Post Published: March 17, 2023

When I slip and lose my grip on the presentation of keeping it together, all of my reality is sucked down into the drain of my depression.

It’s a gushing, rushing whirlwind of despair; damp, dark, and furiously pulling my awareness and all my senses down deep under the foundations of my personality and into the bricked well leading to the bowels of the earth. And doesn’t it always feel like it could be an abyss?

Once you’ve developed a recognition and a sort of safe familiarity with your own depression all you know for sure is how it feels at the start, how it felt at its worst, and what your personal manageable limits are. But there’s always a fear that how it felt at its worst still has more layers beneath it.

There is always a fear that inside the darkness of your most awful feelings there are trap doors and trip wires that could give out at any moment and plunge your further down.

Of course having managed your way out before lends some confidence to your own ability to manage again.

You have routines. You understand the importance of each of them. You have healthier coping mechanisms. You actively practice self-care. You are cultivating self-love.

You do have a grip.

Right until you don’t. Right until your façade crumbles. Until you are alone with your unfriendly reminders. Your personal wrecking team. The demons. And their sharp nails, picking your scabs, twisting their knuckles inside your flesh, pawing your heart, pulling apart your guts, singing all the while their prescribed karmic chants; lines about your unloveableness, your stupidity, your hated nature, how no one ever wanted you to begin with and that every good thing you’ve ever had in your life was never really yours anyway.

The loudest lie, indeed. But how it rings through all your brain cells so profoundly, sizzling sharply over your fractured insides, until your entire body ruptures in agony at the deafening repetition.

Everything, everywhere, in every part of your existence hurts. You hate being you. You hate everything that was ever done to you. You hate everyone who was supposed to love you and everyone who used the word against you like a rod on a mule.

You hate them all.

You hate life.

You hate yourself and your life and the whole stupid, awful, hateful world.

But you don’t want to die and you don’t want to feel this way. And that tiny bit of truth is enough to crack the darkness.

As dismal and scary as your depression is, the part of your being that doesn’t actually want to die is the part that saves you every time. It reminds you that the loudest lie  – though painfully loud and overwhelming – is still just a lie. No matter the volume, or the torture of it, the lie is still just a lie.

Tell me what you think before we both die