Depression

It makes air stick in your throat uncomfortably, makes all your smiles feel stiff. Makes you not care how loud you yell or how hard you hit. It sits heavy on your eyelids at night even while it robs you of sleep. It makes you tired. Tired of everything around you, and tired most of all of yourself.

It's not numbness. That's the worst part... You still feel. You feel so much you want to rip your lungs with an endless scream. What you feel is despair. What you feel is the ultimate misery of a world where you no longer have any control. Not even of yourself, when you were previously so sure that you had a firm grip of your mind. You used to have choices, paths you wanted to follow. Fate takes that away from you. And you realise.. You’re vulnerable. You’re weak. Nothing you ever do will be good enough, nothing you’ve ever done matters. You’re lost. So lost.

You suddenly find you have no purpose and the most you can hope for is a few moments of brief happiness before someone or something takes everything you love awat. What you feel is pure agony. You feel your heart beating, not because you particularly want it to, but because it has to. What you feel is your spirit slipping away from you a little more each day. A gnawing pang inside you that says fight, fight and don't give up… The thing that gnaws at you isn't hope but desperation: desperation and frustration, because sure, you can always fight when you have to, but you pathetic little existence doesn't seem worth it.

The desperation… That stays. You’re desperate to fight back against all that pain, but the pain is too much to battle with, which just makes you more desperate.
What’s worse is you feel alone, like nobody on earth has ever felt this way before and how could they possibly understand what you're experiencing? How could they possibly help, because they dont know!
But, of course, nobody ever leaves you alone. The questions, the demands, the expectant looks in the eyes of the people around you. None of that goes away. With everyone watching you, every mistake, every misstep, every moment of hesitation, everything is magnified and judged by people who don't even know you.

When you get angry, you get twice as angry as before. You strike the first blows when people upset you, and it feels good, for a little while at least… Then later you wish you could have been your better self, and suddenly wonder if you even have a better self. But it's not like you really even care at this point…
It gets harder to drag yourself out of bed each morning. You do it each morning in a mechanical sort of way, even though at this point you barely know why.

Your friends show concern, and yet you only think they pity you. They’re not there because they care, its because they feel they should be there. Like its an obligation. Their duty. Like its fucking compulsory. You begin to only hurt them, or drive them away, or wish you could die and leave them with a huge chunk torn out of their heart. Somewhere inside you a voice is saying you should look after yourself and screw everybody else; but you can't do that. Or maybe it's just that attitude which takes way too much energy to hold on to.

You do hold on to some things though. You hold on to fatigue, to weariness, hate and bitterness. They hold on to you. They are all familiar, old friends. You should cast them aside, but you can't fling them away. You rarely bother to try anyway. You don't really want to be rid of them. They at least get reactions, the kind of reactions that let you know the things you do still matter. Even if the reaction is a hard slap in the face or a spate of death threats. These things at least make you realize that you still exist, still have some sort of effect, at least on a handful of people.

You consider how you can make yourself feel different. Since people don’t change your mood, you turn to more violent answers. You never thought that the results of self abuse could be satisfying; but it isn’t that extreme when you know you're going to die eventually. It's not that much of a difference anyway—not between dying and living, or between giving love and giving pain. And the taste of blood on your mouth is still better than tasting nothing at all.

So on the day you get the right reaction.. that reaction… from the wrong person, you're too tired to fight back against the wave of relief that overtakes you. It doesn't make sense. When a hard punch to the face is the best thing you feel in uncountable days, it’s a little disturbing at first. You never really get used to it. But its good. You cant deny how fucking good it feels.
And you push people, every time you can. You push and push until they snap and lash out. You take their blow with a satisfaction. But you don’t retaliate. Never. You just drink in that feeling and savour it like it’s the last thing you’ll ever know.
Like it’s the last time you’ll ever feel alive.