(no subject)
Here's what they don't tell you about depression. It never goes away. Not really. They tell addicts that no matter how strong they feel, whatever it was they were addicted to is stronger still: "I was clean for ten years, man. Never a drop. Then, one day, I decided to have a little drink with dinner. BAM! Skid row, all over again." You can never touch whatever it was again.
The depressed don't have that option. You can't never touch misery again. So you have to be stronger. Until you're more powerful than the horrors your own mind places on you, you'll never escape, and any attempt will sink you deeper into the mire faster than anything but making no attempt. But maybe, eventually, you become what no one can become and you beat it. Fighting depression isn't fighting human beings; it's fighting a spriggan hydra- strike off one head, and two more grow and, in time, come to attack you. Complete the mighty task of striking down the whole, and it rises from the dead, stronger than ever before. But suppose, in the end, that you do beat it. Whatever means of help you used, you beat it, and now you finally resume living.
But the monster's only beaten. It's not dead. The only way to stop the retrovirus from rising again is to adopt a scorched-earth strategy and end it all. Many people do. But no one wins that way.
So you've won. Congratulations. You've beaten a foe few ever do. It comes back only on occasion, a minor enemy compared to the unstoppable titan it was before. But it still has an ace up its sleeve.
Because the worst part doesn't come until you're not the one fighting. Until you're sitting there watching a loved one suffer through what you did. To sit, and watch, and weep, and know, deep in your heart, that there is nothing, nothing in heaven or hell or all the world, that you can do. And you know the struggle. You know the enemy they face. And you gaze into their crying eyes and wish, with every fiber of your being, that you could make it stop, that you could take the pain on to yourself and bring the sufferer peace. And you gaze still deeper, and you know that no matter what the religious say, Hell isn't an afterlife.
Because it's what's gazing back.