depression, chapter two
On days like this, I have to fight THE URGE. I have to wrangle it and calm it down like it's some wild animal, or risk being overtaken by THE SADNESS. (THE URGE is simply the desire for anything to happen, rather than nothing, and THE SADNESS is an intense longing for the old days, when things were happening in my life. I have capitalized them because these feelings are so immediately recognizable and I deal with them so often that they've taken on a life of their own.)
It's not for lack of energy. I started today by cleaning the kitchen, but the Sun is out in full force and it's Sunday and due to historical particulars of my life this is often the time of week when THE URGE is strongest. So why don't I do something about it? If only it were that easy.
It's early, but being winter, the Sun is off to the side and coming in my windows nearing its sharpest angle now, nearly horizontally, which means I only have maybe a half hour left before I fully enter the gray zone.
I go back to cleaning and try to quiet my mind but all I can do is turn the volume down; the thoughts never stop coming. I opened a cupboard and caught the merest glimpse of a scrubbing sponge and remembered how the other day I considered stopping at this dollar store to buy more but didn't, the same dollar store where I had gone once and asked a young woman stocking the shelves where something was, and it turned out it was right next to her. And she had a young girl there with her, I'm guessing her daughter or niece, and she was trying to entertain her while she worked, and so I was extra nice and thankful to her, and even now, over a year later, I still would like to go there and spend lots of money to help them have a good day, despite not really needing much beyond more scrubbing sponges.
I thought of many more things but maybe I should just stop. Who will care? Humanity is fractured into a thousand pieces already, and each of those pieces is fractured into a thousand itself. We are not in agreement on anything, I mean not anything, and all the most horrible people are in charge. It's certainly not the world I was taught to believe in as a kid.
The sliver of light grows thinner; the gray zone approaches.
A sudden wave of guilt and shame overtakes me, and I feel almost embarrassed of not being smarter, more capable, more stable, more accomplished, and then... nostalgia, because my brother went to space camp and there was a picture of all the kids that went that year sitting on the mantle for a long time, and I would always stare at it for a minute whenever I took to pacing around the living room. This is what I was wanting to tell people earlier: It's always like this, we're always moving and changing, not really the same person from one day to the next, but the same type of person. Like oil in water, we always have boundaries but we're never the same shape for very long.
The Sun has passed the windows and is close to the horizon, giving the trees very long shadows on the snow.
I'm cleaning the front of the refrigerator now, somewhat unsure how I'm even finding the motivation. The other day I was driving in this depressing part of town, a real broken down industrial area, and I imagined myself going to a coffee shop, an idea that I was entertaining at the time. I imagined myself surrounded by all these people sitting in silence, and not being able to keep all my suffering down like you're supposed to, and starting to cry, and not being able to stop, and when asked if I was okay, telling them I thought I was having a panic attack, and as I imagined all this, I had to fight back tears in real life, because I was driving and needed to be able to see.
Oh, I just realized I'm being depressing and that's not what I'm trying to do these days. It should help you to know that I'll be okay though, probably. These days when THE URGE and THE SADNESS come around, I just sit with them, until it goes away. If it was summer I'd go ride my bike, but it's not.
Anyway writing this did almost nothing.
~
February 2026