Dear depression/social anxiety/agoraphobia/etc

Needless to say, I hate you.

I hate everything about you. I hate the deep black hole inside my soul that destroys everything inside me and leaves me worse than empty inside. I hate the dark and trembling numbness that makes everything seem unreal and distant and makes me feel like I too am insubstantial and unreal, and likely to disappear like a candle guttering out in it own wax at any moment. I hate the deafening silence that echoes endlessly inside my head. I hate how hard you make it to feel love or joy or pleasure or even just relaxation. I hate the cold corrosive contagion of your deep rooted fears and insecurities that leave me endlessly treading water in the filth and fetid fecundity of my own backward backed up backwater of a soul, instead of letting the water of the flow through me and make me clean and alive and ready to face the world.

But all that I could forgive if there wasn’t this one last thing : you have stolen my entire life.

I have spent nearly my entire adult life trapped in your disgusting little world. From the time my parents took me out of college at the age of 22 to today, when I am nearly 38, I have languished in your inner dungeon and not had the slightest chance of developing into a true adult, or a real person, even.

Instead, the dastardly differential development which placed me at such risk in the first place and made me a lonely child hated by his agemates and peers has simply continued. My intellect grows and my soul shrinks and my heart remains the same sad lonely place it’s always been.

At times, I feel like I am a small child desperately clinging with one hand to the string of the enormous bloated balloon that is my overdeveloped mind and grabbing whatever he can with his other hand to keep it from taking off with him and casting him into the endless sky of insanity.

If I let go of that to which I cling, I will surely lose my mind. And yet, if I let go of the balloon, it will fly away without me, and frankly, it is all I have. It’s taken everything else away.

And it’s all because of you, my muddy cocktail of mental issues. You are the reason I don’t even have a hand free to try to reach out of the world. You are the reason my brain is so full of hot air.

And with your impeccable instinct for the alchemy of pain, you have turned your very success into the heaviest burden around my neck and used it to keep me in your thrall. The very fact that I am at such an advanced age and have so very little to show for my years on this planet, and by any objective measure am so far behind my peers that I could never catch up in a million lifetimes, and am thus, seriously, an enormous loser…. that is such an enormous thing to overcome that my poor coping resources can only lift it a tiny bit at a time. I dig myself out a spoonful at a time, with mountains more to go. I get nowhere.

And so all those lost years contribute to the very dark pressure that keeps me trapped in the same cycles that caused me to lose all those years in the first place.

I hate that you make me cowardly. I hate that you make me weak. I hate that you make me scattered and unfocused and unable to commit to one thing and see it through. I hate that you make me too paralyzed by fear and pain and darkness to take the steps to escape. I hate that you rob me of any chance to be a truly functional adult, let alone any sort of success in life, and leave me the most absurd and pathetic form of invalid, with a disability so invisible that I cannot even prove it exists.

I hate that you make me talk about you constantly, in real life and on my blog, in the gamely futile attempt to use my ill-shaped shovel of an intellect to dig myself out of your deep cold chasm of colorless contempt.

But most of all, I hate you because you make me hate myself.

You make me hate myself so much that I can barely take it and I have to lsoe myself in distractions just to escape my relentless inner prosecutor.

And I…. just…. HATE that.