On Depression.
“Those who escape hell, however,
never talk about it
& nothing much bothers them after that.”
– Charles Bukowski
p.s. This piece is precious to me, so I tried something new: I narrated it! I write as I speak, and now you can really feel the writing. It hits harder. If you like this format, let me know. 🍵 EB.
I don’t really talk about my past… ever.
Not my chronological past—my experiential past. Mostly for the reason Bukowski illustrated. I've integrated and feel no desire to revisit it. It has passed.
Honestly, I don’t think I understand what people mean when they talk about ‘having depression’ today. It seems to mean 'I feel bad', like arcane Gen-Z slang I missed the boat on.
When I hear people talk about it, I'm out at a café, on Zoom calls, seeing it on TikTok, or with someone on retreat...
...and I sit there wondering, “But how did you get out of bed? How did you get groceries when that requires going outside? How can you use your phone?”
My experience of depression was not like this.
I am not depressed. I haven't been remotely depressed in a decade. This is not a contest. I seek neither pity nor understanding.
Depression was one of the most important initiations I have ever had. I am intensely grateful, for it made me the man I am today.
If you don't understand what follows, thank God. I hope you never do. I would not wish this on anyone. But if you or someone in your life is depressed, perhaps this will help.
And for those who feel as I felt, I want you to know that I understand, I see you, and I love you.
“I’m a master of speaking silently—all my life I've spoken silently and I've lived through entire tragedies in silence.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gentle Spirit
I know what it’s like to wade through chest-deep water every day.
How draining it is to tread water all day just to merely exist. An exhaustion sewn into your bones. To live in envy and be drenched in the red rush of what I can only call 'lameness’, seeing how free and unlaboured everyone else is, constantly questioning how you became so broken. Like running a race where you're up to your neck in honey and everyone else is on smooth, solid ground. When getting out of bed… hell, just sitting up, is a task you did not–could not–achieve today.
I know the constant, chronic, dull pain from hearing ‘just get over it’ from every distant, distorted, fuzzy face you encounter.
Echoing down through the empty hollowness of your body into the crushing black pit at the center of your being from which no light nor emotion escapes. Staying just long enough to add insult to injury, then gone, like everything else.
I know the deeply complicated mix of emotion that arises as you sit in your bathroom, watching your blood flow down the drain from your latest episode of self-harm, confirming how unfortunately alive you still are on the outside and how profoundly dead you already are inside.
A dark red reminder that the only thing on this planet capable of breaking through the great black fog that permeates every waking moment is a physical analgesic response to pain & injury, and what a perverse way that is to experience but a glimpse of peace. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and I am desperate.
I know the frightening, truly terrifying moments when all that sadness collapses in on itself, condensing into a black hole of vicious anger & self-hatred.
No nervous system was made to handle this much anger. It'll rip you apart at the seams. To look in the mirror and despise with vitriolic intensity everything you see reflected at you. To stop looking in mirrors entirely. To take down—or break into pieces—every reflective surface you have in your home because you can’t stand the sight of yourself. To lose the very concept of what you look like, with the care needed to change that long dead.
I know how alien it feels to have no photos, no evidence, and often no coherent memories of your life for great periods of time.
No short-term memory was consolidated, no energy for selfies existed, and no social gatherings were attended for photos from others. Like you didn’t exist for 5 years. For years, I learned about things that happened in my life from the recollections of my friends. How deeply disorienting. What are you going to tell your children? What do you have to look back on when there was nothing there to begin with? Why does no one else talk about this?
I know the maddening (& somehow impressive?) ability of the mind to find every possible permutation of self-punishment.
Starvation, overeating, purging, rotting away in filth, addiction, perfect performance in public, pushing everyone away, locking yourself inside, and all variety of self-harm and self-sabotage. It’s all that creatures like me deserve, after all: creative torture.
I know the body-level pain that batters you when you can see that someone is trying to be supportive, but every blank stare, raised eyebrow, and empty statement of care just reinforces how little they understand.
Revealing yet again how profoundly alone you are in all of this, and how much you wish they wouldn't have said anything at all—at least it would have maintained the illusion that someone might get it, someday. Followed swiftly by fresh layers of guilt and shame for being such a monster that you resent people who are just trying to help.
I know the debilitation that comes from having that one person–parent, friend, professor, the fucking barista–who smiles at you, whose voice and presence are the only life-raft keeping you from drowning completely, and how pathetic you feel for being such an anchor in their life.
Dead weight, always dragging them down, killing the mood, causing them pain—your literal guardian angel!—with the whimpering reality of your existence, where the only gift of thanks you can imagine giving them is the joy of your total absence. The crushing weight of feeling like every breath is a burden on other innocent people.
I know the tsunami of sadness that crashes out of you as you fly past 'negotiating with yourself' into absolute last-ditch pitiful efforts of desperately begging yourself to carry on.
