"In the beginning it can be like moments of perfect bliss and understanding. Feelings of perfection and of oneness with the universe. Understanding everything, loving everything, and finding fault in nothing. This quickly turns to paranoia and terror as you realize your thoughts are no longer under your control. Everything gets mixed up, your thoughts go too fast and the rest of world seems to be standing still. You turn quickly from being the best at everything and in control of everything to being stuck and trapped and afraid."
"I know you have all had an orgasm. I hope so anyway. Imagine that orgasm lasting for 23 hours a day, every day, for a month. Singing in your soul. Everything you touch becomes part of you and you become part of everything you touch. It is not about thinking you are great. It is knowing you are great. You know it deep in your soul, like you've always known it. You are handsome and brilliant and funny. You will rule the world one day. You are a poet and an artist and a chef and the world's greatest lover. And everyone else knows it too. That's why they want to kidnap you and put you on a spaceship. That’s why they want to dissect you. That's why you smash into them with your car and get arrested. And that is why you start on lithium."
"Life with depression is very hard—before, during, and after treatment. Waking up each morning is a chore. It seems like every time you move, your soul is scorched with a fire of pain and blackness. Some days it’s so dark that just being conscious is painful. This is not a pain that is easy to describe. Imagine the anguish that would come with watching your entire family die. Every time you’d think about them, you would start weeping. This is the depth of despair that is felt during depression; although, instead of hurting when you think about a particular something, you feel despair when you think at all. You look out at the world and only half-see everything. Your eyes recognize the colors and shapes, but it doesn’t register in your head. It’s like watching the world through a TV screen—it’s not your life. Your life is inside the pitch black cage in your head. Your life has no meaning, no purpose, no color.
Sometimes you feel so miserable that you just lay in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling. You hear nothing, you see nothing, you feel nothing but agony. It hurts to move, so you don’t. And even if you wanted to, your body wouldn’t react fast enough. At times it’s so bad that your mind has to scream at your body for several minutes before it will enable you to lift a finger. You feel like a puppet or a deflated balloon. There’s a leaden weight inside your abdomen, and your whole body feels heavy. Everything is sluggish and painful. Even when people give you a hug, pain shoots through your body. It’s hard to talk, impossible to smile, difficult to relate to or accumulate the desire to be around anyone who is happier than you (which is everyone). Sometimes your mind is as slow and empty as your body, and sometimes your thoughts begin to race so fast that they spin a tornado inside your mind. The voice of your mind tells you over and over how worthless you are, how everyone hates you, how you will never amount to anything but a failure, and how stupid you are for letting yourself get this messed up (as if you wanted to be miserable), though you deserve it. The voice tells you that you deserve to die, you deserve to hurt, you deserve to be punished. And don’t tell anyone else about it, because they hate you too much to care.
It’s hard to sit through work or school and sit out the stresses of every day life. You would prefer to just lie on bed all day, staring at nothing, and some days you do. You try to mask your sadness around everyone else, to spare them your imperfections, but soon the task becomes impossible. You sleep too much and wake up late every morning, struggling to run around and get ready as the leaden weight sits in your stomach, and some nights you lie in bed for hours with insomnia, praying for sleep to take the pain away. It’s impossible to sit at your desk all day and focus on the tasks you need to accomplish. You find yourself fading out, and nothing ever gets done on time. If you sit down and try to read a book, five minutes later you’re watching TV, and five minutes after that you’re back to working. You go on binges and gain twenty-five pounds in two months, and then the food turns dry and dusty in your mouth and you spend another two months eating a granola bar a day. People begin popping out of nowhere, asking if you’re ok, even though you try to smile for them. At home, someone says a wrong word and you fly off the handle, screaming and cursing and slamming doors. If they ask you what’s wrong...you hit them.
Eventually you begin looking at the veins in your wrist and thinking how close they are to the skin. Every time you're driving your car, you imagine yourself crashing head-on into a nearby tree or pole, or plunging off a cliff. You see a bridge or a building and wonder how much it would hurt to fall onto the cement. You finger the bottle of pills in the cabinet and predict how many it would take to do the trick. Every time you see a picture of a gun, you start to shake. Your world of pain and darkness has become too much to handle, and it needs to end. The voice of your mind keeps screaming that you deserve to die.
One day, a friend drives you to a shrink’s office to get help. Antidepressants are irritating. They make you numb and nauseated and dizzy, and it takes months and years before you find "the right one". After awhile, your world begins to blend into part of the Earth again, although the pain hasn’t left and the voice keeps telling you how little you deserve. Soon you begin seeing a therapist, and you must sit and talk for hours about your pain. Your work becomes more bearable, but you still feel like you have a weakness. It is hard to admit to friends that you need medication and therapy. They don’t always understand. You still feel down a lot, and sometimes people tell you to stop feeling sorry for yourself or to cheer up and be happy. You want to scream at them that you can’t, that don’t they think you would if you could? And you hate them and you hate yourself and you hate your illness. You’ll never be happy again, you’ll never be normal again. You’ll never do anything right. You’re stuck like this forever."