Depression is often described in terms of absence, void, or negation—an extinguishing of color, light, and air. But it’s not just emptiness; it’s an emptiness that weighs, a nothingness that presses in. The paradox is that the absence is itself a presence, a thick atmosphere of its own.

Frantzen’s insight—the feeling of not feeling anything being itself a feeling—captures something chilling. It's as if depression twists affect itself into an ouroboros, where absence is made unbearably palpable. Your metaphor of squirming, venomous frogs evokes the chaotic, ungraspable nature of depressive moods, their restless agony, their refusal to settle into something that could be integrated or understood. And yet, depression is also often depicted as stillness, inertia—like Wheaton’s "feeling of being shot," a wound with no external blood, only internal hemorrhaging.

I wonder if this ‘darkness visible’ is not just an absence of light but a saturation of a different kind of perception—one that is too much and not enough at the same time. A kind of affective blindness where you still sense, but in ways that make sensation unbearable.

Then there is depression as a dwindling economy of affect, a depletion of capital in an unforgiving system where you get what you give, and if you can’t give, you starve. The thimble of petrol metaphor is apt: every decision, every movement, every social interaction is an engine that demands fuel, and when the reserves are gone, even idling is too much.

The connection between depression, motor impairment, and communicative bottlenecks is also compelling. If motivation and direction collapse, thought itself loses coherence, a script shredded before it’s even performed. The rejected scripts pile up, not just in social interaction but in cognition itself—misspoken words, misfired thoughts, actions aborted before they can be completed. It’s a breakdown at multiple levels: the affective, the cognitive, the motoric. The unplugged sensation you describe—of being animated for others, then collapsing into a kind of frozen nullity—reminds me of Winnicott’s false self, but here the false self is not just an adaptation to social expectation; it’s an emergency generator running on fumes.

Wallace’s description—of realizing there is no surface, only the abyss, and then realizing you are the abyss—is haunting because it captures both the horror and the paradox: depression is an internal collapse that still somehow remains an experience, a presence of absence. It is not simply losing feeling but feeling the loss itself as an overwhelming weight. This is where Frantzen’s feeling of not feeling meets the black hole, the falling even while standing still.

And then there’s Folk-Williams’ film-editing analogy—the slowed-down, fragmented perception, the desire to edit out the confusion. It makes me think of how, in depression, the world loses its fluidity, its implicit ease. Everything requires effortful construction, and even then, the scene doesn’t always make sense. If anxiety is an unbearable future and depression an unbearable present, both seem to distort time—one accelerates, the other freezes. The fear of future loss and the despair at what’s already gone, tangled together, with no clear way forward.

GPT commentary