DFW

"I had previously sort of always thought that depression was just sort of really intense sadness, like what you feel when your very good dog dies, or when Bambi's mother gets killed in Bambi...The Bad Thing - which I guess is what is really depression - is very different, and indescribably worse. I guess I should say rather, sort of indescribably, because I've heard different people try to describe "real" depression over the last couple years. A very glib guy on the television said some people liken it to being underwater, under a body of water that has no surface, at least for you, so that no matter what direction you go, there will only be more water, no fresh air and freedom of movement, just restriction and suffocation, and no light. (I don't know how apt it is to say it's like being underwater, but maybe imagine the moment in which you realize, at which it hits you that there is no surface for you. That you're just going to drown in there no matter which way you swim; imagine how you'd feel at that exact moment...then imagine that feeling in all its really delightful choking intensity spread out over hours, days, months...that would maybe be more apt). A really lovely poet named Sylvia Plath, who unfortunately isn't living anymore, said that it's like having a jar covering you and having all the air pumped out of the jar, so you can't breathe any good air (and imagine the moment when your movement is invisibly stopped by the glass and you realize you're under glass). Some people say it's like having, always before you, and under you a huge black hole without a bottom, a black, black hole, maybe with vague teeth in it. And then your being part of the hole, so that you fall even when you stay where you are (maybe when you realize you're the hole, nothing else). I'm not incredibly glib, but I'll tell what I think the Bad Thing is like. To me it's like being completely, totally, utterly sick. I will try to explain what I mean. Imagine feeling really sick to your stomach. Almost everyone has felt really sick to his or her stomach, so everyone knows what it's like: it's less than fun. OK. OK. But that feeling is localized: it's more or less just your stomach. Imagine your whole body being sick like that: your feet, the big muscles in your legs, your collar bone, your head, your hair, everything, all just as sick as a fluey stomach. Then, if you can imagine that, please imagine it even more spread out and total. Imagine that every cell in your body, every single cell in your body is as sick as that nauseated stomach. Not just your own cells, even, but the e.coli and lactobacilli in you too. The mitochondria, basal bodies, all sick and boiling and hot like maggots in your neck, your brain, all over, everywhere. In everything. All just sick as hell. Now imagine that every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick like that. Sick, intolerably sick. And every proton and neutron in every atom...swollen and throbbing, off color, sick, with just no chance of throwing up to relieve the feeling. Every electron is sick. Here. Twirling off balance and all erratic in these funhouse orbitals that are just thick and swirling with mottled yellow and purple poison gases. Everything off balance and woozy. Quarks and neutrinos out of their minds and bouncing sick all over the place. Bouncing like crazy. Just imagine that, a sickness spread utterly through every bit of you, even the bits of the bits. So that your very...very essence is characterized by nothing other than the feature of sickness; you and the sickness are, as they say, "one." That's kind of what the Bad Thing is like at its roots. Everything in you is sick and grotesque. And since your only acquaintance with the whole world is through parts of you - like your sense organs and your mind, etc. - and since these parts are sick as hell the whole world as you perceive it, and know it, and are in it, comes at you through this filter of bad sickness and becomes bad. As everything becomes bad in you, all the good goes out of the world like air out of a big broken balloon. There's nothing in this world you know but horrible rotten smells, sad and grotesque and lurid pastel sights, raucous or deadly sad sounds. Intolerable open ended situations lined on a continuum with just no end at all...Incredibly stupid, hopeless ideas. And just the way when you're sick to your stomach you're kind of scared way down deep that it might maybe never go away, the Bad Thing scares you the same way, only worse, because the fear is itself filtered through the bad disease and becomes bigger and worse and hungrier than it started out. It tears you open and gets in there and squirms around. Because the Bad Thing not only attacks you and makes you feel bad and puts you out of commission, it especially attacks and makes you feel bad and puts out of commission precisely those things that are necessary in order for you to fight the Bad Thing, to maybe get better, to stay alive. This is hard to understand. But it's really true. Imagine a really painful disease that, say, attacked your legs and your throat and resulted in a really bad pain and paralysis and all around agony in these areas. The disease would be bad enough, obviously, but the disease would also be open ended; you wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Your legs would be all paralyzed and would hurt like hell...but you wouldn't be able to run for help for those poor legs, just exactly because your legs would be too sick for you to run anywhere at all. Your throat would burn like crazy and you'd think it was just going to explode...but you wouldn't be able to call out to any doctors or anyone for help, precisely because your throat would be too sick for you to do so. This is the way the Bad Thing works: it's especially good at attacking your defense mechanisms. The way to fight against or get away from the Bad Thing is clearly just to think differently, to reason and argue with yourself just to change the way you're perceiving and sensing and processing stuff. But you need your mind to do this, your brain cells with their atoms and your mental powers and all that, yourself, and that's exactly what the Bad Thing has made too sick to work right. That's exactly what it has made sick. It's made you sick in just such a way that you can't get better. And you start thinking about this pretty vicious situation, and you say to yourself, "Boy oh boy, how the heck is the Bad Thing able to do this. You think about it - really hard, since it's in your best interests to do so - and then all of a sudden it sort of dawns on you...that the Bad Thing is able to do this to you because you're the Bad Thing yourself. The Bad Thing is you. Nothing else: no bacteriological infection or having gotten conked on the head with a board or a mallet when you were a little kid, or any other excuse; you are the sickness yourself. It is what "defines" you. Especially after a little while has gone by. You realize all this. Here. And that, I guess, is when, if you're all glib, you realize that there is no surface to the water. Or when you bonk your nose on the jar's glass and realize you're trapped. Or when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face. That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up".

DFW