Inside a Mind of Blackness; Depression Unveiled
The sun rises but you pull the covers back over your body. Your mind races – it say’s just lay in bed for a few more minutes and you’ll be fine. The alarm gets pushed back another 30 minutes and you fall back into a restless sleep. Beep Beep Beep. It goes off again and your mind tells you to get up but you lay there. Your body feels heavy; your limbs feel like they’re made of lead. So, you push the alarm back again hoping just a few more minutes of sleep will help. It doesn’t. You made an appointment for the afternoon, knowing you won’t be able to get out of bed early enough for a morning appointment, but you still miss it because you never got up. It’s the mid-afternoon and your mind is screaming at you – ‘Just get up already! You’re just so lazy and you have no ambition’. Eventually the self-hate becomes stronger than the lead limbs and the exhausted mind. You get up and make a half-assed attempt to get ready for the day. You look at the reflection and you hate what you see but you have no energy to fix it; your mind feels like it’s running on empty and your limbs feel like they suck out all your strength when you try to lift and use them. Nobody called to see if you’re ok because they don’t know. They don’t know you sleep all day. They don’t know you can’t get to work. They don’t know you can’t take care of yourself. You suffer alone because they don’t know.
This is depression. This is the cycle of hate that our minds are enveloped in. The kind of pain that resonates deep within; manifesting itself in the form of physical exhaustion and pain. Your mind tells you that you’re just a lazy woman. Too lazy to do simple tasks. Too lazy to do the dishes or take a shower – you’re just filthy and gross. It’s a pull so strong and powerful it takes over completely. Envelopes you like a dark cloud filled with anger and pain. This evil is real. This evil is overwhelming. This evil was in me. I began to retreat within myself and the ugly blackness that lived inside. The beast.
My backstory is complicated and it’s intricately woven; with so many moving parts it’s nearly impossible to explain in great detail without leading to confusion. The short story is this: I got married and took over a business on my own at the young age of eighteen. So many big life events all collided at one time like one giant snowball. I have always been a strong, independent, old-souled woman; I thought I could handle it all and the short answer is – I couldn’t. Then began the cycle of pain. To make things worse I did not have a supporting husband, rather he fed (possibly unintentionally but it happened nonetheless) my pain and suffering. He fed the blackness like giving drugs to an addict. This man was supposed to love me and take care of me. I was a beautiful mirror that naively thought I was invincible; and he took a hammer to me until I believed everything was desolate; shattered me until I was unrecognizable.
Imagine yourself inside a dark cave – so black you can’t see your hand in front of your face. How do you get out? How do you survive when no one even knows you’re there? You refuse to accept this fate and you fight. The girl I was at eighteen, nineteen, twenty – she’s vastly different; every year I began changing. The healing stages were a constant morphing of my personality and a cleansing of my mind. I had to purge the bad thoughts, the bad people, the angry blackness inside. I’m not done; I’ll never be done healing from the pain. Once the blackness is there it never goes away. It lurks in the shadows, it hides in the wings, observing and reminding me of how it used to be. Sometimes it whispers sweet nothings of self-hate into my ears. But, the glowing light in my heart that I found in this fight against the darkness of my mind refuses to let its power take over again. The will to withstand and learn from this darkness grows stronger every day. Having this constant reminder of the dark days of my past pushes me to be stronger than the day before. It pushes me to be better, to fight harder. This is my fight and I will never lose again.
–XOXO
