The Specter of Despair

[CW: depression]

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Today is one of those days where I exist on the border between numbness and deep emotional turmoil. It’s somewhat counterintuitive that those things would be so closely related; but for me, it’s second nature.

At age 19, a particularly difficult depressive episode of my life caught me off-guard. For the first time, I was completely numb—all day, every day. I felt as though I should have been crying, except that I physically could not. I would blast drum and bass music in my car just to feel something in the ear-shattering vibrations. I navigated each day with an inner blankness, a ship lost without a compass or stars to guide me through the endless night.

Underneath this numbness, I knew, lay an unbearable sorrow. It was so unbearable, in fact, that my brain and my body refused to let me experience it at all. This feeling was so intense as to be incomprehensible, and the result was profound self-detachment.

Despite the seeming contradiction between numbness and emotional distress, I think this is a common human experience. When we have particularly intense emotions, it can be overwhelming to process them. Many of us turn to distractions as a coping mechanism, turning away from the Big Feelings and moving on with our days as best we can. Sometimes this helps, and we’re better able to process our emotions in small spurts. Other times, all this does is delay our inevitable collision with the cascade of feelings waiting for us on the other side. Still other times, we are so desperate to escape from our intense feelings that we simply don’t recognize we’re having them—or, at least, our brains protect us from them by making the emotions unrecognizable. In my case, my brain took this to the extreme.

These days, I’m in much better mental health than at 19. But there are still days like today, where I know I’m depressed, but I can’t feel exactly feel it. I know I’m emotionally distressed, but I can’t articulate why. I live in a state of liminality* where I’m somehow completely hollow while simultaneously on the edge of breakdown.

This is only one of the ways I experience mental illness. It is a constant struggle that never completely goes away, no matter how well my life is going. There is always the specter of despair, just outside my field of vision, that either pulls me into blank oblivion or pushes me into utter devastation.

There’s something incredibly lonely about existing in this borderland. And while the intense emotions and numbness eventually pass, the time in-between stretches farther than the eye can see. Emotions may be temporary, but the struggle is still real.

_{*ugh, this is such an academic word but it’s the best word to describe it}