For a good moment in my life, I think I was not in a depressed state. I mean this not in a manner to say that I was cured but instead, it’s to say that I wasn’t empty all the time. Now, there’s this weight on me again that I feel. It isn’t a sharp or pounding feelings, it does not burst out of my chest like a magician pulling a bouquet of flowers out of their costume. Instead, it feels like an everlasting rain that only reveals itself in black and white hues. It is a feeling that life is split only between the living and the dead. Everything in between is an empty and meaningless endeavour.
I find it amusing to fall into lapses of existential crises, like dipping my paintbrush into clearly muddled, used, and grey water. Does it really help to clean the brush if the water is brackish and dirty? A reasonable instinct is, of course, to simply throw out the dirty water and refill it with fresh and clean water. Yet for some reason, here I am again stuck in the process of understanding why the water refuses to be anything but clean. Even when effort is placed to cleanse the water, it always muddles at the end of the day.
What is the feeling like? I think depression for me has clear psychosomatic symptoms. I feel it the most as soon as I awaken, this dawning feeling that my sleep was unsatisfactory. That another part of my body aches, that I simply cannot wake up without this painful intrusion into my life. It almost feels as if fate itself has dictated that the pain is a requirement as soon as I wake up. I feel it the most on my upper back, the shoulders and the area right below my scapuli. Like muscles that require constant stretching, kneading, and pressure. It may not even be to relieve it of pain but simply to put the sensation as something other than pain. See, I dropped it off again. I wrote down what the pain wasn’t in the first part, it isn’t a sharp or pounding pain. What is that feeling of depression? It is a pressure that seems to surround me from all angles. Not like an egg wanting to hatch but instead, a feeling of being deep underwater. No matter how you turn, which direction you face, whichever way you writhe your toes and fingers and tense your legs and stretch your ears and flare your nose and clench your jaw and tighten your abs and brace your buttocks and massage your temples. It doesn’t matter, none of your effort matters because the pressure will always be felt by every inch of your skin, your bones, and your mind.
Although, a magic seems to overtake this feeling albeit only momentarily. When I write to you, I start to feel this feeling wash away. Just as one resurfaces slowly from the depths of the ocean, close enough to the surface for light to give you notice of the water surrounding you but not enough to catch a breath of life. It lives as a moment of lightness before you are once again pulled so far down that the only feeling you have is pressure.
Is it enough to give me hope? No, it is not. Instead, it gives me a bit of energy to try once again to surface slowly. Who knows if the progress is cumulative, that one day I’ll be able to free myself completely. It probably will never be that. There is no cure to depression, not in the way that you can be cured of disease. There are only treatments to aid your daily living, to maybe make the pain less present. But the void is so undoubtedly present, it almost feels like the void is god.
In Wuthering Waves, the recent Lahai Roi storyline focuses on the fight between humanity and our creations against the threnodian, Aleph-1. Here, Aleph-1 is represented by a black hole. An all-consuming and ever destined destruction that only knows infinity as emptiness. In many ways, I feel like the story’s focus on this conflict between hopelessness, emptiness, voidedness and our constant civilisational struggle to hope, to love, to be is representative of many a similar feelings that we face together. It doesn’t need to be a physiologically existential crisis that confronts us for it to qualify. In fact, I think it boils down to philosopher Albert Camus’ question: Should I/we commit suicide?
I always have difficulty answering this question. Not because of the morality behind it but because of the feeling that I can’t ignore no matter how hard I try. The pressure of being underwater, crushingly great, can wipe me out in an instant. Do I allow it to do that? Do I allow it to become my unbecoming? I don’t know, I don’t have an answer for this today. I don’t think I ever will.