Boy Meets Depression by Kevin Breel

Author:Kevin Breel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2015-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

NOTE TO SELF

When you feel fucked up: Stop. Breathe. Talk to someone. Tell them stuff. Stop being an asshole and thinking you’re going to get through it alone. Problems are like broken pipes: they need a person to fix them. Oh, and clean your room, you filthy animal.

IT TOOK ME months to realize that I was drowning in a deep and dark depression. It seems as though knowing you’re depressed would be obvious—the way it is when you cut yourself or come down with a cold—but it isn’t. It’s as if suffering has a way of secretly finding a home inside of you, slipping past your own sense of self and common sense. I felt not unlike a ceiling with a tiny leak; water passed through me undetected, slowly flooding every inch of my existence.

I couldn’t come to terms with the torture that I felt inside of me. It was as if I had become a stranger to myself, simply renting the skin of someone who looked familiar. It was haunting and horrible. Each day I felt like I was being dragged through life, clutching at anything and everything in hopes that if I could hang on to it, maybe it would make me feel normal again. Anything to do with emotion devastated me. I couldn’t watch movies. I couldn’t read books. I couldn’t listen to music or make conversation. I fluctuated between being unbearably quiet and irrationally angry. Truly, I felt like I was losing my mind.

Pangs of pain and pessimism ran rampantly through my brain. I was angry and upset with who I was and what I thought about. I knew that no one could actually hear what happened in my mind but was horrified at the thought of what they’d hear if they could. This invisible playground where I was able to indulge in whatever whimsical version of the world I wanted to had turned into a battleground. It was the secrecy of the experience that made it so devastating. Slowly, the solitude of it all began to challenge my sanity.

On any average day, I was so lost in my own mind that there was nothing else that was real. Every conversation was like listening underwater. I could hear words and see gestures and make vague connections, but my focus, each and every conscious thought, was married to my sadness; nothing else successfully connected with me. It was pathetic and childlike, this compulsion to think only of myself, and yet it was unshakable. I hated that this was who I’d become. I felt less like a human being and more like a reaction. I flinched in the different directions of my despair and could not stand still long enough to notice I was doing it. Like a fish out of water, I jumped all over the place, trying to make it back to where it was safe while simultaneously exhausting myself.

At the end of some days, I noticed how much my shoulders had sunk in and my eyelids had drooped and how even my physical shell was telling me that I sucked.

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