October 11, 2013

A Love Letter to Depression

In honor of Mental Health Awareness Week, I'm grateful to share my new friend's "Love Letter to Depression." I know many others can relate to her pain.

AJS

Dear Depression,

I hate it when you push me into my darkest waters and hold me there until I’m crying for three hours on my bathroom floor -- or worse. I hate it when you take feelings from me, and I am left enjoying nothing. I sit and stare at the TV or the computer screen checking Facebook over and over for distractions -- news, updates, whatever. Fake reality. Fake friendships. I can’t even respond to the messages on my phone or meet up with people because I am so empty and stuck in you like a pit of tar.

I don’t like it when your presence causes me to dwell on extreme ways to escape the pain. Nothing really works. TV distracts for a time, puts me in another life that is unreal, but sucks more time away from I don’t know what. The days pass by and I’m in a dark room, TV on, staring.

I finally got to the point where I could sit at my desk, still in the dark. I stopped trying to cook on the hotplate because I have no desire to clean after. I order food and stress that my neighbors will see me doing it again.

I scheme new ways to avoid contact. I take the trash out at night and keep the black out curtains drawn all day. I open the bathroom window to vent the 150 square foot room that is bedroom, kitchen, pantry, living room, reading room, office space, art studio.I’m fed up with myself, because I am you.

You are my drive to work on art, go to school, see people, sleep, get up, breathe, eat, talk, pay bills, and care about myself enough to not break my razor open and cut deeply down my left arm like a surgeon trying to remove a tumor, tearing the skin so I can peel off almost an inch thick of flesh and strip my arm of muscles, skin and tendons.


I feel sad when I can’t. Even the bizarre urges to destroy myself and you in the process are unfulfilled and meaningless. My fantasies are all of leaving whatever this is. And they just stay there, growing more powerful than even you and I together.
Nothing changes and you continue to torture me, choking my attempts to escape with the thickness of death and rot. And in a way I like it.

You will never leave me. You will never go away. You will keep me safe from the tightrope walk of happiness and peace.

I feel hurt because you abuse me with your power. You were just disappointment once, and now you’re god to me. Heaven and earth, all is hell because that’s how you like it.

I feel awful because I will never know life without your reality. My life has been tainted by your love. All my meet and greet and gettin’-to-know-you stories are either poison, venom, or mimicry. Nobody wanted to hear how you and I have lived for these past 17 years.

You are the ghost of my peace, and you fill me up with graves. Every future hope has died at your hand. Every attempt to live and be like all the healthy people with parents who love their children and try to dream their children’s dreams with their children and when their children stop dreaming them.

I feel disappointed because you have destroyed my ability to feel the love of others, to feel loved, to enjoy love, to love myself, to love my life, to live my life.

I’m afraid that without your embrace, I will trust the wrong people again and they will break me down into your arms again and deeper than before. You never did like it when I tried to leave you for another, and you attacked me whenever possible to ruin my time with them.

I feel scared because I want to die more than I know how to live. I will end up homeless, or a shut-in. Either way, suicide will be the only place I can hide from you. You always know where to find me, no matter the mask I wear.

I’m sorry that you think that we belong together. I’m not your soul mate, and I’m tired of being your love slave. The sex was never any good. I faked it.

I’m sorry for the things we’ve done together. I missed out on so many things because I listened to you when you promised me all the monsters couldn’t hurt me if I hid with you.

Please forgive me for prying myself from your grip. I’ll always have your teeth marks to remember you by.

I didn’t mean to stay so long. I tried leaving you before and that just made you vicious. I can already hear the sound you make coming down the hall to beat me back into submission.

I love you because you never abandoned me. You kept me safe sometimes. I know you loved me, too.

I love when you only whisper softly because then you don’t control my thoughts.

Thank you for spending time with me. I learned to see the light in your darkness and know you balance out my sense of peace.

I understand that this is hard for you, but I lied when I said I didn’t sort of want to live without you.

I forgive you for eating me alive and spitting out the bones to read them like some morbid form of tea leaves.

I want to live a life where you cannot intrude and push away the people that do care and probably won’t hurt me enough to bring your satisfaction.

Love,

FFW

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