Death by Metaphor

You get really good at hiding it.
Because, really, nobody could have time for you. You can’t make sense to them. Which close aunt did you lose, they’d ask, if you let even the remotest bit of it show? When did you break-up? Why did they do that to you? Why so sad, ‘all of a sudden’? But, no… There was no event. Nothing traumatic to empathize with. It’s just a slow flesh-eating bacteria, an impregnable eerie silence, a hopelessly dark room, that if embodied as a phantom, would torment you even when you aren’t alone or shouldn’t feel alone in the company of people. But it’s not a phantom. It’s nothingness. It’s the crippling vice, a grip devoid of meaning, a numbing agent that no one has to apply. It’s the truest angst and the falsest sadness. You try to quantify what ‘it’ is, what the cause could be, what happened. Otherwise, why would they ask you all those presumptuous questions? You feel compelled to answer, maybe even to connect to anyone… anything. You answer ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’. You say it because time distorts the painful and the ugly. Subtly molds it into your being. Makes it unique to your experience. Leaves you writhing, thrown into the world. You say it because if anything it’s long term, and immaterial. You realize that’s the best answer possible. Eventually, you recover. You rear away from the dark… and from time to time, you’re okay. You escape the darkness, seemingly to hear again, to feel. Even in your anxiety, you’re reminded that you’re alive. You vow to be authentic and appreciative. Your humility and patience puts that ’emptiness’ out of perspective, far removed from ‘you’. The hopeless is hopeful. You have yet to fall back into the dark room. When you inevitably do, you realize that there was no light switch all along, that speaking can’t do much, that loneliness is your virtue. You are most toxic when you’re ‘alone’, but remember that it’s posited everywhere, proximal only to you. The shame of this absurdity claims any hope of relating, you shut up indefinitely. The most violent of thoughts break the inner silence before the questions start flying around. You’d understand that it’s confusing to them, all of it so ‘all of a sudden’. But not in the darkness. [‘Even in your understanding’] you know that their words are empty. That you couldn’t rationalize that they mean what they say, or that it means anything to you. Not that they’re liars, but rather they ‘feel compelled to answer’ to you, if they do. There’s no understanding [in] the darkness. Your senses are challenged. If it’s not the self-loathing that get in the way, it’s the self-mutilation that runs your imagination. You can’t make sense to them… You come to the grand conclusion that you are ‘fundamentally unhappy’, that this is how you are and you are ‘to be’. Then its truly quiet…

New to SP here and I figured I’d contribute something that I wrote one night that, even now, defines depression for me. In retrospect, this was a dark time for me and harming myself was an alarmingly logical thing to do. At the time, all of it seemed logical, and the logic only made it so much more hellish and real. I’ve haven’t completely departed from this, but I can say that I have some insight on it: shame, desperation, feelings of isolation, numbness and undeniably thorough self-loathing are things I still contend with presently. My apologies for the second person, if it threw you off. Maybe someone will understand this.