Depression

What is depression but a feeling

Of having your vital self pushed down?

A symptoms perhaps

Of changing your authentic shape

Of trying too hard

In all the wrong directions?

Losing yourself

Or being the one who absorbed all of the shocks?

That is why now

I must advocate for you

I must be your memory

For the times you forgot all that you endured

Only then to be discarded

Like a piece of defective machinary

My heart aches at times for what we humans

Do and endure

And how often we lose the way

To love of ourselves

Trying to fit in

Or being the one who had to always make everyone else’s

Needs

Wants

Hurting and desires

More important

And then sadly losing the way to authentically relate

In any meaningful way

At all

And saddest of all

Consenting too to the death of all

That was most precious

Most vital

Most meaningful

Most authentic

In our soul

I didn’t totally fit in. I kind of disintegrated around people and became what they wanted me to be.  But paradoxically, I felt an intensity inside me all the time.  I didn’t know what it was, but it kept building, like water behind a dam.  Later, when I was properly depressed and anxious, I saw the illness as an accumulation of all that thwarted intensity.  A kind of breaking through. As though, if you find it hard to let yourself be free, your Self breaks in, flooding your mind in an attempt to drown out all those failed half versions of yourself.

Matt Haig