Tag Archives: describe

One Thing, Ten Ways

28 Feb

Alrighty, folks. I follow this famous writerly person called Chuck Wending, which means that I get about half a billion blog posts from him filling up my inbox every day. It’s pretty good, actually. Wending has added half a dozen books to my oh-god-please-just-read-me-already list, and his, uh, spritely writing style constantly challenges me to make sure mine is adequately colorful.

Anyhoo, every week Wending hosts a challenge of his own – usually in the form of a flash fiction topic, but this week, as an assignment to take one thing and describe it ten ways. Abstract ways, concrete ways, literal and figurative ways. All that jazz.

So. I figured I’d describe something that I know pretty damn (read: way too fucking) well: depression.

I know, sounds like a depressing topic, right? Depression sounds like it’d be pretty depressing. I mean, I think that’s why they call it that. But… well, depression has been with me for a long while, and it’s a beast I well know the shape of. It’s a terrible beast – but I’ve learned from the best of books (the ones like Harry Potter and the Young Wizard Series) that if you can describe something, you have power over it. Why do you think the best of magic is always done with words?

And so if I must keep this bedraggled familiar in check, at least I can do it eloquently.

So. Here goes. Depression is…

  1. Hopelessness, helplessness, soulessness, joylessness – all those “lessnesses” that come in the form of deceptively paltry checkboxed lines on a psychiatrist’s diagnostic sheet.
  2. A searing pain felt in hot tears down cheeks and a throbbing throat and a chest that’s constricted and convulsed with crying.
  3. Nothing. Nothing at all. Numbness, listlessness, a-motivation. An inexorable annihilation of being that turns a person into glass eyes and an empty shell.
  4. The point of last resort – self-harm, eating disorders, suicide, all those co-morbidities of depression arise not as a wall of rock bottom but as a desperate attempt to tunnel back out. Sometimes you shut the door behind you.
  5. A paradoxical battle in which there are no sides. It’s not an I against the world, an I against a villain, an I against a situation. It is an I against an I. Not even two clear-cut sides tearing a someone down the middle; a confused and blurred raging that smashes everything together and leaves nothing whole.
  6. A murderer, plain and simple.
  7. Not a fault, not a choice, not a mistake of the patient. Ever.
  8. Incredibly mis- and mal-understood.
  9. A broken brain; a disconnection between know and feel; a mis-firing, bad wiring; a nontraditional way of processing neurochemicals and pharmaceuticals aimed to fix them; a bastard to consistently properly medicate.
  10. A demon that yet an angel can make, in more ways than one, and likely more ways than ten. But that, I suppose, is for another description.

 

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Nil

10 Oct

Hello, lovely readers. For some reason only beknownst to it, my depression has gotten rather uppity over the past few days. But rather than continuing to sit here in a grumbling match with my depression, I decided to pull out my keyboard and describe it instead. Spectres usually aren’t so hard to deal with once you’ve managed to pin them down.

So now I’ve got a poem to share with you all! Aren’t you lucky. But don’t any of you dare go thinking, “Man, more writing, this is great! If only she were depressed more often!”

Seriously. I will excommunicate you.

 

grey

Nil

Depression is the tired feeling of waking up too early on a grey morning,

cloudy and alone.

Depression is the too busy, too rushed, too late sprint to the next have-to

with the no-consolation of a half-peck on the lips from a lover while you don’t even stop

on your way out the door.

Depression is the uneven kilter of a storm-ridden brain when it’s sunny outside,

and you continue to stare at the light coming through your window even while you shrink from it,

because the bewildered confusion in your eyes is too rapt to look away.

Sometimes depression is pain. Sometimes depression is numbness.

But sometimes depression is none of these things;

it is not pain or numbness or fear or hardness or solitude or sadness.

Sometimes depression is nothing.

An odd non-existence to the mold of organic matter,

an emptiness where there once was something,

a void of anything at all that would indicate you are still alive.

A hollow deadness, too much of an absence to be either blank or black.

A hole into which everything is falling,

but in which there is nothing at all to be seen.

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