Reflections on Depression
How it feels
Note: Quotes in italics are mine.
I tell people it's like being dead. It feels like being a ghost, maybe. You float through your days feeling insubstantial, cut off from warmth, light and all feeling. Sometimes it feels like you're in a coffin buried alive. You're screaming inside your head, but no one can hear you.
"It was not really alarming at first, since the change was subtle, but I did notice that my surroundings took on a different tone at certain times: the shadows of nightfall seemed more somber, my mornings were less buoyant, walks in the woods became less zestful, and there was a moment during my working hours in the late afternoon when a kind of panic and anxiety overtook me..." - William Styron, Darkness Visible
"I'm frightened. I'm always anticipating that someone is going to scream at me, a cop in the street, my boss. I'm sure I'm going to be held up or get a flat tire
at rush hour. Every ache and pain in my body convinces me I'm going to die of cancer. I can't sleep. I wake up in the early hours of the morning terrified.
I'm either afraid of dying or that the house is going to be broken into. I have nightmares. I wake up sweating, paralyzed with fear. It's been several weeks now.
I think I can't make it, I can't go through another day and night feeling this way. I feel beaten up, my body feels as if I've been in a fight. Nobody seems
to understand." - Richard, You Are Not Alone
"I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never meant any such thing. I have made a captive of myself and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself out." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"I didn't know what was the matter with me. All I knew was that I was feeling lower than a snake's belly...I remember we used to go to restaurants, and I'd say 'Everybody's pointing at me, the cheat, the fraud, the fake.' You really believe these things! Astonishing!" - Mike Wallace, On the Edge of Darkness
"I was much further out than you thought and not waving but drowning." - Stevie Smith
"When you're depressed, there's no calendar. There are no dates, there's no day, there's no night, there's no seconds, there's no minutes, there's nothing. You're just existing in this cold, murky, ever-heavy atmosphere, like they put you inside a vial of mercury." - Rod Steiger, On the Edge of Darkness
"I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would be not one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell. I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better it appears to me." - Abraham Lincoln
