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Of Startdust and Storms and all the Space Between

When everyone understands depression, nobody does.

By D SurlsPublished 3 years ago 8 min read
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A certain darkness is needed to see the stars.” -Osho

Trigger Warnings: Depression and Body Dysmorphia

Sometimes, quite often and mostly by night, something terrible and wild rises up with in me. An idea, an action, a feeling, whatever it is, it crouches, hunched and billowing at the edges of my consciousness. It surges in my blood, drives me up and fills me with a desperate want to do something.

I never have had a word for it.

It fills me up with a terrible longing for something nameless and soundless. Whatever it is that haunts, I think it’s what has given rise to legend among human kind. We call it wolf or witch, beast or bitch, but at the end, it’s the monster within. Some of us have one, some of us don’t. When I ache in pain or sorrow or something much more indescribable, the haunting is silent. It’s when I feel happy or even contentment that it stirs. It howls then, a curse, a jinx, a bone rattling cry to tether me to my aches and pains. Whatever I am, whatever those of us with this creature within are, we were meant for the hollow and wild places on earth. We are those meant to bleed.

I have a lot of fantasies, obsessions if we are being honest, that I don’t admit to. I try, desperately, to push them back and keep them at bay, but still they roll over me. I see myself driving in silence out to a place where there is some vein of silence I can hear. I park my car and flip open a small compartment in the back. Inside is a .380 Ruger. It’s heavy and cold in my hand, but the metal soon takes on the warmth of my skin until it feels like a part of me, like my own flesh. I can feel the barrel on my lips and teeth and tongue. Sometimes, I even hear the crack of pulling the trigger through the silence I’ve found. Sometimes it’s something else. It’s driving on the highway and seeing a curve, gentle and winding. It’s the crunch of the guard rail. It’s glass shattering. I can still taste it. Fantasy and memory blur together until I’m lost remembering gasoline and cut grass of the air, my blood in my mouth.

To die would be a peace after all this.

It started slowly at first, the barest glimpse of an idea I’d brush away just as quickly as I recognized it. Suicide, my mother always told me, was selfish. I never did believe that I had enough worth to take something for my own. Selfish, in the darkest corners of my psyche, always was a subdivision of fat. And if I’m running from anything, it’s that. Owning things, the act of purchasing, is another subdivision. Eating before I drink coffee. Letting my hair fall in my face. Asking for help. It’s all me taking up too much, ballooning out beyond my reaches.

None of these things have anything to do with the storage or distribution of fat cells on the human body, and believe me, I understand this. But any one of those things makes my skin shrink around me, leaving me sweating and exposed and somehow worthless. There is no logical way to explain it because it is inherently illogical. But knowing that doesn’t make it any less real or any less painful.

Sometimes, when those imaginings of death fill me too far, some cool, calm, reasonable part of me takes over. Logistics. How? How can I make this feasible?

It is a very dangerous way to think.

In the end, I do what I always do. I punish. I think of all the twisted things I know about myself and turn a vicious verbal attack inwards. The insults and hate that rolls out is dark, heavy, and slippery smooth. The worst part about it is knowing that this is a disease talking, that this is a chemical lacking in my brain. There is a scientific reason behind it. And I know better. I know that the barbs that sting are coming from something that I should ignore. That I need to ignore. The problem with depression, though, is that as easy as it is to describe it as a monster within or try and separate myself from it, it’s so interwoven with how I think that it is simply a part of who I am no matter how hard I try to push the viscous vitriol away, darkness always comes crawling.

I’ve always been afraid to ask for help because I don’t genuinely believe that it will be there. I have always wrapped up these ideas and punishments with an iron bound control. No one could ever see how deep it went. No one could know because they would see what I see: a creature huge and heaving with gluttony and hideous to behold. I’ve slipped a few times, the pain of it leaking out in one way or another. And the witnesses of it leave because just the smallest trickle of what hides inside me is too ugly to stand.

Most of the time, I feel like surviving it is the last vestige of worth I have left. And I don’t do it for any of the reasons I should. I do it because my dog would never understand. People, I can leave behind words to help them understand, to give them at least a reason why. Things like reasons matter so much to us. I could leave that. But I can’t leave her like that.

I adopted Bert from the Humane Society on October third. It was an October third like any other, really, except her eyes were haunting me. She looked like a coyote, skinny and scared. Her eyes watched every movement around her, and the fear pooled around her like a cloying storm. When I sat in a small concrete room to meet her, she shrank into the corner, tucked her face into the wall, and tried so desperately to hide.

The scent of fear cling to her for several days around the apartment. It was a hard metallic and musky scent that stunk and made me feel like crying, but also like crying wouldn’t purge me of the sadness it made me feel. So I fed her and took her for walks, where she cowered from any approaching being, and waited her out. Finally, she stopped going belly up when I reached for her. Instead, her little tail slowly thumped, and then gently wagged, and now it’s a full on tornado when she sees me.

To be loved like that is a whole feeling, and when it takes you, for a instant there is nothing else.

After a few months, she learned to play with other dogs. After a year or so, she learned to play with me. After three years, she has learned to snuggle ever so slightly.

And so, I cannot betray that by giving her to a shelter or another home or anywhere else. It is for that reason, and I’m somehow ashamed to admit it, that I’ve pulled through some moments I doubt I would have otherwise. She doesn’t judge me or tell me I’m being pathetic or that I’m not good enough. Instead, she licks my cheek if I cry, or just lays next to me when I’m sad. No person has done as much, but perhaps it’s because I never learned how to ask for it.

So I take what she can give, return it as much as I can, and dig through all the dark sludge for my own guiding light. There is a way out, a freedom. I’ve been chasing it for years, and I will not give up the fight.

I’d like to tell you that depression is something that anyone can understand, but it isn’t true, not really. We make all these metaphors for it, what it’s similar to and mincing it down into bite sized pieces. But depression is all of it all at once. It isn’t one metaphor, it’s all of them. It isn’t one sentence, it’s a whole book screaming in your every cell every moment of every day. And I can dial it back, wrap it up tight and storm through life with just a fragment of myself showing, but I can never turn it off. I can never feel silence inside of me with too feeling an awful ache.

It hurts, all the things I can’t help but to think. They slip through the cracks, insidious and whispering. I tell myself lies and truths and half truths until I can’t make out the difference anymore and it’s one great cacophony of anger and hate and a dull sense of betrayal that crushes in until I feel as if my ribs must crack from it. Sometimes it feels like they do. I remind myself of terrible things, of my loneliness, and it presses in through my skin until it fills the great hollow within my chest. And it hurts.

Sometimes, it occurs to me that I should open up, talk about it. I never quite manage to find the ability to do so. I don’t want someone to emphasize, say they get it when they don’t. I don’t want to scare away my scant handful of friends scattered around the country. I don’t want to let the demon speak when there won’t be any understanding on the other side.

Rationally, I know that there are other people out there with the same demon, with a similar demon, sometimes several demons. I’ve met some, and seen others. But I never really found it in myself to share, to give out an “I understand. I have one too.” I talk to the silence at the top of a mountain sometimes, or else the wild quiet in a forest. Those confidants are black holes, absorbing what I say with no reflection. I know now what it is inside me, my demon, my witch, the beast within.

For now, it’s under my control once more.

depression
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About the Creator

D Surls

I’m out looking for the lost and lonely things.

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