This is not an essay about depression

TW: depression, SI

taken on my ancient android the summer before year 8

This is not an essay about depression.

I could tell you about my “how to get prescribed antidepressants” incognito Google search on the bus this morning, or about the summer before Year 8, or the story of the little girl who wanted nothing more than for her life to end the Christmas before her twelfth birthday, how she’s frozen in time, how she’s still at the water park on the holiday her mom threatened to cancel on, how she’s still paralysed in that motel room staring up at the popcorn ceiling, or about just how scared she must have been as she wrung the Thoughts out of her own brain with small, frail hands.

But this is not an essay about depression.

This is not about a strained relationship with an idle god, a girl curled up on the shower floor, afternoons spent in bed and days without brushing teeth. There are not enough words in the English language to carry the weight of chemical imbalances or cliff sides or solo car drives or knuckles or bathtubs or vodka so I will not write about those because this is not an essay about depression.

Years of abandoned journal entries, dozens of unfinished letters, never-ending to do lists, a broken-stringed guitar, piles of unread books, sent and unsent messages, filthy bedsheets, empty shampoo bottles, handfuls of pills, a malfunctioning brain, a dusty bible, an empty sky, an empty grave, an empty heart, a body, a vessel, a shell, a person, not a person, a space, a cell, an urn, a sky full of doves.

This is not an essay about depression.