The Noonday Demon is a difficult book to describe. The present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge." And in flipping through the pages, I found passages so true that I had to check it out: "Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moments as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come. It's impossible to miss Andrew Solomon's tome on depression, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Because knowing makes me feel somewhat in control, even if it is an illusory sense of power. I wanted to read every book that detailed an experience with depression. Once I was diagnosed with depression, I became a bit obsessed with it. Being open about depression has allowed me to form some of my best and most sincere connections. I find that often, I don't think about the benefits depression has given me: a sense of empathy for others, a massive helping of humble-pie, and the ability to express myself in a way I never could before. But accepting the fact that depression isn't curable, that depression will always be a part of my personality, has helped me as well.
Because for the longest time, I have felt as though I don't deserve to exist. I over compensate, over-work myself, which is often read as being professional when no one knows the truth, that this is all some sick form of validation to prove that I deserve to exist. I remember feeling as though I could never connect with anyone my age. My teachers would laugh and make fun of me, as if I was lazy, as I would sit there horrified with myself. I remember being so exhausted in college courses that I would fall asleep. I saw the depression as being something that was wrong with me, something that I could not fix.
Understanding is difficult to find, especially when you don't even know what it is you have.Ī massive amount of my life has been spent feeling as if there is something inherently wrong with me.
Every effort, being reminded that there is nothing you can do to stop the void that is mortality from claiming your weak, lazy body. Every conversation, plagued with thoughts denying that anyone could possibly like you. Only that there is an indescribable ache within you, the ache of alienation from your self, from others, the ache of detachment from life. I can't even begin to tell you what it is like to suffer from depression. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair."
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