sonicrocketman

I'm no stranger to depressive episodes, though thankfully mine are sparse and usually brief: sometimes a day or two, though on rare occasions perhaps a week or more. I'm thankful mine have never progressed into anything serious. That said, I'd like to discuss something that's become somewhat of a theme in my conversations lately about depression, and something I hope you, the reader, might find useful when combatting this Great and Terrible Beast yourself. To begin, I'd like to draw a distinction between depression and melancholy. There's a beauty to melancholy[1] that there simply isn't with depression. One begets yearning, the other smothers everything in its path. I love melancholy, I really do, enough that sometimes I work to keep it going a little longer. Melancholy is a mourning wistfulness, the loss of something dearly loved, a cousin of grief and dour predilections. Depression is a plastic bag, thrown over your head to choke off every breath of air until you succumb to its will. It's insidious, and it lies to you. The Venomous Snake Depression, however brief or fleeting, is the bedfellow of despair. They don't always arrive together, but they are never long apart. Both weave a web of thought that strangles fragile hope and sets to bury will and want beneath the mountain of excuse. Despair works slowly, convincing—no, proving—to you that this is how the world is: that it's terrible, that it has always been terrible, and that it will always be terrible. Then Depression swoops in like a hero to stifle that pain with dullness. Depression and Despair have all the rhetorical skill of Cicero: ethos, pathos, and lagos enough to destroy whatever justification you can weakly muster to your own defense. That's what makes Depression and Despair the monsters that they are. They pull the ultimate trick: not only to convince you of their lies, but to convince you that they—not hope—hold the truth about the world, that theirs is the only word you can trust, and that n