Depression
One of the many things I hate about the word “depression” is the assumption of blankness attached to it, as if the experience of depression is as absent on the inside as it looks to be from the outside. That is wrong. Depression is a place that teems with nightmarish activity. It’s a one-industry town, a psychic megalopolis devoted to a single twenty-four-hour-we-never-close product. You work misery as a teeth-grinding muscle-straining job (is that why it’s so physically exhausting?), proving your shameful failures to yourself over and over again. Depression says you can get blood from a stone, and so that’s what you do. Competing voices are an irritating distraction from the work. No wonder depression doesn’t get invited out much. Not because it’s not the life of the party, it knows it’s not that, but because self-absorption as a work ethic is so prickly and one-eyed. That’s okay with depression-it figures, who’d want to be friends with it, anyway? -Lesley Dormen, “Planet No”