I have friends and family who admit they cannot understand depression, and I must admit to being rather envious of them as they probably have a different mental make-up to me – one that is less susceptible to pressure, stress and emotion. But I have always found it difficult to verbalise how depression feels to me.
Depression. The big D. Happy’s grey and spiky sister.
Fearne Cotton
In her beautifully honest (and beautifully illustrated) book Happy: Finding joy in every day and letting go of perfect, Fearne Cotton explains that depression has “many faces and can creep in at any speed.”
Fearne says “all I knew was that I was walking through this thick mud that was making every step exhausting and debilitating… stuck in a really shitty place, imprisoned in this thick fog with no way out.”
Winston Churchill called his depression “the black dog”. Fearne’s Mum calls hers “the black pit”, as for her it feels like “being in a dark hole unable to pull yourself out of it.”
It feels like I’m stuck under a huge grey-black cloud. It’s dark and isolating, smothering me at every opportunity.
www.mind.org.uk
Robert Duff, who has written the very readable, plain-speaking Hardcore Self Help: F**k Depression, refers to a “depressive monster that has crept in like a black cloud raining over all my thoughts and feelings.”
I can relate to all these descriptions, as I have experienced both the slow descent and sudden downward spiral into Hell, the complete inability to perform the most basic of tasks, the thick cold fog suffocating any hope of a brighter future.
One of my favourite analogies is equating my mind to a box of jigsaw pieces. The pieces are usually all in the box but not necessarily in the right place or the right way up. With depression it is like someone has thrown the box on the floor, scattering all the pieces, so the picture is broken and makes no sense at all.
Sometimes I manage to scoop the pieces back into their box quite quickly, minimising depression’s impact on day-to-day life, but this quick fix inevitably doesn’t last long before the box is dropped again.
This time I am sorting through the pieces, laying them all out, turning them all the right way up and putting the jigsaw together so the picture becomes clear.
Considered like this, I can understand why it is taking some time – after all, who can complete a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle in a few days, especially when they don’t have a reference picture? But the sense of achievement, even after just a small section of the puzzle is put together, is so gratifying.
Hopefully the outcome will be a mind that is in one cohesive piece and is less likely to be dropped in future!
Musings of a Muddled Mind 