Fits

Depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day—wham!—there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain … and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won’t even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal … and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live … I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality … In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal—unpleasant, but normal. Depression is in an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest … the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead … There is a classic moment in “The Sun Also Rises” when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, “Gradually and then suddenly.” When someone asks how I lost my mind, that is all I can say too.

— Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel

This fits my life and repeated experiences in the moment you have the sudden realization of the slow accumulation of depression, the weight of life and living overwhelming the body and the mind, and all the effort you can muster won't fend it off, won't keep it away and won't save you.

Only time and the small amount of hope, while thinking of the alternatives, you won't act on them. I'm still here and alive, and I'm still fighting it. As some people do, I always will. It never leaves me alone, it only buries itself in my memory to come back, suddenly as it always does.

It's my, and my others', reality.