Into the Void

I’d been thinking about voids a lot lately.  Not a space where something is missing or gone but an endless vortex of darkness.  Having depression means circling that vortex more often than one should and fighting very hard not to get sucked in.  When you battle, you try to save yourself but you keep slipping anyway.  And you’re never far away from that vortex.  It’s always there, sometimes in the distant background where you don’t even remember why you worry about it.  Sometimes it’s right next to you, a constant reminder that you’ll never escape it.  When you lean over that vortex to peer into it’s blackness, there’s a pull.  “Fall in.  You want to.  Stop fighting.  Just fall in.”  What is it about this disease that has us fighting against the basic human instinct of survival?  

When It’s The Worst

It’s bad when I decide to get out of the house and head to a coffee shop (any coffee shop), but when I get there I don’t talk to anyone and spend every last second feeling like every set of eyes is on me.  It doesn’t matter how many times I tell myself there’s no way that EVERYONE is looking at me.  That it’s self-centered to think that way (I’m not that important, really I’m not).  I still can’t stop feeling awkward and unusual and lonely and scared.  I pack up my backpack (if I even go into the coffee shop to begin with) and walk to my car and realize that I barely talked to three people all day (all to do with work) and that I haven’t actually touched another human being – actual, physical touch – in a week.  The next day, I go out again to try and make some kind of contact but the result is always the same (because I am always the same). And this isn’t the worst.