Dissecting the Mind
November 13, 2002 12:57 a.m.
"I start to think that there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I'll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it's worth it."-Elizabeth Wurtzel, "Prozac Nation"
As I sit in my corner piecing together phrases, words, paragraphs, and sentences that catch my eye, Ellie's life mingles with my own in a sinister way. To be intelligent, even gifted, and to be cursed with drama in your own home and a sickness in your own mind and body is one of the most haunting feelings I've ever experienced. To sleep for hours upon hours, just to wake up even more exhausted. To run from life as fast as you think you possibly can, just to have it laugh and ensnare you again. Depression is a ball and chain that you drag through life. Yes, it's still possible to go on living, but everything seems a thousand times harder.
It makes you envy those with obvious physical disabilities. To be simply confined to a wheelchair becuase of a car crash would be much easier to bear than your own mind working against you saying, "You don't want to have energy today. You don't want to care today. You don't want to live today." It haunts you every moment of the day. If you couldn't walk, you could still forget that while you are asleep, while you are riding in a car as a passenger, while you are sitting in a concert hall... When you're depressed, you never forget what's wrong, it never stops affecting you. Every moment, waking or sleeping, it pulls you down deeper into that unforgiving territory of your own mind. Questioning your worth to society, your friends, your family, even your worth to yourself. You start to think, maybe it doesn't really matter if I don't go to community service today, they'll never miss me. So you don't go. But the entire time, what is left of your real mind is whispering, "You know they miss you when you don't come."
Depression is like sudden blindness after seeing your whole life. Suddenly plunged into a world of blackness in which there is no visible escape, nothing to hold onto. Only empty darkness.
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