What it's like to be me - days of mild depression

Step by step, inch by inch, minute by minute, second by second.

This is how I want to respond when people ask me how I get through each day.

Instead, I merely smile and nod, giving placating answers that ease their minds and guilt. They can't understand. Not for lack of trying, no. They can sympathize but never empathize. Many think they can, many don't even try. And precious few simply let me be.

There are days where I feel giddy, joyful even, gleeful and full of life, ready to take on any challenge that comes my way.

But a word, a breath, a simple act can change all in the brief blink of an eye.

As suddenly as it began, the day turns sour. Nothing goes right.

I hate the good days.

The good days only emphasize the bad days because on the bad days, I remember the good, remember how it felt to be happy, to be in control of my reactions. In control of my feelings and my life.

On the bad days, it’s all I can do to keep from screaming obscenities at the people I encounter, at the frustrating nuances that fill my brain. Control slips, and with it, so do the people around me.

My emotions run rampant, much like a herd of sheep that have broken free from the hold, confused and without direction.

Anger, peace, hate, joy, sorrow, love, pain, any emotion that can be felt is. In one moment, I can feel everything that you will experience in a week.

The medications don’t help. They merely serve to cloud the brain and slow the processes down. I can’t think, I can’t breathe, I can’t function with the medication. I merely feel frustrated because I can’t function like I feel I should.

But I can’t function without it.

I hate the good days.

I hate those days more than the bad.

Because I know what is coming. Whether it’s in one day, one week, or one month, I know it is coming.

I can’t escape it.

I fall to the bottom of a well. When I look up, all I see is a very gray cloudy day. I am looking up at this insurmountable cloudy day and I can't climb out of the well, despite how I scream, claw, and pound. It is silent and very isolating inside my well once I stop, falling dejectedly to the muddy ground.

No one can help me in my well of darkness. And soon, the water will return to fill the well.

And I will welcome it. Because all I can think of is escape.

And somehow, I leave the well, if by swimming or if by climbing a rope that is tossed down, I escape only to see a desolate wasteland that is uncrossable.

I hate the good days.

I want to be a normal girl, even though normal is merely an etymological misnomer, an irrelevancy because there is no true basis for “normal.”

But anything, ANYTHING, is better than this. This purgatory of desolation and isolation.

What I want the most, I know I will never have, even though what I want is what I truly need. And most days, I accept this truth, the idea that I will never receive what I need.

Except for on the bad days.

It’s the bad days where I remember my longing, my desire for someone to help guide me through.

God is a nice thought. But He can’t be there to calm down my screaming rage, dry my streaming eyes, hold my face in his hands and tell me that he’ll love me no matter what I do, what I say, what I scream at him in my irrational emotional swings.

So instead, I smile.

I put on the face people expect to see and I live.

I force myself through each and every day.

Step by step, inch by inch, minute by minute, second by second.