More than a feeling
My depression is heavy and thick this morning, as it was yesterday, a steady weight crushing upon me.
Sitting on the couch with a headache summoned by chaotic neck muscles, I trawled twitter for news and soft interaction, winding down from our first raid in the new WoW expansion. We’d made good progress, only the last fight before a random shutdown caught us struggling, and with the distraction gone darkness swarmed me again like a spectre.

It’s like trying to breathe in honey, made of something extremely soft while everything else in the world is made of solid concrete. On the train in to work I distracted myself with twitter, again, sporadic moments of interaction with those I admired and desired to be.
Standing, somehow, I waited for the final stop and distracted myself eyeing the crowd. A man wearing Gordon Freeman glasses. A woman an echo of a young Sarah Chalke. Another woman, an older version of a Gunpla enthusiast I follow on instagram. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a great film with a neat little scene of a game I’ve always placed in crowds, product of a youth where I trained myself to recognise faces.
As often, walking forward with the shuffling morning crowd of working zombies, it amazed me how everyone just kept going. The world dragged at me, seeming to pulled down at every cell, and I could picture myself falling first to my knees and then my face, exhausted simply by being. How, knowing the statistics on mental health as I do, could it be that for so long I’d made this commute and not once seen someone just slump down, defeated by their own demonic abyss?
I don’t know how I kept walking, but I did.
I take the stairs when I get to work alone, knowing my body needs every ounce of exercise I can force upon it. My stomach hangs out, a gut, over my belt, and disgusts me in ways that infuriate me. Could I but sculpt the flesh like words, most of my physicality would look significantly different, but it’s all I can do most days to choose two small flights of stairs instead of an escalator, let alone power the work to shift over a hundred and thirty kilograms of person into self healing action.
Even my blinking is slow today. I remember being mocked for that over twenty years ago in school.

I got here early, like most days, allowing a brief blogging before the days start. My head and back ache, my neck twinging, and the world feels like a honeyed soup around me. Breathing is like lifting a weight. Despite it all my face betrays nothing, as always, turning to the salutation “Terry”, the name somehow dysphoric in my ears like ever. “Peter”, I reply, nodding with a broad smile. I envy the illness he had years ago, weight evaporated leaving him near a skeleton, and I chastise myself for the myriad of thoughts tying in knots.
A sip of liquid, a glance out a welcoming window, another day rolls onward in the machine.

All I can do now is ration my energy, and foster creation of more. Warcraft will draw me in again tonight for a joyful distraction, and my dear love and our pets will lay with me in warmth, and all I can do is hope tomorrow I waken refresh, unlike today.
And breathe.
