"Even though I know it's only chemical / These peaks and valleys are beginning to take their toll / Try to convince myself that all it takes is time / but the most derisive voice I hear is mine // It opens all the scars on me / It leaves me shaken in my belief / It takes my hand just to drag me down / It makes me a stranger in the crowd // Give me isolation just for now / I feel a hard rain coming down / I promise that I will be back soon / But for now I'll return to my cocoon."
Assemblage 23 - Cocoon
Have you ever felt like this in your life? I can feel a depression manifest itself like you can feel a cold creeping through your body, nesting in your sinuses and wrenching your forehead. I can feel depression dragging on my frontal lobes. A sensation akin to perpetually falling down, akin to feeling it rain inside my head. I cannot move. I cannot talk. I cannot smile, my frozen face giving away how I'm feeling so I hide in my room, in my room with the stars in the ceiling and the sea in the floor, swallowing my sense of purpose, suffocating my screaming mind, all these voices. I've never felt like that before, but this year, for the first time I thought, I wish I had never been born. Given the possibility, I would choose to never have existed. It's not that I don't love myself anymore – it's more like I'm losing my… attachment to myself.
Then suddenly the fall is interrupted, I landed on a trampoline and up, up, up it goes. Defying gravity, soaring the skies, everything is made of light, including myself. Everything and everyone loves me and I'm in love with the world. A stranger to pain, I feel safe and whole, nothing can ever hurt my wide open heart. There's fireworks going off in my brain, thoughts racing fast, fast, fast, my mouth blabbering away in a voice so much more elated and vibrant than the days before, while seeing all this beauty and being overjoyed I can see people around me thinking that I'm being exhausting to be around, talking too fast, talking too much. I can see their thoughts forming, I can see them looking, judging, being weirded out by my sudden change of temper and it hurts, and so I try to keep all of this to myself: my fireworks, my ideas, my bottomless love.
After years and years, people still don't get me and make me feel like I'm too much and not enough at the same time. I feel like noone is ever proud of me for just living this life (and why would anyone be?) with what feels like normalcy, proud of my quotidian rather than my achievements, proud of me for constantly keeping myself at bay and holding space for everyone around me. Only in the tiny cracks they see, in the little ways I'm failing to hold up to their expectations, my struggle becomes visible and is punished. I'm fucking tired of pretending to be someone I'm not, of pretending I'm fine when I'm not, of pretending to be calm when I'm bursting with love. I'm fucking tired of feeling like an idiot for being proud of what I'm capable of. But I am scared of driving away my loved ones when I do not regulate myself to that extent. And I feel incredibly lonely.
–NMS