Simile though your heart is breaking

'But what does it feel like?'

Sometimes this is asked because all the poetry of clouds and darkness doesn't make sense, and sometimes as a way of trying to understand how 'feeling sad' can knock someone's life off balance in such practical and real ways.

For my own sake I've tried many ways to articulate what it is I feel, although it can be hard to get past describing the effects rather than the experience.  I thought I might share my humble attempt;

So in the style of Alanis Morissette here's the list.  But it's not about irony (not that her song is either really...), it's about depression.

Imagine taking the feeling associated with each bullet point and putting it in a bottle.  On some days you just drink one of the bottles, on others you might have them all in your system.  (In case anyone is alarmed by the list, I haven't experienced all these actual things - I'm just using my imagination to conjure up a reaction that can be likened to some of the experience of depression.)


It's like...

• Being on a non-stop train to the airport and quickly realising you've not got your passport.  But you have to sit on the train and wait to arrive knowing you're going to miss your flight.
• Standing within a crowd of strangers who are whispering about you and giving you suspicious looks.
• The feeling the day after everyone you love found out you'd been lying to them.
• An indefinite, restless wait for a call to tell you bad news
• Standing in an ice rink in bare feet whilst cocky children whizz around you.
• It's just arriving to a party you'd been looking forward to, to find everyone leaving and you missed it.
• Knowing that everyone you know has been given a £5000 gift for being wonderful, and you weren't eligible
• Listening to the person you secretly love tell you about their new relationship.
• Being the only one at work that knows you're all going to lose your jobs at any moment.
• Finding out your group of best friends went on holiday without you.
• Trying on all of your clothes and none of them fitting, and you have no money to replace them.
• Showing a painting you've worked tirelessly to finish to your loved ones for them to be underwhelmed.
• Tidying up after a party you threw, that only you came to
• Knowing you'll be stuck in a rut doing the same mundane routine for the rest of your life
• Waking up on the day you have to go to a funeral or event or work that you've been dreading
• Doing a massive supermarket shop and realising you haven't got your wallet at the checkout
• Getting to your wedding day and finding you're not enjoying it
• Going on a once in a lifetime trip and being ill in bed for all of it
• Feeling the loss of someone so deeply even though the world has moved on
• Everyone telling you that you 'should be better by now' and questioning you as to why you aren't coping

Two of my most effective antidotes

Well, that's quite a larder of bottled up feelings. I appreciate that it might only make sense to people with my kind of imagination and emotional sensitivities,  But one of the defining features of depression is that so often the feelings are there without the logical trigger.  'I just feel low' is possibly more frustrating when it has no 'because'.

I guess that the challenge is to find some antidotes and soothing balms among it all.

And yes, I've now got Ironic in my head too.  It's like raaaayyeeeaaain...