THE PRISON

This feeling is as old as time itself. Sometimes, suddenly, without apparent reason you might feel unbearably sad. It all turns grey with a bitterness in your mouth, the worst part is you reaching out and finding you are all alone.

There is a difference between being depressed and being unhappy. Most people will tell you that you are just unhappy,my shrink said something interesting the other day. He said with being unhappy you are able to seek comfort and let that comfort come through to you and ease the pain. You can actually seek out and obtain other’s sympathy and concern, but in depression neither the sympathy and concern of others nor the gentle love of oneself is available nor enough. I was a little bit shocked since this is not what I see in movies where you are on some couch and they ask you what you are feeling and the person takes down notes. But the honesty made me smile(in my head)

How can you describe this experience and convey its meaning to someone else? Saying you are depressed or really down or fed up can mean to the other person no more than the ‘Monday blues’ or something you could snap out of if you really tried hard.

I have a friend who told me when he wakes up he is scared of getting out of bed, he has slept on this bed for years and he is too scared to get out of it and walk across the room to open the door. So he stays in bed and thinks the most terrible thoughts. So he is frightened. He wants to get up and rush around doing things so he will be thinking of something else.

If you tell your friends you are damned, they will hasten to tell you that you are not, that God is not like that, you are a good person. You tell them that you cannot do your job properly, you are not a good person, father /mother…. They will tell you you are the best at everything

Honestly there are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public, worse than miniature betrayals, Imagine not being able to sleep because voices are screaning in your head. The fear turns your life upside down, undermining your confidence until the smallest decision, ‘what should I wear?’ becomes an impossibility

Over the years I have come to understand that inside the prison of depression you are very selfish. But arent we all selfish when fighting for our lives? Feeling the terror of imminent death, so we strive to save ourselves. But if you told people how frightened you are they would think you are mad. Well maybe you are. The thought of this makes you more frightened and it becomes greater than that of death. That is why many people suffering resort to death. The fear is so great that death might be welcomed as peace, a way to cease the fear. But what if after death there is something worse than here? Or death may bring peace but dying is so painful.

Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and cruel jailer