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Depression is rotting food and dirty laundry.
It's stink of sweat and unwashed tangled hair.
It's dust and stiff air. It's blood,
and it's pain,
and it's nothingness.
It's headaches from sleeping too much or too little.
It's dark circles under your eyes and clogged pores, and acne.
It's vague nausea, it's not caring about eating.
Losing weight,
gaining weight.
It's all or nothing in everything.
It's getting tired from just walking around your apartment,
because your muscles got too weak after rotting in bed for so long.
It's arguments with your loved ones,
distance from your friends
and just plain isolation from anyone really.
It's guilt.
It's hopelessness
and avoiding thinking about your "future",
because when you try you come up blank.
It's rotting teeth, it's cavities.
It's sitting in the shower, if you manage to get into one,
because standing is too damn hard.
It's the daily horrors of going to sleep, because that
would mean that you failed yet another day.
Because that
would mean that tomorrow you'll have to do the hardest thing imaginable-
wake up and get out of bed, or at least try to do it,
again.
It's loss, of ambitions and hobbies,
of dreams and possibilities.
It's loss of personality. It's grief for a person you could be,
but that person is so far from who you are now,
that it's the same as grieving for a stranger.
It's grief for a person you could be, but never will be.
Depression is the feeling of inadequacy.
It's loss of knowledge, skills, loss of words.
It's hot shame. It's discussions that end with nothing,
because you don't want to explain it,
because you can't explain it
and all you say turns into meaningless excuses.
So maybe you shouldn't talk.
All I do is bother people and make them sad, worried, uncomfortable.
I can't hold a job.
I can't cook- I'm too tired.
So many things feel impossible,
and with the way your bones feel like they're made of lead,
maybe they are.
Sometimes when I'm outside I feel so fatigued that I consider falling to the floor
and just never getting up again.
Depression is fear and feeling of fatalism, and inevitability.
It's a feeling like you're a character in an ancient Greek tragedy,
like you will die and it was destined this way.
It's thinking 'maybe it's just who I am as a person'.
'Maybe I'm the problem, and the only way to fix it would be to get rid of the problem'.
You think 'maybe I should stop taking meds and drop out of therapy'.
And you think 'it will never get better, I'm fucked for the rest of my life'.
But maybe it will,
so you go to therapy
and say that maybe it's getting worse again.
You ask for help.
And you wake up
and wake up
and wake up
and hope.