Vulnerability

CW: Suicidal ideation, self-injury

This is depression.  It's early morning and all my friends are asleep; I've already talked to half of them today anyway.  I am gut-crying, weeping into pillow, snot running down my face.  I am desperate.  My head hurts from crying.  My whole body is shaking.  All I can think about is making the pain stop; please, god, make it stop.  It feels like I'm breathing in water instead of air.  It feels like my organs are rotting inside me, but for some reason, I'm the only one who can smell the stench.

When you have been depressed for 15 years, you run out of ways to describe it.  There are only so many ways to say "I feel sad for no reason" or "everything hurts" or "I can't take one more fucking second of this existence."  You know you're gonna come out of it but you also know you're gonna end back up right here, staring at the computer screen, thinking about all the ways you could kill yourself, and feeling completely, utterly alone.  You listen to voice mails that you've saved for years just so you can hear somebody say "I love you."  You read the letters that you asked your friends to write for the darkest nights, and cry some more, and try to tell yourself that people care about you.  You hold the trinkets that people have given you and bring their faces to your mind, tell yourself what they would say to you - keep breathing, stay with me, you are safe, you are loved.  You tell yourself, but at the same time you can't help reaching out toward that darkness, that nothingness, that peace - it's right there, so close, an end to this pain that no one but you can fight, but it's too much.  How do you breathe when all the air is gone, how do you walk when your whole body is filled with stones, how do you live when you're Atlas and every morning you start back down at the bottom of that fucking mountain.

My psychiatrist calls what I do "jug-hits."  Depending on where you place the ligature, you can restrict either the flow of air or blood to your head.  With the latter, in just a few seconds everything goes away.  Your vision goes dark, your hearing fades, your lips start to tingle, and for some reason, those few moments are the only times my mind is quiet.  In those five, ten, sixty seconds, I don't exist.  I've reached Nirvana - nothingness.  And then when I let go and the light and sound come rushing back in, the air tastes a little bit sweeter.  I started pulling out my hair a few months ago.  It usually takes seven or eight good sections until I can breathe again.

This is the side that I don't let many people see.  I don't like to be vulnerable and will go to great lengths to avoid it.  I have been called a liar.  I've been told that I have no reason to feel like this, as if I don't know that.  I've been told that blaming my depression on brain chemistry is a "cop-out."  I've been given advice by people who barely know me, telling me to exercise, what to eat, what magical supplements to take, as if they have the right to tell me they know the secret to cure this thing that has been eating me since I was a child, as if I haven't tried it all.  I am afraid to admit how closely this long-clawed creature clings to me, how it grows on me like a fungus, how it sticks to my skin no matter how many hours I spend trying to scrub it off.  This face, snotty and naked - this is me, in my darkest moment, trying.  I am trying.  For my family, for my friends, for the children that I love - I am trying.

This is depression.  It is ugly and it hurts.  It is a selfish thing that takes and takes until it's picked you down to your bones, and even though you have no muscles left, people will still tell you that all you have to do is stand up and walk away.  I see you, lying there, stripped down to nothing.  I can't fix it.  But I can tell you that you're not alone.

There's not much left of me, but I will lie in the darkness with you.