"I’ve got a bad case of the 3:00 A.M. guilts—you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn’t do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression, and self-loathing. Okay, I don’t really hate myself. But I do piss myself off—quite a bit, actually—and sometimes I need a good, stern talking-to about important elements in my life."
"After that, I don’t know, I was pretty messed up. Not physically. But mentally, it’s like I went down a deep hole for a long time. I just gave up. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep more than a few hours a night, and there were times when I couldn’t stop crying."
"The absolute worst part of being depressed is the food. A person’s relationship with food is one of their most important relationships. I don’t think your relationship with your parents is that important. Some people never know their parents. I don’t think your relationship with your friends are important. But your relationship with air-that’s key. You can’t break up with air. You’re kind of stuck together. Only slightly less crucial is water. And then food. You can’t be dropping food to hang with someone else. You need to strike up an agreement with it."
"People think depression is about being sad. They think it’s just when you ‘feel down’. It’s not. It’s like a darkness that creeps over you and fills you. It drains all your emotions. It takes everything from you, and leaves you feeling hollow and numb. It’s not sadness, it’s not anger; it’s hopelessness. Imagine waking up and there being no colour. Walking outside and feeling no wind. Eating a meal and tasting nothing. Holding someone and feeling completely alone at the same time. When you’re depressed, it’s not a bad mood. It’s a numb, empty hollowness that seems to never leave. It’s feeling alone in a room full of people. You feel like there’s no hope left."
"Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify it or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I’m feeling now. It’s so bad, it’s useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be."
"I don’t know what it is, but it’s pain. A massive pain, that I can just feel in my chest. It makes me want to just cry and scream and do nothing. It makes me feel so so sad, and it hurts. It’s this one big pain in my chest that I can’t feel on the outside, it’s on the Inside so it’s like I can’t even get rid of it. Everything that keeps going wrong adds to it, makes it worse, more painful. I don’t know what to do about it. It’s tearing me apart."
"I know my head isn’t screwed on straight. I want to leave, transfer, warp myself to another galaxy. I want to confess everything, hand over the guilt and mistake and anger to someone else. There is a beast in my gut, I can hear it scraping away at the inside of my ribs. Even if I dump the memory, it will stay with me, staining me. My closest is a good thing, a quiet place that helps me hold these thoughts inside my head where no one can hear them."
"I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else."
"Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re “not at all like yourself but will be soon,” but you know you won’t."
"Some friends don’t understand this. They don’t understand how desperate I am to have someone say, I love you and I support you just the way you are because you’re wonderful just the way you are. They don’t understand that I can’t remember anyone ever saying that to me. I am so demanding and difficult for my friends because I want to crumble and fall apart before them so that they will love me even though I am no fun, lying in bed, crying all the time, not moving. Depression is all about If you loved me you would."
"‘Depression’ is so underrated. Do you have any idea what it’s like to not want to get out of bed every morning, not wanting to go and deal with all the bullshit outside your bed? Do you even know what it feels like to feel completely alone while you know there are millions of miserable people just like you? How about what it’s like to be completely repulsed by things you used to love? To feel completely lost in the dark and not really knowing if there’s a way out? To not have the strength to feel like you can make it through the whole day, let alone the next one, without breaking down? To not be able to explain how you feel at all? To have everyone constantly asking if you’re okay until it gets to a point where no one asks, making you wonder if they don’t notice or just don’t care? To have no energy or drive to do anything? To feel completely worthless? To hate who you are and how you look? to feel like you have control over nothing? To know you don’t belong? To feel trapped inside a world full of ugly things but being scared of what’s on the other side? To be hurting constantly? To know there’s no one to save you from the way you feel? To know the only one who’s really hurting you is yourself?"
"Studies show intelligent girls get more depressed, because they know what the world is really like."
"What’s wrong now? Too many problems. Don’t know where she belongs, she wants to go home, but nobody’s home. It’s where she lies, broken inside, with no place to go to dry her eyes. Broken inside. Her feelings she hides. Her dreams she can’t find. She’s losing her mind, she’s fallen behind. She can’t find her place, she’s losing her faith. She’s fallen from grace. She’s all over the place. She’s lost inside."
"When you decide to die, little things begin to happen. You stop looking both ways before you cross the street, you start answering the door without asking who’s there. You don’t hold onto the railing when you go down the escalator, you play with matches. You smoke, and breathe it in, actually praying it will make a difference. Deciding to die is actually almost nice, in a way. You stop caring. Even if you are not pro-actively looking for ways to kill yourself, you stop looking for ways to survive."
"I thought…you haven’t really lived until you’ve contemplated suicide,” I said. “I thought like it would be good to have a reset switch, like on the video games, to start again and see if you could go to a different way."
