How Would You Describe How Depression Feels?

[Deleted member 12723]

Like in the fairy story where the girl is put in a room full of straw by the king and being told to spin it into gold or else.

 

[Spiderallis]

Remember that old movie 'The Blob'? I think of depression as being stuck in that black goo, slowed down, heavy, and when my head is submerged I can't hear or see anything else. It's quite sticky and hard to crawl out of too.

 

[Chincho]

I feel empty inside. I go about my day, talk to people, and do what must be done. Nobody seems to notice that there's a big black hole inside of me that sucks all my feelings, and that no matter what I do, nothing fills that hole, nothing makes me whole.

 

[renee-des]

It feels like complete emptiness. Like something is missing. Like a hole in your heart or your chest or your stomach. It's just complete emptiness and the worst part of it is it feels like you can never escape it. It feels like you will always be empty. The missing piece will never be found.

 

[miss_isolated]

It feels like I'm not a part of the grand world that everybody seems to live in all together. Sometimes it's like I've got no purpose and I'm here on earth by accident with many others who are also here by accident. It's a sense of complete separation.

 

[Lapislazuli]

My depression feels similar to yours, Hashi. I feel like there is this gray wall around me, with a sense of disconnect from everyone else. I feel rather numbed and detached (to the point I feel I'm completely alone, though realistically that isn't the case) when I am feeling depressed from PTSD. I have learned how to snap myself out of the gray wall with meditation, assuming I have the proper space/environment to meditate in.

 

[kdblossom]

Depression feel like I am sitting in a bottomless pit with no way out.

 

[Christian Price]

It feels like a gangster initiation beat down and I'm the wanna be gangster and depression is stomping on my guts and kicking my face in. Then add PTSD from a decade of child abuse, a prior attempt with a firearm and the stigma surrounding what I did. Its an all out savage street war sometimes.

 

[fairywings]

Depression feels like love lost.

 

[frozen]

Profound darkness. Empty, and completely hopeless.
Am not "living", crippled and frozen.
The only thing I'm able to accomplish is living another day.
The grief from losing myself consumes me.

 

[feelingok]

I am having another episode of depression now, and I used to have a serious one some 8-9 years ago and it lasted for about 3-4 years. Not only did I feel life was hopeless and meaningless, like some people said, I also felt complete emptiness, like a hole in my heart, but it was more than that. In those 3-4 years, I felt like playing pirate ship ride every minute of the day, like my heart was flung thousands times in a day, dropping from the very high to the very low constantly. A friend who didn't see me for some time those years was surprised to see me still alive when we met again. I don't have ptsd, but my ex does. It seems depression from ptsd is a bit different ... or as I read the symptoms of depression for men (more anger issues?) and women are different.

 

[Helliepig]

It feels like complete emptiness. Like something is missing. Like a hole in your heart or your chest or your stomach. It's just complete emptiness and the worst part of it is it feels like you can never escape it. It feels like you will always be empty. The missing piece will never be found.

This really struck me today because this is how i feel. I have reached a point in my therapy where I have suddenly got in touch with my absolute yearning for mum, for the connecion I never had and in so doing it has plonked me squarely back into what I used to feel as my depression.

What I feel right now is exactly how you describe, exactly how I have felt over and over, but I have never been able to "see" it with the clarity I have now. I have known the theory, I have thought it, I have wondered, I have tried to figure it, a million times, but only now have I moved into the space that occupies this emptiness and can feel where it comes from.

Abandonment, shivery fear, the aloneness of forever, death. Nothing and noone to help..The first time I've seen clearly, rather than just understood intellectually, that this "depression" is the deep abandonment tragedy of my little child.

I have read what people have written, how they describe this, but until I was ready to move into these layers deep down, it was just noise. Yeah yeah yeah, blah blah blah. As this will be to those who read what I'm writing and aren't quite in their right place yet either.

I'd like to tell you what is the other side of this place, how it feels to grieve it, how you can live without this insane deep wound and for it to be ok, but I don't know. Yet?