The truth is, my days haven’t been anything you can even start to imagine. I lied to you. Just like I lied to myself for a very long time. I know I look fine. But that’s because I force myself to appear that way in front of you — my family, my friends, my teachers and coworkers.
The truth is, I look fine. But I’m not. I haven’t been in a pretty long time, yet I’ve only just come to accept it. Again. Yes, again. This is not a first. Depression and I had met before. And I thought I had defeated it for good. I thought I had the tools to fight the demons. I thought I knew how to bypass all of their mischievous twists and turns. But depression is a sneaky bitch and a violent storm at the same time, and the magnitude of this earthquake is 10 times stronger than the last.
The truth about my depression is this. It’s the devil living inside my brain and my heart, on a quest to destroy all of my cells, catching every breath I take until I’m unable to inhale on my own, breaking every bone in my body until it eats me alive completely, destroys me and kills me.
It wakes me up every morning and puts these dark thoughts into my head… “F*ck… I’m still here. Why am I still here? I don’t want to be here.” And by here, it means alive.
It makes me look at the same four white walls of my bedroom again and again and again; it makes me close the curtains because the light of day would be too painful to let in. It makes me cry and it makes me ache.
It makes me harm myself sometimes, and starve myself too. When the hurt becomes unbearable, and when the tears won’t stop, pinching and punching seem to be some sort of exit doors, pushing away the constant and persistent pain inside my chest, my head, my brain, my eyes, my legs, my cheeks, my whole body.
It switches off the lights and locks me in, preventing me from just stepping out of my bedroom. It makes me lie on my bed or curl up on the floor in that corner between the window and the wooden chest of drawers, my two arms tightly surrounding my trembling knees.
It makes me stop caring. About work. About people. About anything and everything. Or at least, it makes me want to stop.
It comes crashing. At any point of day or night. Just like Dementors, it comes and reduces to ashes all the good memories and only leaves me with the obscure ones.
The truth is, I’ve lost so many people along the way, and I feel like I’m not good enough for anyone to stay. “You feel like you don’t belong to life,” my therapist would say. The world, life, is dark, and I am not coping.
The truth is, I have depression even though I appear just fine.
Follow this journey on On My Way by Marie.
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