Happy Birthday to Me

Having depression is like drowning in a dark, freezing river.

You’re dragged and thrown in its tide, in its waves, and all you are able to do is flail helplessly about. You try to swim against it, or even with it, but it’s to no avail. Your body begins to numb and you feel yourself being pushed deeper and deeper into the river’s depths.

At some point, you begin to feel the light fade away, and all of a sudden the darkness is the only thing you know. It consumes you. It breathes you in. It becomes you. It is you, and it has always been you; it never had to be let in because it was inside of your body all along.

You give up long before you reach the bottom of the river. When your body finally collides with the deepest point of everything, you’re not even human anymore. You’re soulless. Every bit of your previous self was flushed out when the water flooded your lungs.

And that’s when the river has truly claimed you, at long last. And at the bottom of the river of everything, is where you will stay.

That’s what depression truly is. In the end, you don’t reach the bottom through suicide. You reach the bottom when you’ve totally given up; on life, and death. When hope itself has been destroyed.

I think that’s the point I am now. Or at least, will be.