Miles away.

Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation. If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.

It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too. No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged.

I stumbled upon this quote on a blog which touched my heart as it is everything that I know and feel about depression... it's funny because this blog was by someone that had hurt and scarred me on another level of pain. I don't know why I decided to go to his blog again, probably because I wanted to read again a poem I know he wrote about me 2 years ago. In it he mentions that I was nothing to him, that I was reaching out for something more and he could see straight through me. I can't say that reading it again didn't hurt me. It brought back the pain that he inflicted on me, a pain that I don't think will ever really heal or which I can ever forgive. And from this infliction came one of the most darkest times of my life, if not the most darkest time in my life.  I built the walls around my heart so damn high and sought to never give myself away to a man like that again, for fear of causing my heart utter pain. But when I met another man, who when I first met brought down every wall around my heart without even trying, I was afraid. I had never fallen in love with someone so quickly before, and I ran away. Almost more than a year later, here I am, in the same place as I was when I met the former - depressed, utterly heartbroken and betrayed. But, my gosh, were they 2 wonderful and amazing men, particularly the latter. A part of me believes I will never find another man like the him again. In my experience, when I meet other men, I come away feeling disappointed. I'd rather not love again until someone comes along that can exceed what I was given by him... and right now it just seems impossible.

Currently listening to: Coldplay - Speed of Sound