Depression and What It Means to Feel Exhausted All the Time

I am exhausted.

I am exhausted of constantly contemplating the correct way to phrase my feelings so that you might understand. I am exhausted of searching within myself to find words that accurately explain how I am feeling.

I am exhausted because I search for words that allow me to place depression and anxiety in a box I can then wrap up with shiny paper and tie with a big sparkly bow.

I am exhausted because my life is messy: It involves sentences that are broken from my sobbing. It involves me screaming into my pillow because I am afraid. It involves sitting on my bedroom floor in silence for hours, feeling numb. It involves anxiety attacks that leave my body feeling like I just ran a 5k. It involves me scrolling through my phone and starting a new message to you four different times before I decide that I shouldn’t reach out because I feel I would be a “burden.”

It involves me sobbing at my kitchen table because I spilled my tea. It involves me calling my mother or my sister to hang up on them 15 times in a row out of frustration, only to finally call them back to apologize for everything. It involves me gasping for breath in a crowded room because it feels like I am drowning. It involves negative thoughts running a marathon in my head.

I am exhausted because no matter how hard I try to use symbolism or metaphors I still never get it right. I attempt to design an experiment that would allow for me to confirm that I have tectonic plates in place of the spaces between the hemispheres in my brain; I am always on the verge of falling apart and destroying everyone around me.

Whenever I cry, I fear that my tears might actually be the rain before a tsunami. I check the weather to see if it predicted showers, offering insight on my mood. Because I never know when it is coming. It takes everything I have, destroying me before it has finished.

Whenever I laugh, I remember I am an active volcano. I look at my seismometer to assess for magma movement. I never forget they can be dormant for years, but then out of nowhere they erupt and they destroy everything that surrounds them, without pause.

When I have a bad day, I hypothesize I am a star that has never burned as brightly as it was intended to, before it started dying. My supporting data includes, but is not limited to, the fact that a majority of people think stars make the night sky pretty and wish upon them. Because we seem to forget that stars are decaying, deteriorating, right before our eyes.

I am exhausted from pretending to be something I am not.

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Thinkstock photo via SIphotography