Mascara and tears waterfalling down your face. On your knees, clutching your chest, gasping for breath in the corner of your closet, begging yourself to stand up. Begging with every inch of your decaying humanity to just stand up. Do it for Mom. Do it for your brother. Just do it. Please, please, please, I'm begging you... I'm begging ME... please just one more day. I don't know why! Just one more day. You can do this. Don't give up. Get up. Get up. GET UP. Get up... please... slowly fading into a whimpering ball on the ground, blacking out until a new day begins and the cycle repeats.
I know how dehumanizing it is to finally, at the very end of your rope, muster the immense courage to seek help; scraping together money you do not have, and despite everything screaming at you otherwise, allowing the faintest glimmer of hope that things might change...
...only to crawl into the therapists office and be sat down, alone, for an hour, filling in fucking Scantron Bubble Cards like some high school history test from hell, ranking ‘symptom scales’ like you're a dysfunctional robot, where the answers come nowhere remotely close to capturing the crushing pressure of simple breathing, and how much worse that makes everything–and the vain smile and $200 invoice you get after your latest humiliation ritual. Checkmate.
I know what it’s like to watch your hair fall out in clumps, to see your ribcage in gruesome detail, your throat eviscerated from throwing up, allowing the most abusive relationship dynamics that H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe only wish they could conjure up...
...for your dick to stop working entirely, days without eating, your world greyscale and monotone, the small whispers of strange voices that are either inside your head or out of it, the narcolepsy, insomnia, jitters, shakes, blurry vision, bloody rags, scarred limbs, withdrawals, onset symptoms, the sick comedy of suicidal ideation, and every other hellish side-effect that comes from the pharmaceutical cocktails and chemical experimentation they put you on.
...and the numbness.
Oh My God, the numbness. What you would give to feel anything at all. Pain is better than numbness. The absence of any and every feeling and sensation. Total loss of thought and narrative. The loss of self, soul, and substance. Unreality and depersonalization in vicious self-reinforcement. The floating, empty ghost…
And I know how good you are at making sure no one else knows anything about this.
Always the one with a smile on your face, telling everyone you're fine, suffering in silence, no one any wiser to reality. Tears become 'allergies', bruises become 'falling down', wristbands covering scars become 'style & self-expression'. Hair loss becomes a 'new hairstyle'. Freakouts in public become 'lack of sleep'. There's always an 'appropriate answer'. Maybe you should go into acting, because your performances are magnificent. Someday, you wonder silently, how many people will say "Well I had no idea, he always seemed so happy...". And part of you dies each time, each act, each lie, starving for a moment of real connection.
...I know what it’s like. I’ve been there.
And because I've been there, I also know…
I know that if you find some way—YOUR WAY—to overcome this, to rescue yourself from the abyss...
...you will be granted one of the rarest and most beautiful experiences few humans ever feel: the simple freedom of walking on this planet in peace. Hardship and personal challenges remain, but nothing ever cuts quite as deep again.
I know that your pain and sorrow, once metabolized, turn your life into a form of living medicine.
You are the medicine. You become a force of healing—the very guardian angel that once held you afloat—for other people. It is a quiet joy that is hard to name, but has deeply karmic roots.
I know that there is not a single thing more important for you to accomplish than to overcome this.
This is your karmic inheritance. Your Earthly project. Anything and everything is secondary to this. Your whole life–money, career, education, relationships, even other aspects of your health–can be rebuilt on a better foundation. It will take everything you've got, your full undivided attention, to overcome this.
I know that it is possible to reclaim the spark inside, as dark as it seems and as far away as the light is.
That there is a future for you here, on this planet, at this time. It will be the hardest thing that you have ever done. No one and no thing will do it for you. But slowly, agonizingly, the spark can be found, the flame rekindled into a roaring fire of life-affirming soulforce that will carry you to heights all but forgotten to mankind. And that nothing else, ever, will feel quite as difficult.
I know the soft, quiet, but unbreakable core confidence that comes after surviving something like this.
No need to impress anyone. No need to discuss. The unshakeable knowledge that all is well. That you can handle whatever the future holds because you've already been to hell and back. No Earthly event can break those who have already been crushed by the Fist of God. The small smirk when you look at yourself in the mirror now. The spacious freedom of being untouchable.
I know that every so often, you will come across another person who has that spark in their eye.
Where you share a glance and know that you were not alone in your pain. That others, spread across time and space, were there with you the whole time...
& in closing, I will remind you of our little secret…
...you can reply to these emails.
There is someone here, writing the words you are reading right now. Whether you have no one at all or many to support you, know that there is at least one person here for you. Please do not forget this.
You are not alone.
I am here. I understand. I see you. I love you.
If you call, I will answer.
Grow toward the light, 🌻
EB.
No spam, no sharing to third party. Only you and me.
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