They Said It

Lately I've been writing dark poetry in my head.

Last year when I took Creative Writing, I couldn't write poetry for the life of me. Not a poetic word in my body. Now I lay awake at night writing depressive verse in my mind. My head's full of dramatic phrases like "dark abyss" and "silencing the voices of my mind" and "swallowed by darkness."

It's crap, really. The ideas and the poetry itself. All sheer crap, all symptoms of my depression, and really, really annoying when I'm trying to sleep but my anxiety keeps me up. Conjugating French verbs in my head is actually relaxing and soothing.

Today I stumbled upon wingsofmadness.com, a mental health site with a great section on depression. And it turns out I'm not the only one who feels this way and is compelled to write about it. Everyone from nobodies like me to Abraham Lincoln experiences depression and writes it down.

They said exactly what I'm feeling--every single one of the following quotes!--and that somehow makes it just a tiny bit easier:

I tell people it's like being dead. It feels like being a ghost, maybe. You float through your days feeling insubstantial, cut off from warmth, light and all feeling. Sometimes it feels like you're in a coffin buried alive. You're screaming inside your head, but no one can hear you.

"It was not really alarming at first, since the change was subtle, but I did notice that my surroundings took on a different tone at certain times: the shadows of nightfall seemed more somber, my mornings were less buoyant, walks in the woods became less zestful, and there was a moment during my working hours in the late afternoon when a kind of panic and anxiety overtook me..." - William Styron, Darkness Visible

"I'm frightened. I'm always anticipating that someone is going to scream at me, a cop in the street, my boss. I'm sure I'm going to be held up or get a flat tire at rush hour. Every ache and pain in my body convinces me I'm going to die of cancer. I can't sleep. I wake up in the early hours of the morning terrified. I'm either afraid of dying or that the house is going to be broken into. I have nightmares. I wake up sweating, paralyzed with fear. It's been several weeks now. I think I can't make it, I can't go through another day and night feeling this way. I feel beaten up, my body feels as if I've been in a fight. Nobody seems to understand." - Richard, You Are Not Alone

"I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never meant any such thing. I have made a captive of myself and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself out." - Nathaniel Hawthorne

"I was much further out than you thought and not waving but drowning." - Stevie Smith

"When you're depressed, there's no calendar. There are no dates, there's no day, there's no night, there's no seconds, there's no minutes, there's nothing. You're just existing in this cold, murky, ever-heavy atmosphere, like they put you inside a vial of mercury." - Rod Steiger, On the Edge of Darkness

"I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would be not one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell. I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better it appears to me." - Abraham Lincoln

I become virtually inarticulate; I can barely speak, which is the complete opposite of how I am normally. When I'm not depressed, most people would tell you it's hard to shut me up. But when I'm depressed, putting words together into a simple sentence is like carrying water with a sieve.

" I had pains in my arms and a kind of weakness in my legs. I would be asking questions in an interview, and suddenly I wouldn't be able to hear the answer, or think of the next question. My mind was on a completely different plane. I had no memory, no powers of concentration. If you asked me questions about a newspaper column I'd read two minutes before, I wouldn't have been able to answer." - Mike Wallace, On the Edge of Darkness

"It's difficult for the public to realize how powerful the mind is, and how much pain the mind can give you. When you're depressed, it's as though this committee has taken over your mind, leaving you one depressing thought after the other. You don't shave, you don't shower, you don't brush your teeth. You don't care. The one thing I did do, I still ate a little bit. But I didn't have much of an appetite. I know a lot of people who say they didn't eat at all." - Rod Steiger, On the Edge of Darkness

Taken from wingsofmadness.com.