Tied Together With a Smile

This post happens to be deeply personal to me, and I've had it written down for about a month now and I've been backing out of posting it but I feel like it's important and could be quite enlightening about what it's like to live with depression. This has been a reality for me for over 8 years now, so here are just some of the days of my life. There is a trigger warning for this post. 
Please, if you think you may be suffering from someone similar, see someone about it. It doesn't have to be a doctor necessarily but a friend or a family member, someone that's safe. No one deserves to go through this alone. 


So this story starts one Sunday afternoon. 
I'm sat on my bed. My brain going crazy, telling me all the ways I could die, head screaming at me, asking why I still want to be alive. Me, sitting there, genuinely not being to answer that question. Tears streaming down my eyes, not able to die, not being able to live, I just sit there in shock. I'm frozen in time being unable to move, think, or do anything, waiting for the moment to pass. 
Imagine this happening, not just on the one-off, but literally every day, sometimes several times a day. 

It doesn't matter where I am, or what I happen to be doing at the time. One minute I'm living, the next thing you know, I'm fighting for my life. 

This is a genuine reality for my life. Thankfully these episodes are about once a week now, and are getting fewer by the month (with the help of medicine- thank you Jesus!)

This next story starts any morning.
One day, I'm stuck in bed. I'm not miserable per-say, I'm not really feeling anything. I can't move, I can't seem to do anything.
So instead I lie there, for hours, stuck in this life. I'm unable to live, and I sleep for as long as I can, putting off the day. I hope I can move later on, maybe before my family get home, so I can hide my feelings. If I get changed maybe they won't know the severity of my day. 
Once I'm out of bed I just cry. My life amounts to nothing if this is what my day is gonna be like, if this is what my life is going to be like. 
I can't keep doing this forever but I do not know what else I can do. I'm stuck in this paradox of life. This is not the usual day, but what happens around two or three times in a row, about once a month. 

I do not know whether this is better or worse than my episodes. It feels like I'm faking it. Everything I do is a fight against myself. Am I sure I am not able to move? Am I just faking it? Am I able to eat? Am I able to look after myself? Do I even care? What am I able to do? I do not even know. I'm weeping.

Then comes the most common day.
This is pretty much the same as your average day. I get up, go to work, then to the gym, hang out with my family, read, etc. Except instead of being happy or whatever there's just an apathy surrounding my life.

I'm living because I have to. There's no real enjoyment in what I do, even if it is something I love, like re-reading Harry Potter for the hundredth time. Everything has this dullness that surrounds it. It's like when you're smiling for a photo and your smile never quite reaches your eyes. Happiness, or any genuinely pleasant feeling is superficial. It only ever hits me part-way. The one good feeling I seem to have is comfort. If I am doing something I know I enjoy, or something simply normal, like cooking for myself, I'm comforted by the fact I seem to be doing. If I'm doing, I can't be that bad really. 

That is not to say there are not good days. There are, and they are wonderful.
It's basically your normal life, but you can feel fully. You can laugh until your belly hurts, you can cry because you are heartbroken, rather than because you were unable to make a cup of tea for yourself that day. You can feel every emotion under the sun. It's just life, and life is good.

This is the most rare of all the days. I can only remember one good day in the last 6 months at least. There have been glimmers, but that is it so far. This is what we aim for. We aim for the good days to become more frequent, and hope for a day where the bad days are almost non-existent. I am not expecting to always be happy, life does not work that way. I just simply want to be alive.