First: I’m OK. Don’t freak out. Nothing out of the ordinary is going on.

Just trying to work through, and this is today’s effort.

This is what it’s like for me: depression.

It hits late in the evening.

There were plenty of other things I should have been doing, but instead wasted my time online. Or playing solitaire. Or doing I don’t even know what. But suddenly I realize I’ve wasted another evening. Another day.

I start to think of all the things I want to do, but haven’t done yet, or just can’t seem to do. The 50k words of my novel that I abandoned. The ideas floating around in my head for more stories that can’t seem to make it out. The classes I want to take.

But I don’t have the energy for that. I don’t have the energy for much of anything but feeling sorry for myself. Which never helps anything and only makes me feel worse.

Earlier I was good, when I first came home. I wandered outside I checked my garden and saw the plants coming up and thought about how my garden will look and what I want to do once it gets warmer.

But then I come in, we have dinner, and I’m at loose ends. I’m tired and t want to read the really good book I started, but then I’ll want to stay up and finish it and then I won’t get enough sleep and tomorrow will be worse so the book sits there, waiting to be read.

And the the pit stares up at me. Those finals hours of the day where nothing is accomplished and the accomplishments and lack thereof for the day swirl around my mind, rattling around in my brain, knocking loose any calm I may have gathered.

My breath catches in my chest, and I can’t quite get my lungs full of air. I can breathe, but my lungs are too small or too large, for all the air that should be there. I try to stop thinking about it, but the thoughts are knocking around in my brain, rattling the bars and windows.

And I’m full of despair and tired of being me but knowing there isn’t anyone else I can be, knowing that I’m needed to be who I am and sometimes it feels like there is no escape and I’ve come full circle back to despair.

So I get up and a take a hot shower and try and relax. I pick up some non-fiction and curl up in bed and try to escape my brain and at some point it all disappears. I’m wrapped up in history or mythology or astronomy or whatever magazine came in. And then it’s okay again.