Nights like tonight really test my resolve. The world outside seems dead, even non-existent. My phone is abnormally silent; no txt messages, no calls. My inbox is empty; there’s not even spam to read. The internet is abuzz, but I’m not a part of any of it. There’s traffic on the streets, but none of it seems real. I’m not a part of it. No kids on my block playing in the street, flirting with death. No noise from the neighbors, no IMs.

I know that this feeling of utter and abject loneliness is my own doing. I work toward isolation. I push people away. I reject socialization attempts from friends until they just stop trying. I allow my phobias and anxieties to make me less than pleasant to be around in social situations.

Every now and then, though, I get antsy. I need reassurance that I’m a living thing, that other people can see and hear me. That I haven’t somehow died without knowing it, and discovered that I was wrong about that whole afterlife business, and my punishment is to exist forever in the limbo of my Groundhog Day-like life.

So I reach out. I txt the people that I normally txt several times a day. I IM people who I don’t normally IM. I look out through the blinds over and over. I go to every single social website I’m a part of and send random messages to random people. And on nights like tonight, I get absolutely no reply.

It feels like I’m the last person on earth. It’s crushing. I know I’m not actually the sole living thing on this planet, but I still feel a vague sense of terror and anxiety tugging at my heart from somewhere distant and unnameable. I try to will some kind of communication. I start to resent the people who have ignored me. I talk to myself. I get increasingly restless and wander from book to book, computer to tv to wii to ps3, window to window, floor to floor, room to room, wishing I had the strength to just go out and say hello to the first person I see and judge for myself whether s/he is real or imaginary.

I make grand plans of self-rejuvenation. This is always the last time. This is the final push to fix my life. Things will be different from now on. Just let me get through tonight.

But once it passes, the suffering is forgotten, and the status quo is resumed.

Here’s an interesting quote from the book I’m reading:

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency - sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying - are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living being. This anhedonic Inability To Identify
is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.