Alone in Bad Company

Posted on June 25, 2010 in Depression Journals & Notebooks

The worst diseases are the invisible ones. They are like a drawer that you can’t close and can’t see the reason why it won’t close. You can shove against it with all your might, but the pressure gets you nowhere or makes things worse. The state of my little finger is like this and, when it comes, so is my depression.

Last week, I felt especially out of sorts in my mood. I wrote:

I’m at that point in life where no one sees the promise in me anymore. Those accolades faded as I grew older and was derailed by my illness. I can’t see my future amounting to what it could have been. There’s the old, damaged dream of not being a millionaire by age 30 and then there is the loss of a vocation — the sense of a career stalled by madness. Those who might have been your respectful peers ignore you. You become the embarassing relative, the odd man married to the friend of the family.

Among others who don’t and won’t understand, you retreat into corners to look at magazines or take your place on the couch watching a game to which you give no attention when you are alone. In your own time and space, you sit with demons skilled in mockery. Between doctor’s appointments, you count emptinesses.

[[Ambrose Bierce]] defined alone as “in bad company.” This is you.

But only as long as the dread-fall lasts.