A number of the people I’ve loved in my life have suffered from depression. Severe depression, clinical depression, chronic depression.
While I’ve done more than my share of grieving and mourning, I’ve been dealt far less than my share of melancholy, of depression. I often feel fortunate to have access to as much sadness as I do, sadness about what my life has and has not held thus far. Sadness about the suffering of those I love and those who are further from me. Sadness about the transience, the impermanence of everything good (and everything bad).
I’ve written before that this sadness feels to me like a gift. At the same time though, and this may be evident if you’ve been reading, at the moment I am contending with a bit of depression of my own. It’s not crippling. It’s far less extreme than some depressions I’ve witnessed. But it is pronounced and undeniable. It creeps out, seeping, leaking, leaking under the doors of various rooms of my psyche. It infects how I think about the future. Whether it’s the future I ponder with the people I love, the future I ponder with colleagues or in work, the future I ponder with women whom I date or haven’t yet met but hope to.
It infects everything, coating it with an ooze of morose lethargy. As I said, it’s not that severe. I don’t struggle to get out of bed. I’m not anhedonic. I have lots of fun. It’s just that if I pause for a moment, if I stop and reflect, what bubbles to the surface is a slightly tearful, mournful sense of loss, of sadness.