I live with sorrow, with sadness, with darkness, with emptiness, and I have for a very long time. It's not that i'm never happy, sometimes I'm really happy, i'm incredibly lucky, my life is awesome, I have people in my life who love and support me, I have a house full of books and music, I can make beautiful things with my hands. I get a lot of enjoyment out of life but depression circles me always like a big dark bird waiting for the chance if I'm not vigilant, or I just get unlucky, to block out the sunlight.
When it hits sometimes I am langugeless, sometimes I feel like there is a thick pane of frosted glass between me and the things and people that matter to me.Time slows down so I feel like I'm moving through treacle. Sometimes it lasts minutes and sometimes it lasts months. But I'm old enough now and have lived with it long enough to know that it will go away, eventually, it might come back, in fact it always does come back, but it also always, always goes away.
I have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping it at bay, do enough exercise, get enough sunlight, watch what I eat, use my lightbox, make sure I read and write enough poetry, get the right amount of sleep, keep my social life in the right exact balance so i'm not too sensory overloaded or too isolated. I have to be aware all the time of the slide, of the taste of metal in my mouth, of my limbs getting heavier, of my brain slowing down, I have to wake up everyday and do a depression check "where am I on the slide today and what can I do about it?"
When I first started getting depressed in my early teens, my parents would tell me that I had nothing to be depressed about, that I just wasn't grateful enough for what i had, and that I wasn't really depressed I was just feeling sorry for myself, all of which pushed me further into sadness, into darkness, and the church I belonged to was very heavy on the idea that if you were really saved your life would be awesome and if you had enough faith god would heal everything, and if he didn't heal it that was your fault for not having enough faith. Both of these things made me feel incredibly guilty, and added to my feelings of worthlessnes and being a bad christian.
But there were times even then where I would break through all the sludge and lies and feel Gods comfort. And when I was sixteen I heard this song performed live (Like seriously I'm so cool, I remember Delirious? when they were Cutting Edge, and by "cool" I clearly mean "old")
And since then I have always, always, listened to this song, first on cassette, then on CD, and then on youtube, even all the years when me and God weren't on speaking terms I listened to it in the darkest points of my depression because it always gave me a kind of comfort i can't even explain
I've learnt in the years between that depression is not feeling sorry for myself or not being grateful enough, and I learnt that this is part of the me-ness of me, living with this has so profoundly shaped who I am and how I live that it can't be taken away even if that was an option. its not about having enough faith or not, that if God wants all of me, as I am, he has to take the depression as well
And I believe now, or I'm starting to believe now, that he will do that, that he will take my sadness, and not take it away, but support me with it, through it, even if I feel like he too is on the other side of that thick frosted glass, I am learning to trust that he, like the other people who love me are still there and still supporting me even when I can't feel it
Beautiful <3
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