Thread: Magnificent, Marvelous, Mad Madam Mim's Maniacal Menagerie (Comments Welcome)

I'm 25. I've been dealing with anxiety all my life, and with depression for the past six years. I've fancied myself a writer nearly my entire life. Looking back through my old high school notebooks makes me cringe almost violently because I fancied myself edgy in the worst ways sad and angry and fascinated with the morbid, without willingness to commit to the goth, emo, punk, or any other sufficiently dark stereotype or even asthetic. I wrote as though I were the only one among my peers to feel this turmoil inside when in reality it was that seldom-experienced condition of being a teenager. My parents were still together at that point and I was the typical suburban teen desperate to make my own voice heard I had never suffered true loss, never felt actual depression. The worst I'd experienced was the repeated leaving behind of everything I knew to move across the country again, which in an age before the internet was fairly devastating to personal relationships. That's not to say that at the ripe old age of twenty-five I've experienced all of the suffering life has to offer, but a rocky transition into completely autonomous adulthood and then reintegration into civilian life has given me a bit of perspective and in high school I was, to be honest, silly and naive. The only thing I got right about depression was that it's cold, but even that wasn't entirely correct. It isn't an avalanche burying you sixty feet deep in ice and snow. It's the slow cold that seeps into your skin on a day that wasn't that chilly when you stepped outside but now you're stuck walking into the wind and it feels as though you'll never be properly warm all the way through ever again. Depression isn't the way the pop-punk and goth bands I liked in high school made it out to be at the very least, it's far less glamorous than their makeup makes it look. You see, depression isn't black. It's nothing so wonderfully simple and dramatic as that. Depression isn't the festering corpse of happiness, stinking and bloated, wheeled around on a cart inextricably tied to your belt. It isn't a squirming hill of maggots, a death wish, a darkness blotting out the sun. What a relief that would be if it were, to know that there's nothing you can do, no way to fight, no light at the end of the tunnel. No, depression is a translucent blue-brown filter that doesn't block out all the life and joy around you. It's a thick mire through which you either trudge or sink. You may choose to drown or to struggle through the muck in the distant hopes that one day soon, maybe, hopefully, you'll find that grassy hillock in the bog to rest your aching legs and heaving chest before continuing your trudge. Life isn't the bog. You know this from your memories of the warm, sunny grass on the side of the swamp far behind, before your foot first got stuck in the mud. There's another meadow on the other side. This must be true, because you're alone in the brown, stinking quagmire but you weren't in the meadow. At least...you don't think you were alone. Were you? The swampy haze makes it hard to accurately remember the meadow, or even the occasional patch of grass the thick fog creeps into memory and it taints everything it touches. So you choose to trudge, even though your thighs burn and the muck sucked off your shoes long ago, for the shadow of a hope of a patch of grass. It's exhausting, working so hard to move so slowly, and all you want to do is sleep, or to just stand and stare into space while you allow yourself to slowly sink into the murk. But by God there's a meadow somewhere on the other side and you're gonna find it! So on you go, and eventually your feet start to find something solid. You crawl out of the mire like some primordial slug and lay on the grass of the hillock that feels so much like a meadow you fool yourself into believing that it is. The haze clears for a while and no, you're not alone. But eventually that little island of sun in an overcast murk returns back to the morass. This leaves you to sink or trudge again, the grass lost to memory in the blue-brown fog, feeling somehow even more exhausted than before, in the maybe-perhaps not-so-vain hope of finding that meadow and never setting foot in the bog again. The grand trick of it is that on the outside the bog doesn't look like a bog. On the outside it looks like laying in bed with the covers up to your chin until you're certain you've become one. It looks like a few days without a shower because after you fulfilled your obligations to society for the day, you just couldn't bring yourself to leave this committed relationship you're in with your bed andor your couch it's starting to get serious, and they need you. It looks like binging on prepackaged cookie dough and some pita chips with hummus because that's so much easier than actually making an effort to nourish this body that houses a brain that's betrayed you. It looks like hoping your loved ones will understand and will help, even if you can't find the words or the courage to ask them for it. It looks like hoping if one of your loved ones finds themselves in the same directionless swamp you can offer a guiding light out, but being afraid that you won't be able to because you're just. so. tired. from feeling. so. much. Or nothing. Some days, when going about your day as just another face in the crowd, you can feel the bog physically pulling at your feet and can't wait to get home so you can go bond with your bed and hope that sleep brings a grassier tomorrow. Some days you just stand with both feet in the muck, staring into space, slowly sinking other days are a determined trudge, occasionally with someone else pulling at your hand. I think so long as we have more trudging days than sinking days, eventually we'll get to the grass on the other side of the bog.