This story. My story. Unlike so many that came before it, this is not a diary of sorts. It is not a day by day account of one’s most difficult struggle with depression. It is not the bland descriptions of endless days spent in bed pondering the ultimate value of life: “Today, as yesterday, I stayed in bed, tomorrow I shall do the same”. It is not pages spent lamenting “I am so melancholy!” or that ever intense and enveloping inner dialogue “why am I sad?” I have spent many a mind-numbing night reading several accounts of the fallen writers who found themselves victims to this blackness and felt no closer to their own experiences, felt no unity with them, not even a single nod of agreement was given in hearing their tales of woe. With this written account, I hope you feel it: feel the gnawing in the pit of your stomach as I did for years; feel the desolation, the hopelessness; feel the devastation of losing oneself in utter darkness, and the spark of light in the possibility of rediscovering what was once lost. I will not give detail of how I came to fall so far, the despicable story that is my life would be taken as not much more than a badly written drama with far too many devastating blows thrown at the protagonist than could be believed. This was a life that was nothing more than a sweet chorus line of catastrophic events that could drive even the most resilient to the final breaking point. But they do find their way back. They are coming back.

            After years of struggling in the blackness that is depression, I am trying to come back. I am trying to rejoin the living, to resurface from this deep sea I have immersed myself in for such a long time. I used to think that choosing to go get help was the most difficult step, but I was horribly wrong, and have been proven so many times. This is the ultimate struggle. The battle to end all battles, the final war. Will I win? I don’t know. Do I want to? I’m not sure.

            For 12 years, my depression was my companion, my safety net. The one thing that was constant in the midst of relentless change and instability: the friends who’d come and gone, the family loved and lost, the broken homes whose pieces never quite fit back together properly. I’d forgotten happiness, and feared finding it again, feared the threat it posed. It was not only being happy, but being a notch above rock bottom; not just the idea of being back up, but the possibility that I could yet again fall back down. When you’ve hit rock bottom, there’s nowhere to go, its dark, its lonely, but its safe. I clung to that in my teenage years. The depression was no longer a self-destructive disease, but a comforting way of life, a life I came to love and hate, the way a heroin addict hates the drug he needs so much to live and function. It was the crutch that carried me through. The darkness was mine, and mine alone. It kept me in a world no one else could penetrate, it was my haven, my escape. It was truly precious to me. And it was slowly killing me.

            When I was 15, I tried to take my life. Rock bottom was no longer a comfort, but a cold, unyielding, hateful place, a place I’d called home for far too long, away from love, human contact, and the light of day. The alternative, the outside world, was no more appealing. It was a strange land, one I had avoided for six years and one that was still unstable, unfriendly, and unwelcoming. My only option was a bottle of pills. Capsules of salvation, laying my terribly troubled mind to a quiet rest. I swallowed one by one, whatever was left rattling in the container, echoing against the walls of my empty heart. I thought of my mother, how horrified she would be to find me dead in my bed the following morning, the devastation she would feel. My shame and the pity I held for her overcame my own suffering for a brief moment and I regretted my decision. I paced the floors of my bedroom, crying, panicking for my own life and cursing the stupidity of it all. But the embarrassment of going to my mother and telling her of my plan was too much to bear, even if it meant saving my damned life, and I stayed silent and alone in my room, praying for a second chance.

            I was blessed with one. The night was the worst of my life. The sleeping pills had taken their effect in excess, and I could barely stay awake to guard my own life, though Death lurked nearby, creeping in the shadows, waiting for my heavy lids to slam shut one final time. When I would slowly drift to a hapless sleep, my conscious would jolt me awake and I fought the compulsion to check my own pulse. The light of the rising sun slowly seeped into my room and I’d managed to make it through the night. A feeling of immediate calm washed over me, but the solemn hand of continued life soon took hold of me, and I realized I was still condemned to live this Hell, the execution only fulfilled by some other means. My near death experience was not enough incentive to take initiative and help myself.

            Spend a moment on the hopelessness, it occurred to me one night in pacing my bedroom floors. Hopelessness. One whose never felt it will never know its true potential. A light that has gone out in the core of your soul, leaving you cold, lifeless, desiring nothing and needing everything: a warm touch, a sign of love, a reason to keep breathing. The pain has all but blinded you to anything at all that might keep you in this merciless place of torture and unimaginable suffering. A haze has hovered over the beauty of a day; a fog settles in the crevices of your brain, a cloud seeps from the holes burnt in your heart and a pristine sunrise is the gateway to the Hell that is a day in your life. You find yourself praying for the fiery ball to fall once more beyond the horizon so that you might slip into the cold covers of your bed unnoticed and drift through the night amidst tears and relentless whispers of despair screaming in your ears. Here you feel safe. Here you can cry without hiding your eyes below a wide-brimmed hat. You can remove the mask you’ve donned in the light, wear the sadness on your face and make no excuses for it. But all too soon the sun breaks the eastern line and splashes onto the windowsill, a daunting beam bouncing upon your face and calling you to the trenches once more.

            There’s an emptiness inside that can only be described as the digestion of the stomach eating away at its own walls, gnawing furiously for something to feed upon and finding nothing it sets out to destroy itself. The lining dissipates and gives way to the burning acid, then the tissue of the walls is slowly penetrated and the barrier broken. Through this tiny hole, the acid seeps out into your body, frothing over onto the other organs and tissues in a wave of bubbling bile and disintegrates the body internally. You expect its only a matter of time before the shell of what you used to be collapses into the void beneath the skin.

            For years this frothy bile ate away at my insides, and the darkness slowly destroyed my heart, my mind, my spirit. I turned my head from the urgings of concerned friends and family to seek professional help. My daily turmoil was precious to me and no one was going to take that from me, it was my safeguard, my companion. What would become of me without it?

            I sank further into an oblivion, slipping lower beneath the glassy surface of that dark sea, allowing that shell of myself to operate on its own, going through the motions of daily life without question or hint of missing host. Where I really was I’m not quite sure, but I no longer cared for the world of the living and didn’t see myself as a part of it.

            Before the stream of acid reached my heart I’d had the final straw. Just as my ribs began to crack and give way to my chest, I’d sat myself down at the table with the capsules strewn out before me; capsules of all different colors, sizes, shapes. Some pills, some gel caps, some in plastic shells; pinks, blues, yellows, greens, two-toned. All leftover remnants of tried and failed treatments for this beloved plague. I’d paid my dues, my debt to society, I’d born the burden and the pain, and I sought the relief only eternal sleep could bring, yet again.

            And yet, my hand stayed. Perhaps it was a spark of hope flickering somewhere in the pit of my being, something unbeknownst to me, there in the darkness, a reason to go on. Perhaps it was fear of what would greet me in the beginning of the end. Perhaps it was sheer and pitiful irresolution. Whatever it was, I shoveled my final opportunity for eternal peace of mind back into their bottles and called a doctor.

            It took only a few moments and some superficial lines of questioning for her to cram two more bottles of opportunity, both to be administered under the watchful eye of my mother, into my hands with a recommendation to see a psychologist for therapy. It became all too clear that interpersonal relations with their patients has become a distant memory for psychiatrists in one’s treatment options for achieving sound mental health. I sought out the therapist and began weekly sessions and medication to slowly wean me from the clutches of this addictive shadow that walked beside me for the last decade.