the gray drizzle

“The gray drizzle induced by depression,” William Styron wrote in his memoir about his depression “takes on the quality of physical pain.” In my own experience, the most withering aspect of depression is the way it erases, like physical illness does, the memory of wellness. The totality of the erasure sweeps away the elemental belief that another state of being is at all possible — the sensorial memory of what it was like to feel any other way vanishes, until your entire being contracts into the state of what is, unfathoming of what has been, can be, and will be. If Emily Dickinson was correct, and correct she was, that “confidence in daybreak modifies dusk,” the thick nightfall of depression smothers all confidence in dawn.

And yet daybreak does come, with a shock and a rapture, to find us asking ourselves in half-belief:"What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment?"

I have no faith in this moment that daybreak from my depression will dawn. And Styron got it so right:  when I am most depressed, I can't remember what it felt like to not be depressed. This is the worst aspect of my deep depression:  I have no memory of happy.  And when I fall into such holes, I tend to fcus on my Katie wound, the neverending grief of her shunning me all these years. I don't htink she cares one whit about me yet I can't stop longing for her. What is wrong with me that I long for someone who took took took from me, all my financial resources, all my ability to give, all her private education, all my love and ceaseless giving and she just turns me off, out of her heart. I don't feel anger towards her. Oh no. I feel anger towards myself, blaming myself for her choices.  She has contact with her father, who incested her when she was five, but me she shuns?  she took took took frm me until I had nothing to give and then she booted me out of her heart. Why do I want such a person to act like a daughter, to show me love, to care about me?