MHM Magazine

only I can hear it. This voice speaks to my gut. This voice is like a stuck record or like a song on the radio with the airwaves going on and off. It keeps on echoing to stay in the fight. No hanging up my boxing gloves. There are people watching the fight who I will never know, but they are watching. My test will be my testimony - the voice reaches a high note. The hardest thing about depression is that it doesn’t always have to be followed by some tragic event or crisis, instead it can stand alone, by itself in the ‘cold’ because of a chemical imbalance in the brain. People don’t always ‘get it’ – how can you be depressed? You’re young, you have a family who love you, you have a job that pays your bills and so on and so forth. But what people don’t know is that if your pillow could talk and if what played in your mind was streamed on Netflix you would see how depression isolates you to a point of not feeling human nor can you connect to people, even as simple as standing in a queue in a grocery store to buy bread. You can’t make eye contact or understand an inside joke in the right context. You become nothing and no one, and people get more and more difficult to understand. You slip in and out of your body because of involuntary spells of disassociation – a combination of numbing and overactive anxiety. When I am in active depression I look like on the outside what I feel like on the inside. Weekdays I soap my body to avoid ‘office talk’. To avoid ‘speculation’, I use all my energy from Monday to Friday to dress the depression for work. There’s never any colour on my clothes or make up to paint my face, just a functional look dressing - a half-washed body. On the weekends I don’t care to shower or brush my teeth or do anything to my hair. I sleep the weekend away or contemplate my suicide, planning the attempt down to the hymns for the funeral service. But that is fantasy, escapism. All of it is to validate my suffering – the depression. I can’t sit with these feelings of intense and unbearable sadness, and in time, after getting ‘properly’ into the depression I am a bucket of water full of holes. All I do is cry. I cry at everything and without warning, confusing people in my space. I can’t explain what is happening to me except for responding that I’m sad and further respond that I don’t know why. This does not add up for someone who has not got lived experience of chronic depression. In my experience, I’ve learned to speak with people who are medically trained or qualified, or people who have lived experience of depression because it’s here that my feelings are not played down. Living with chronic depression is like going to war with every waking thought. It’s a long and hard fight, but it’s a fight that awakens your inner light if you choose to stay in long enough to see its purpose. “When it’s dark enough you can see the stars.’’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson) References available on request. MHM | 2025 | Volume 12 | Issue 4 | Living With MHM Issue 4 | 2025 | MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS | 33 H