I tell people it's like being
dead. It feels like being a ghost, maybe. You float through your days feeling
insubstantial, cut off from warmth, light and all feeling. Sometimes it feels
like you're in a coffin buried alive. You're screaming inside your head, but
no one can hear you.
-Deborah Gray
She couldn’t pretend her feelings away or cover them with a phony smile. She was withdrawn, irritable, and tired. Suddenly she couldn’t stand to be in the light anymore, so she holed up after school in her room, doing nothing for hours on end.”
“I
stood in the bathroom, looking in the mirror, and I didn’t recognize myself,”
she says, recalling that fateful day. “It was my face looking back at
me in the mirror, but my soul wasn’t there. It was just a body to me,
and I didn’t feel part of it anymore. I felt I had lost control of my
thoughts, my emotions, and my actions. And when you have lost control of everything,
what do you have left?"
-"Bright Red Scream" Marilee Strong
When people ask me how I could possibly consider killing myself, I tell them
it was easy- I was already dead inside, so why would it matter if I killed my
body…the shell? And by dead inside, I mean nothing mattered anymore- there
were no feelings at all…period. It didn’t matter what happened,
I had the same numb state inside me. Thus, slowly, the will to live would slowly
escape me.
Maybe that is why the first major depressive episode was the worst…when I realized it was possible to feel nothing inside. I had no previous knowledge that I could make it though- this would be the time I compare all others to. But I didn’t know that then. No, all I knew was that I was empty and dead inside and that was all there was to life. My hope everyday was for God to kill me and save me from this misery. I woke up each day to a world set to mute, with each image fading to darkness and each face becoming more faceless. I was a living ghost, moving through each day as if I was alive, but nothing was real. Nothing could touch me.
This was my depression. It was not the blues or a kind of sadness- for that I would have leaped for joy. Instead I was just dead inside. There was no anger, no sadness, no melancholia- just numbness and a deafening emptiness to my heart. With sadness or the blues, at least you feel real- there is something inside you. Sure, it hurts like hell, but you’re alive. I could not conceive of how to live when I was already dead inside.
This first depression was the beginning of me realizing that I had no idea who I was. And it was the beginning of my numb stage- where I was cut off from my emotions and preferred to self-destruct and stay lost in my mind. Perhaps, then, this is why I lived thruogh each subsequent depression, because this first depression was the worst...it gave me a preview of what real depression was like…what I could live through. Making it through the first bout of complete numbness forever gave me hope that I could find feelings again, however brief. The first episode is the worst, but it supplies the hope to carry on through the rest of your days.
One theme here lingers: I survived my first depression. I learned what therapy was (even if I didn’t know “how” to talk), that a hospital could be my sanctuary and medication a long journey. I made it through my first depression and this would serve as the hope and reminder that this was something I could beat. Just one question lingered: would I always want to beat this?
The answer to this follows in my next "snapshot": Because I Feel...
