What It Feels Like When Your Own Mind Turns Against You

We come to ourselves through damage,

the mind a country with disputed borders,

sovereignty claimed by competing generals

who issue contradictory proclamations at first light.

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My grandfather's God was a reasonable man.

He expected the crops to honor effort,

the seasons to fulfill their obligations.

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The brain, that faithless servant,

negotiates with no one.

It drafts its own amendments in the dark,

rewrites the constitution of the self

and presents it as established law.

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The bell jar descends.

Suddenly the world is muffled,

the mouths of others moving

behind thick gauze, their concern

reaching you distorted, a letter opened by someone else

and resealed badly.

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Inside: just you and your own recycled grief,

the same thoughts cycling like laundry

through the long machine of sleeplessness,

the spin that never stops,

the drum that never empties.

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You hold your forehead to the mirror of yourself

and something prehistoric stares back,

something that predates medication,

predates the whole civilized project

of getting better.

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Some of us have stood on bridges

to feel the river's indifference

as a form of kinship.

Some of us have been so terrified of morning

we bargained for one more hour of dark,

one more hour before the telephone,

before the mirror makes

its daily accusation.

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This is weather descending

on a coast ill-equipped

to bear this storm.

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What the republic demands of its suffering

is silence and a swift return

to usefulness. The wound dressed tightly.

The face arranged back into

its practiced, presentable calm.

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Suffering moves on its own time.

It does not file for the extensions it requires.

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I have sat in rooms painted the color

of institutional hope. Have heard

the professionals sort sorrow into categories,

press the sprawling, humiliating truth of it

into their small, precise containers.

Have felt the relief of being classified

and the terror that the classification

explained nothing. Cured less.

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We are the woman in the cereal aisle

stopped completely, staring

at the rows of bright, indifferent boxes

as if they were written in a language

she once spoke fluently

and has somehow, catastrophically, lost.

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We are the man who irons his shirt

with the concentration of a surgeon,

the shirt being the one thing

that will submit to being made right.

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We are the boy whose brightness

exhausted itself too soon,

rationing the remainder ever since,

spending it carefully

on the people who have learned

to love him across the distance.

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The mind becomes a foreign country

that has revoked your citizenship.

You stand at its border

holding papers, it no longer recognizes,

speaking a dialect

it has decided to no longer understand.

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The border opens.

Never on schedule.

Never on demand.

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In that ungoverned moment

between the closing and the opening

lives the whole brutal, ordinary courage

of continuing, undecorated, unwitnessed,

the bravest act most people

will perform and never be credited for:

staying.

Author's note:

To anyone living with depression, or something like it,

I don’t have answers for you.

Just this, if any of this felt like your own thoughts staring back at you, you’re not alone in it, even if it feels that way most of the time.

And if all you did was make it through today, quietly, without anyone noticing,

that is not nothing.