Depression feels like someone is ever so slowly pressing your head into warm molasses.
It feels alien, at first you kick and fight screaming. Something takes control and it does not have good intention, you can feel it. Yet after a while the struggle tires you even more, the instinct to fight fades, thoughts slow to a sluggish crawl, just keeping your eyes open takes heroic effort, letting go begins to look enticing, restful, the only possibility left... As you slip under, it suffocates the last breaths of self and leaves the empty shell of the body to sink into gray nothingness.
Watching your own brain spiral slowly into the abyss like this is at the same time fascinating and utterly frightening. Fascinating as it is not anything that I'd call "me", doing this, it's not a part of us, the brain does it without any further input from us. In this autopilot inescapability everyone scrambles for a hold, something to stop the slow descent into madness. All normal life comes to a stop as emergency procedures take over. If we fail, we die.
One of the more confusing symptoms is the strange way time perception changes. Now, we don't have much of that to begin with, but when the depression unfolds the moment becomes all there is and all there ever will be. There is no tomorrow, no future, no hope that anything will ever change. Mere moments ago I might still have been able to think that it's just a phase, something to dive through and come out alright at the other end, we did it before, we can do it again. And then I'm in this still torrent and even the memory that I wanted to hold on to that hope is wiped away.
When we resurface, the whole experience looks like a surreal trip. There often is no outward reason why things spiraled so far out of hand. Hormonal changes tend to drag me under at astonishing speed, one moment I'm fine, the next I'm gone, barely a moment to realize what is happening.
That makes it hard to prepare and possibly catch the fall. Without friends who remind me what I wanted to do and insist that I go do it, no matter how pointless it might feel it would be hard to regain my footing. It is the most important thought to hold on to: Speak with your loved ones, be honest, they love you even when you're not doing well, trust their love.
They would miss me. Without that hold hold I would slip under and be lost without a trace. And I wouldn't even care.
