Symptoms

I am finding the lists of symptoms on websites like the Mayo Clinic to be a little too dispassionate. I suppose they have to be "clinical," but they are not descriptive.

Do you ever feel as if someone is sitting on your chest? As if you either cannot breathe, (even though you are breathing in and out steadily) or as if the air you are breathing is not enough? As if it were poisoned?

On the edge of tears for the full day? Feeling the sob simmering in your chest ready to burst up and out?

Do you feel afraid but afraid of nothing in particular? Does your heart hammer away in your chest throughout the day? Do your hands shake. Do tiny sounds of terror squeek out of you before you can stop them?

Do you find yourself suddenly "waking up" from long periods of blankness where your mind simply went grey and wordless? Do you look at the clock surprised to find that hours have passed? That it is night and you did not see the daylight fading?

Do you find the presence of others intolerable? Do you both fear and crave solitude? Do you want to tell your friends to leave you alone because the pressure of appearing fine for their sake is exhausting you?

Do you wake in the morning and groan to find another day is presenting itself, like a hill to climb? Do you dream of escape and wake only to find the world is a prison?

Lies

At some point, a conscious decision has to be made, whether to live or whether to die. Until that decision is made, and acted upon, depression will continue to offer ways of self-destruction that are, essentially, deceptive. It will lie to you, whisper through the long sleepless nights that there are ways to kill yourself that do not involve actually killing yourself.

It will offer secret ways of disappearance that look, from the vantage of the twilight, like the door to another world.

You can fade away. You can dissipate yourself, like mist in the morning breeze, and no one will see or stop you.