Depression

Depression is such a fickle thing. Some days everything seems fine, you build yourself up and seem so full of joy and purpose and then one look, one word or callous gesture just brings it all crashing back down. The seduction of emotional isolation, alienation and catastrophic disengagement with the world is at these times quite utterly complete and all-consuming.

I wonder if happiness is really our natural state or, like some convenience of myth or narrative fiction, it merely sustains us and provides an empty fantasy with which we might clothe our experience so that we can not perceive the true emptiness that dwells beneath the hollow surface.

These moods pass, it is true, but is not their transience that troubles me anywhere near so much as their persistence and eternal, emotionally dissipative return.