I want to describe the feeling of depression to you, while it’s still raw within me. I’m not talking about emotions, but the actual, physical hurt you go through. I’m describing the feeling, right now, as I type, as it happens. It’s going to be short.

Let’s start.

There’s this weight on my chest. As if a full-grown man has decided to step his full weight into it. I can’t breathe properly, not naturally. I’m forcing myself to take each and every breath, less I lose concentration and suffocate.

The lesser breathing is making my head spin. Lack of oxygen clouding my thinking. I’m writing. I’m trying to focus on the writing. I’m tearing up, my body goes through the motion of crying, which makes focused breathing harder.

There’s an urge to sleep. My body is fighting the pressure building up in my chest, making me yawn and tear and run my noses. Stop.

 

Took a break. There’s a physical tiredness as my mind and body tries to force me to go fully into depression, to get tired, to go into the…O lost my words…hang on…the word to describe the feeling of not wanting to do anything and just lying in bed until the world ends. That feeling. I can’t remember that word.

I tried to edit my previous paragraph. Can’t focus. Stop.

 

My body feels cold. I’m thinking I should get my camera to film my actions right now. I’m flailing around in discomfort. Stop.

I just took a nap. A 3 hour nap. The physical experience of depression is a really draining process. And sleep during depression is a contradicting thing. You’re tired, but not in the traditional sense, because you can sleep this kind of fatigue away. The more you sleep during depression, the more tired you get.

Because sleep in depression is more like a drug. You’re not actually sleeping because you are tired, but more along the line of sleeping because you want the pain to stop. It becomes a painkiller, and can be damaging in the long run.

I don’t think I can describe my experience any further. But since I can no longer talk about the physical action, I hope you don’t mind bearing with me as I talk personally and selfishly for a while. It’s just me ranting about the situation that led me to experience this swing to depression. There’s no need to read on

*****

I live my life by a simple rule. Be fair. And I always says, “I hate everyone equally.” That’s not to say I can’t grow to love or hate someone more. It just means, that without having known you, I hate you as much as I hate the next person. I’m a pessimist, if you have yet to figure that out.

But I try to live life fairly, in every thing I do. Friends, family, work, play. But I don’t like confrontations. I avoid them like the plague. Because a confrontation is basically a fancy word for a fight. And a fight will always end up the same way. Someone fights, thinking they are righteous, someone lose, someone else fights, thinking they are righteous, someone else lose. And it keeps repeating until we do the thing that we should have done in the beginning. Talk it out.

Most of the time, I take the shortest route out of a confrontation, usually, that means taking on the blame or playing villain. Usually, the price for doing that isn’t very high. I just swallow some pride, maybe pay a few dollars, or just apologize to the people involved.

Sometimes, in a few rare occasions, I discern the price to hard to pay. I try to defuse the situation, have the responsibility fall fairly to the people in participant. But that has never succeeded, since people always take that balance as a challenge, a confrontation.

I’m quite spineless when that happens. I could never carry through with the diffusion. I just fall back on accepting blames and responsibilities to end the situation faster, even if, overall, the situation is detrimental to me.

This is what happened to me recently. A bad accident happened, where no one was directly at fault. I tried to take full responsibility, but found the price too high to pay. I tried to defuse the situation instead, find a better and fairer route for everyone, myself included, and found myself under fire for trying to shift the blame instead. In the end, I lost everything I tried to protect, and the price just grew higher. And I gave up.

All this could have been avoided, the world was just and fair. But, we are often told it is not. Because of my bipolar disorder, I don’t expect to be able to live past 55. And if depressive episodes like this are common enough, I don’t think that dying young will be much of a problem.