So easy to forget

It's so easy to forget that you are depressed.

You start doing something new, you dedicate yourself to some new plan or activity, life gets busy, and you aren't thinking about it anymore.  But that doesn't mean it has gone away, because even though the only way to describe depression uses the word "feeling," it's not an emotion.  Feeling depressed is not really what depression is about.  It's about feeling so inadequate that you hide yourself from even your dearest friends for fear that they'll see the real you.  It's about feeling so much despair about your own possibilities that you bury yourself in television and embroidery without even realizing it.  It's about not being able to even grasp the concept of believing in yourself, because it's such a ludicrous idea.  It's about feeling completely isolated while surrounded by your nearest and dearest and not having the faintest idea how to begin to bridge the distance.  It's about not bothering to honestly tell yourself what you truly want because you know in your heart, your gut, and what's left of your spirit that you can not have it.

And the bitch of it is that all of that can keep going without your paying attention to it.  So you can think that you've got depression on the run, then one day turn a corner and find that it's all still there, carrying on just fine without you.

Or maybe that's just me.

I've wanted to write about depression from a spiritual point of view for a long time now, but never knew just how to phrase it.  How do I explain how it feels to be able to reach out to other worlds, but not to my own?  The pain of sobbing on the floor and seeing my spirit friends watching me with eyes brimming with the sorrow of knowing that they can't help, that this is something I have to do alone and that all they can do is watch?  Not to mention the pain of realizing that no one in the "real" world even cares that much anymore, that while everyone around me has become immune to my pain out of self-preservation it will always feel fresh to me?  And of knowing that even if I did kill myself it wouldn't fix a damn thing.  Some how it would follow me.  That much I have gathered from my spirit friends, but not how.

All I can do is keep struggling, even knowing that I apparently can't win.  I have to keep hanging on to the tiny thread of hope that I'm wrong, that I will someday fight my way clear of this.  Sometimes I even believe it's possible.  But not today.