Ok, the truth. I don't even know how to start to explain what depression is or what it means. Typical of my life, the moment I want to explain something, something that I should know something about, I feel like I'm in a tutorial on an author I love, and I'm raping my brain (thanks Eli), trying to find a way to explain them, and I realise I don't want to know how they work because I just want to marvel at them as a whole. The thing is, I'm in love with my depression. That's not the same as saying I'm in love with depression. Nobody starts off wanting to feel like this, but I've spent so much time, just me, my depression and I, that it's become a surrogate parent, an adored sibling, an alternative me.
Depression isn't just being sad, it's being so fucking miserable that you spend a whole day in bed praying to die, because you're too scared of the consequences in the hereafter if you take control (the only control you have left), in your own hands along with the pill bottle. Depression isn't being tired. When you're not on the pills it's being so certain that the world is a shit place and everyone hates you that you really can't face the world apart from beneath the security blanket of your unwashed duvet. When you've finally accepted that you need medication, you're too tired to open the eyeballs that they've dosed you up to, but somehow your body still finds the energy to sob and rail and scream as though it were a natural function that just doesn't need any complicity from your messed-up brain. Depression isn't a part of your life that you like to bore your friends with so that you look intellectual and bohemian. Instead it's so all consuming that everything is filtered through this sieve of misery, and it colours all that you can see and feel and hear and smell.
The nastiest part of all is that you can't help feeling that there's something so self-indulgent about this, like it's a choice that you made, like you decided when you were born to look at the world like this, like you decided to take all that shit in school to heart, like you decided that every time you heard laughter that people were laughing at you. Depressives seem to have a sick equivalent to 'gaydar': we can sense other people like us and congregate together. A 'misery' of depressives would be the collective term. I even feel guilty about using words like 'we' and 'us'. I feel like I'm making it seem as though it were some kind of exclusive club, an alternative Octagon, where entry is guaranteed, not by downing ten neon-pink glasses of vodka, food colouring and economy lemonade in one go before seeking a lavatory to besmear with the curry you ate earlier, but by a pale green prescription.
But of course, in a way, it's the truth. You can see us in Gertie's, shakily sipping cups of milky tea, trying to steady hands that are shaking with the drugs that we have to down each morning. Or weeping in the quad because, well, because of nothing, except the overwhelming sense of isolation, trying desperately to gain the attention that we were either smothered with or deprived of in our youth.
It's a fucking frightening sub-culture to be a part of. I am jealous of those people, those sloaney images of perfection who always have people around them, who always seem to be doing something, or going somewhere, even if its just to the newest trendy coffee shop, in a big group, a 'pashmina' of perfections whose parents don't dread them coming home, the end of term heralding yet another return of the black sheep who confronts their expectations by lying on the kitchen floor in a catatonic state of misery, simply refusing to get up. Part of me wants to be you; to go to Filth to have a good time, to get pissed, to have something to yap about into your mobiles the next day, instead of going because the pubs don't stay open long enough to let you drink enough to forget, to pull a random innocent in a pathetic attempt to prove to yourself that you're not as repellant to other people as you are to yourself, and then stupidly expect it to mean the same to them as it does to you the next day.
But then, part of me is proud of it. Yeah, go ahead, nod your heads wisely and say that if only I wanted to look at it in a different way, if only I could pull myself together, then I could be just like you. But either I don't want to or I can't. I can't block out these ideals of self-annihilation, I can't pretend that the world is a good place, that my life is something to be grateful for. But there is satisfaction in depression. I've gone places and felt things that you can never dream of. So I'll go on writing my life like episodes of a soap-opera, I'll go on falling in love with every man that so much as looks at me. I'll go on believing that an argument is the end of my world.
Emotions are like a heart-monitor. A straight flat line in the middle of the screen might be neat, it might offer an image of perfection, but in the end it's not good news. The jagged line of an up and down heart-beat might not be pretty, it might be erratic, and the constant bleeping might spoil the quiet of an otherwise tranquil ward, but it's a sign of life. And I'm only human after all.