Take the Pills

Take the pills.

The worst thing about depression is that you forfeit the right to have actual problems. If you’re sad or angry or frustrated about anything, it’s The Depression that’s doing it. Nothing is bothering you, nobody is upsetting you, no problem is intruding on your life besides “your illness”, the all-consuming medical monster that ate all your feelings. The day you stop being depressed, and start having depression, is the day you agree to give up responses to external stimuli.

No. That’s not the worst thing about depression. The worst thing about depression is the number of different paragraphs you end up writing that begin with “The worst thing about depression is”. The worst thing about depression is whatever aspect happens to be slapping you in the face at the moment you start speaking about it.

Or maybe the worst thing about the depression is the pills. But you can’t stop taking them.

Gotta keep taking the pills.

On a night like this, take the pills.

When you’re gasping for breath because there’s an invisible stone on your chest and an invisible hand around your throat and you can just tell that this is your punishment for every mistake you ever made and there’s nothing but more panic in your future, because everything that you’re afraid of has rolled up into a ball colossal enough that you can’t even make out any of its individual pieces and it will never ever ever ever ever stop rumbling down the hill behind you.

Just take the pills.

When you see only your failures, because there are so many of them, and they are confirmed and reinforced every minute of every day, as everyone you see goes past you and your every attempt to move forward gets rejected and everyone you try to get help from sees you as inferior and you don’t know what made you think you could have a career or chase an idiotic dream or even raise your head in public because in every direction you look there is someone more successful being congratulated for being better than you.

Keep taking the pills.

On this night, when you struggle to figure out what friendship is and whether you can be a good friend to anyone, and whether your friends are your friends out of affection or pity or just habit, and your mind is infested with the friends you had once who hate you now, and the probably perfectly good reasons they have, and how long it will be before the friends you have now take the same path, and perhaps they already have, perhaps they are edging along it right now and the more you talk about these fears the further down they go because nobody wants to know this garbage, nobody wants to be bummed out, nobody wants your life story, nobody wants to know what you’re actually like, and you’ve got the proof, in the friends who never want to see you, in the loved ones who get together without you, in the people you want nothing more than to impress who are completely unimpressed by you, when you want to believe that they’re friends but you can’t because you know you wouldn’t be your friend if you were them.

Please take the pills.

Because you can’t notice anything good anymore, all you know is that your own family would rather be anywhere else but with you, all you know is that people you love keep choosing people who hurt you over you, all you know is that loving anyone is a mistake because loving without being loved is pain and all you know is you’re not worth loving, because you’ve been studying yourself for years.

It’ll be OK.

Just take those pills.

You have to take the pills because you can’t afford to see a therapist and you can’t afford to take a break and you can’t talk to anyone about what’s really going on in your head anyway, because telling someone can only lead to them walking away in anger or disgust or just plain boredom, and after walking away they’ll tell everyone else it’s time to just stay the everloving fuck away from you in case you ruin their day too, and your conviction that this is so is so intense that you’ve never, not once, told anyone everything you’re feeling, because as terrifying as it is living this way, it’s slightly less terrifying than the thought of sitting in total honesty in the middle of a crater of your own wretchedness.

So take them.

Take them, because at least those pills are an answer to a question that is too vast to face any other way, in a world where your problems, by any objective measure, don’t matter one little bit, a world with which the merest engagement brings only deeper and darker knowledge of the irretrievable hell that humans live in throughout the globe, and knowing the hatred and savagery with which people treat each other makes depression and anxiety a perfectly reasonable response to being alive, but knowing that that doesn’t help fix anything, and knowing that by the same token, it’s entirely possible that you don’t even have an illness, you’re just a useless, failed, broken human being who is suffering the pain you deserve, and knowing that doesn’t help fix anything either, but then neither do all the people telling you that you’re wrong about that, as nice as it is for them to say that, because you’re the world’s number one expert on yourself, and if you think you’re shit, you’ve got the experience to back that up.

Take them for god’s sake.

On a night like this…

When you think about dying, and you know you don’t want to die, but you’re afraid that you’re nearing that point where what you want won’t even matter, you won’t even have a choice.

On a night like this…

When you think about the days you get in the car and drive and hope that you’ll crash and it’ll all be out of your hands, and you think about the day that’s coming when you’ll make the crash happen because you don’t know what else there is to do.

On a night like this, when you’re about to break.

Or maybe you already have.

Just keep taking the pills.

That’ll do the trick.