illness of depression creates loud echoes on body, mind

BY NICHOLAS MICHELSEN Entertainment Editor

Wakeup at noon. Gasp for air in a sigh of relief.

Relish the first few moments of consciousness in gratitude that you didn’t die in your sleep, and realize this feeling is fleeting as the sudden dread of another day of existence follows suit.

Lay in bed for another hour in the dark silence.

Boot your computer and stare at the screen that stares back into your tender soul. Keep the curtains drawn so that not even God himself may see the ugliness inside of your spaceship on its collision course downward into Hell.

Depression is the loneliest sense of isolation, no matter how many people you surround yourself with.

The American Psychiatry Association describes depression as “a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act.”

As medically accurate as this vague statement is, I feel it misses the spirit of the bigger picture.

I often feel trapped inside of a white room made of bone, gazing outward into the world watching the people pass by and the body I inhabit reacts to these moments accordingly. It is the imposter and I am it’s captivated parasite.

I am the faceless entity viewing reruns of the past choices that have been attributed to me, that have humiliated me. In here I am alone and haunted by the whisper of my demons laughing at the echoes of my past.

Waves of hyper-control and mania followed by days and weeks of disassociation in an alien-land. Depression feels like being a stranger in familiar places and being home-sick for a home that I have never visited. Maybe I was never invited-in to begin with.

Comedian, character-actor, director and writer Jim Carrey speaks out about his own struggle with depression in an interview with Outstanding Screenplays.

“I don’t exist, so uh- they’re all characters I played,” Carrey continues. “I played the guy that was free from concern so that people that watched me would be free from concern,” he says, describing his own personae.

When I was a child I assumed I woke-up in a world alone and depression was an entity with malicious intent. As I grew older and found other perspectives, I have learned this is not the case at all.

Malice would attribute something of higher complex thought: Planning and deceiving with a purpose.

“The difference between depression and sadness is; sadness is just from happenstance. Whatever happened or didn’t happen for you, or grief or whatever it is. And depression is your body saying, ‘f**k you, I don’t want to be this character anymore. I don’t want to hold up this avatar that you’ve created in the world. It’s too much for me,’” Jim Carrey explains regarding the mechanisms of depression.

Depression itself is so cold, that it is indifferent to us entirely. It is an unconscious mind-worm. A strange phenomenon that co-exists with the human experience. Depression is not a demon, because even a demon feels justified in its wrath against all things righteous.

No, depression just is, and it hurts constantly. It is an invisible aliment that plagues its hosts into more serious illnesses.