m choking it’s coming as a surprise to me, like wow! Maybe I’m getting better?  For a second I feel myself becoming something else, something alive, tidy, connected. Only for a second – it passes.

2.

Depression. From the Spanish word – Presión: Pressure. That’s what it is. Two hands, twice the size of my body pressing down on my chest trying to drain the air out of me. Who is this violent strangler? Me. Me. Me.

3.

A museum of me, a funeral, a gallery of me on my best day. But the child smiling there in the elegantly framed photograph on the altar isn’t me.  I’m the body in the coffin. Please help me.

4.

Fed up, you say “Everybody has problems. Why can’t you just snap out of it, why can’t you just be happy?” Then I pray to the universe that you never have to feel this for yourself,that you never fall into this cerebral nightmare.

5.

How can the mind become such a deep hole? Why does reality, the everyday world, seem physically thousands of miles from where I am? I’m rotting in my mind. I’m trapped in a water well.

6.

Pushing myself deeper and deeper into it.  Punishing myself more and more for something I’ve never done, for something that does not have to be my fault.

7.

Nothing comes of it.  Just greater and greater separation,  greater distance from everyone and everything. And I wish I was one of those poets that could transform this hopelessness into something beautiful.

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