Of things that might have been and words in the darkness – The Ghost of Mind.

There are some things most people won’t tell you about depression, even when they’re suffering from it. Even when they’re nose-to-nose with the abyss itself, they simply won’t tell you how vast and empty that wasteland is. It is the very definition of unspeakable.

For myself, before I had the aid of antidepressants, I almost lost myself entirely. I remember being about 15, and slowly losing my sense of personal volition. That’s a trussed up way of saying I turned into a shadow, into the merest whisper of thought that rides on the back of a single breath, into the calm before the storm.

I barely moved, for days at a time, literally getting off my bed only to pee and returning to it as exhausted as if I’d just ended a 30km forced march. You think I’m exaggerating for effect but I’m not. I did not change my clothes – indeed I habitually wore this beautiful old trench coat that had belonged to my Grandfather and a fuzzy dark blue jumper underneath, day in and day out. I was perpetually cold, you see. I had no interest in food though I’d be certain I ate and drank. I just don’t remember it. Food had no taste or properties of any kind. Bland doesn’t cover it because the whole world was bland and blank.

I stopped speaking at some point. I couldn’t tell you exactly when but there’d be times when my entire world was silent. You know how people joke about teenagers who only grunt in response? I was having a really up day if you got a grunt out of me. If people spoke to me their voices sounded remote and dull. You know when you try and talk to someone who’s on the other side of a fish tank and it’s all oddly distorted? That’s something like it.

The only break in the monotony of it all was the punctuation mark that is mental pain. I’d have periods where all I wanted was to disappear completely because my mind and something in the very core of me ached so very much. It was not an emotion in the traditional sense for it seemed to come from all of myself at once, and it was pure pain, not given to any change or response to the outside world. It simply was, and though I can think of many possible causes I think it’s actually not rooted in the past much at all. No, sorry Freud but it’s not about what was but what is. It’s the purely desperate cry of a mind about to destroy itself like the snake that eats its own tail.

You’d cry out too if some unknowable force was about to erase you from all existence and you suddenly realised the truth of it. Luckily the pain would ebb since one doesn’t actually die from this unless you have a sudden burst of energy with which to wander out into the ocean and never return. I didn’t, and for that I’m grateful. I guess it’s a bit funny to say that I’m grateful it was about as severe as it gets but I am because it meant I did not have the will to think that I wanted to end it all. I did want that before and after but that’s a different story.

The slim volume of things to be thankful for that are caused by depression also includes the lack of a sense of time: You don’t remember how long you’ve been empty so the loss and the shock and the sheer horror of it doesn’t seem too great.

Still, it’s not pretty, the emptiness that stretches on forever and isn’t nearly as majestic as, say, the vastness of space. Space has light, after all but depression is the equivalent of being on the edge of a black hole: You get to watch all the light and air get sucked right on in, inevitably and easily, all too very easily.

The trek to the edge of the wasteland of the mind is usually a gradual journey but once you’re there, once you’re facing the descent into madness it’s the quick and the dead. You’re as certain as you’ve ever been about anything in your whole life that you’re the dead because for certain you’re not quick. Breathing is the only thing that takes up time and it’s amazing just how much time and effort that alone can take.
In this particular movie you’re the zombie that barely resembles its former human self: people are sure you’re in there, somewhere but they surely don’t know where. At least most people don’t, and for that, I beg you, be grateful. If you read this and have no on earthly idea what I’m talking about then thank whomever you might care to pray to. Really, you don’t want to know.

You’d think that it’d be very lonely but thankfully it’s not, not once you’re on the brink. If only you could remember what lonely felt like, then you’d be able to take a step back but you can’t. It’s as though all emotion has been erased from existence so that even if you can summon the presence of mind to reflect on the past, it is just as empty and meaningless as the future or the present state of things.
It’s like someone has crept into your mind late at night and slowly raised it to the ground – it’s a very literal saying: the lights are on but nobody’s home. If you’re lucky, you’ll sleep a lot but it won’t be restful. It’s a break for which you’d be grateful had you the presence of mind to notice it was much different from your waking state.
I don’t know if they’ve studied it but I expect that this eraser in the mind will simply not allow you to remember your dreams, if you should happen to have any, which it’s unlikely you will. Depression is, indeed, the slow atrophy of the mind. I’ve read that they’ve measured the shrinkage of the brain in an area called the hippocampus, and I’m sure that’s not the only bit that shrinks.

I mostly remember lack of everything in the really bad periods, though later those spells would be emphasised with brief psychotic breaks. I think there’s only so much of running on empty a mind can take before it does snap. I lacked emotion, or much conscious thought at all for that matter. Indeed I was lucky if I could think beyond the next breath. Restricted doesn’t cover it.

I was asleep at the wheel and only occassionally would I wake up and feel a jolt of something that might lift me out of harm’s way. It didn’t last long enough to form any sort of coherent plan of action, any action at all like, say, having a shower or perhaps talking to someone. These things were foreign entirely to a mind which couldn’t see out anymore. My entire knowledge of the world was reduced to a fuzzy gray ring into which I would stare without pause.

I forgot all that I was or could have been, and in that total mental fog I wandered. I’d sometimes hear the echoes of footsteps behind me but I could never be sure they weren’t just my own so on I would plod, heading nowhere fast.

When finally I saw my first psychiatrist, she gave me a word for this state: Anhedonia. She looked me in the eye and said, as seriously as anyone has ever told me anything: “You’re completely anhedonic. Do you know what that means?” And she began to describe my mental state, and though I wasn’t capable of following her whole conversation that moment sticks out. I had a word for it, miracle of miracles. I could name it, and therefore I could begin to step back from it because suddenly it was outside myself. The trick is keeping it there.