Waking up and realising within seconds that it’s one of those days that will never have happened. A tight chest, and not from a binder. A feeling of deep sadness, of a loss that has no object. Circling around nothing. A black hole in the chest. Every breath is a bloody burden and tinnitus dizziness is also checking in today, why hello. Carrying the loop “that’s just how depression is, you just have to get through it, it will get better again” in front of you until it suffocates in deep disgust with yourself, because: maybe it could have been avoided, because: ifonlyyouhaddonethisifonlyyouhadavoidedthat – oh demon conjunctive! – because, well, because of an inability to do anything: social contact, everyday housework, work with people, friendship and anything that is somehow creative. Which for a long time was something that often got me through/out. Inability for caring and precaution. Eternal escapism into the now. Lurking behind it: the constant fear of the consequences. Closing my eyes to failure. Denying myself the world so as not to end up here again.

What works in such a phase, and what I am always grateful for: digital contact. In its wonderful non-physicality. Without those damn categorising looks. Here I can smalltalk, deeptalk and work a little. With emails and posts, nobody is asking me to do the emotional work that I can’t do today: Pretending I’m okay. Here, it’s okay to be a wreck today. To burst into tears time and again. To stare into the void. Here I can belong.

I have a mixed relationship with compassion: it feels good to be understood and hugged, be it verbally or literally. At the same time, however, compassion often implies an acceptance of this condition. And this condition should not be accepted! It should be angrily and loudly attacked from its source, because it is not an illness but actually the most normal reaction: despair at the state of this world. Sick who is not sick from this world!

When your body imposes a forced mental break on you, when the antibodies of the mind scream stop because everything happens so much.

I get it, but can I please fast-forward to the moment when I’m functioning again.