Depression
"Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair. Just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means that you are alive."
—Kafka
Part One: Subjective
- Narcolepsy.
- The universe dies from its own momentum...
- Rain of frogs.
- Smoke. Black, gray, white.
- Invisible.
- Depression means not brushing your teeth, because you don't want to be clean.
- Gnats.
- Dried moisture, like a landscape of salt pits.
- Two bags of Mother's Oatmeal Cookies...
- I am burning through my time on this earth.
- I don't know.
- Sleep.
- I feel as old...
- False peace.
- That you made such disastrous choices...
- Your posture droops.
- Fatigue, lassitude, disinterest.
- It's like the constant background radiation of the Big Bang.
- I miss that warmth.
- Vacuuming.
- No.
- Crowds.
- Photos.
- Classic PTSD.
- Unfocused, listless, scattered.
- Try, fail, sleep.
- Pointless time.
- Of all the mysteries in the world, why must I be one?
- There's no choice but to embrace the struggle.
- We disappear with our works.
- The shriek of the wind is the song of a million ghosts.
- Violent dreams...
- Whose stomach is this?
- Tomorrow is another day.
- Depression is all about the time you'll never get back..
- Girls.
- Hurt feelings of friends.
- It's like having dinner with a family who observe rituals and use language you haven't been introduced to.
- Remorse, regret.
- My little wolf cub stares with gray and white affection.
- Lonely house, my friend is gone.
- The best times are when I feel I don't exist.
- I'm almost a ghost.
- I saw the moon collide with office towers.
- The prison house of memory.
- Midnight in the City of Cardboard.
- i want something else
- Seven kindsa restless, more than slightly dehydrated.
- The silliness of solipsism.
- The light changes.
- i ran into the rain
- To lock the world out.
- Evil world, evil people.
- Sandstone, Levi's, Capital Volume Two.
- Season of shards and edges.
- Eaten by ants.
- Let me be empty.
Part Two: Objective
- Depression isn't sadness.
- Discouragement is when...
- The window is cracked.
- My breakdown put a definitive end to self-confidence.
- I'm on the BART in Berkeley minding my own when street people offer me food and money.
- During my breakdown my depression was not circadian.
- I would play the same song endlessly.
- In the darkest period of my breakdown I thought of suicide continually.
- I walk from my apartment near the Panhandle to Mel's on Geary.
- Haight Street emo...
- People think "depression" means "sadness"...
- Even mental health professionals sometimes conflate the term...
- There's a lot going on during a depressive episode.
- I feel it happen.
- You recognize how deeply frustrated they are with you.
- There've been moments in my life when I felt so claustrophobic I had to withdraw.
- My cycle was more similar to Styron's than to what he cites as typical.
- "You look like Gollum," says a helpful minion.
- Causes and effects.
- My therapist asks: Why has re-reading The Bell Jar triggered such an intense outpouring of grief?
- My mother's depression was one of many outcomes of the severe abuse she suffered as a child.
- Breakdown changed my anxiety profile.
- That was what there was.
- If I'd sought help earlier I might have been able to save my mom.
- Withdrawal was no worse than mild flu.
- Over the nearly three decades after my breakdown I developed, by trial and error...
- The literature of depression is filled with anecdotes of depressives who felt worthless.
- My earliest symptoms were disrupted appetites for food and sleep.
- She denied sleep disruption altogether.
- Insomnia.
- Romanticization of mental illness.
- It's scary to me when friends talk of "handling it by myself".
- My first experience with therapy was ludicrous.
- My new psychiatrist is charming...
- Loneliness as trigger.
- I want to reach out.
- Let us make no bones about it: We do not really know what causes depression.
- My ex explained ADHD to me this way.
- In these pieces where I've written of my own experiences of depression I've characterized it as essentially univocal...
- I was terrified of meds.
- My first experience with antidepressants was via my GP...
- My friend is defeated.
- Difficulty speaking.
- In addition to bupropion I'm taking a shit-ton of supplements.
- Dostoevsky believed, with the Romantics, that wisdom is the fruit of suffering.
Part Three: Narrative
- I'd been lonely before.
- I'd just begun to forge new friendships when the second disaster changed my world forevermore.
- For me, "adolescent onset" lasted about four years...
- Where even the reading rebounded: amplifying and focusing the darkness I was experiencing.
- Next was naturally The Bell Jar.
- I began dramatically challenging The Adult Authorities to notice me.
- The worst, where I had the full panoply of classic symptoms...
- Somewhere in there I had a long, adolescent, destructive relationship with entirely the wrong partner.
- This period of adolescent onset began to fade when I met the right woman.
- At the worst moment of the worst moment I literally left my body.
- I read those two sentences at an ironic moment.
- Walking to visit my friend in the Mission.
- When I moved from San Diego to San Francisco, loyalty was perhaps the most urgent hurdle to my mental health.
- Ann Marlowe says addiction is essentially nostalgia:
- My first attempt at therapy was laughable.