Loving Through Depression

It creeps in like flood water.  You can sense it coming, but you aren't sure from where.  Soon it's a part of you, surrounds you.  You don't know where it stops and where you begin.

I begin here, right now.  With this.

I'm crashing, moodwise.  I can feel myself starting to hurt, starting to doubt.  I am covered in a sheet of warm malaise.  It's like heated wax paper.  I can sense it wrapping me up, turning my consciousness.

It's nothing new.  But it still manages to cut me down the center of my being, and I am left gaping, gasping.  With every return, depression brings the thoughts that rattle their hollow truths.  Oh Dear God, not again.  I can't bear the pain.  Please don't let me hurt like this again.

Next comes the bargaining.  You want to make peace with it.  You want to feel there again.  You try and hope your way through it.  But it shackles your optimism and whips it with its dirty reeds.  You see that the struggle is once again futile.  You submit, knowing that you are not in control.  But the submission leads to those thoughts, again, of ending.  The only way to end the pain, to get outside of it, is to leave it.  You let it lie and hope for remission, but it dawdles, dwells.

You want to give up.  Not again, can I go through this. Not again.  The pain too much to endure.  There must be a way to make it end.

The suicidal thoughts present themselves.  Will you be creative?  Will you find a different way to navigate this transition?

I thought about driving to the beach, stripping down and walking out into the water and letting the ocean decide what to do with me.  Were I to be swept up in a riptide or thrust into the rocks, or even just overcome by the water and sunk to the bottom like a stone, I would be relenting the pain.  I would be finding peace.  Somehow.  So it seems.

I do not wish to bring grief to those that I love.  And there are many of you, I know this.  But when the depressed paradigm arrives, it inhabits all four corners of my mind.  There is no escaping it, except to know that all things must pass, and eventually it will.  It must cycle its way away from my life, just as the joyous times are fleeting and don't last either.

Giving up and checking out of life would be a cowardly act.  A selfish act.  I would be acting only on my own needs and not considering the needs of others.  To set out to end my life would be a grand risk as well-- what if the pain continues, or even worsens, when one takes one's own life?  Perhaps there is nothing; but perhaps one locks in to a special kind of hell.

I don't have answers.  I don't know the future, I don't know what is my fate.  All I know is what I have right now, in this very moment.  And that is a desire to live, a desire to love.  A desire to be loved.  And that, I think, is enough.