What does depression feel like?

As a sufferer of depression for over 7 years, many people have asked me: "What does depression feel like?" There is no simple answer to this question, nor is there one specific answer that applies to all those who have struggled, and continue to struggle with the debilitating illness. Yet, I have tried my best over the years to find a way to describe my pain to outsiders looking in - parents, friends, therapists - and I feel that I have developed a fairly good description.

"Depression is a blackness, a dark wave that suffocates every inch of you and replaces it with anger, sadness, guilt and sorrow. It beings small, like any disease, almost unnoticeable. A ping of sadness from time to time, that lasts a noticeable length longer than the average persons unhappiness, but still insignificant enough to ignore for the most part. And then it begins to metastasize, growing into a ever reaching monster within you, sucking out all joy and replacing it with despair.

Sometimes I wonder if maybe some people are born with a darkness inside them, something like a virus. It lies dormant at first, while innocence is still relevant and discovery blossoms with each day. Then, as time goes on, it begins to grow slowly, until one day something happens and it becomes uncontrollable, consuming every inch of you until there is nothing but darkness, static noise. No matter the day, place, you always have this pressure weighing you down, forcing you further and further into the recesses of your mind. You become afraid that one day, it will finally win, and you will no longer be.

There comes a time, long after the disease has sucked the last bit of hope from your mind and replaced it with a black tunnel to which there is no end, that you begin to think that the only way out is death. To be no more, to feel no more, it seems more and more like heaven than hell. There's something romantic about the idea of a short life, although sad. You start to think that maybe the ones you love, and those who love you, would be better off without the pain you carry with you. Pain that seeps into their lives and infects them with sadness, no matter how hard you try to keep it away.

Soon, the things that you used to love, the things you used to turn to in order to chase the sadness away, they become meaningless. They are a part of the person you used to be, the happy person who used to fill those around them with joy. Now, you bring nothing but melancholy and anger. You start to lose those dear to you, feel them slip away, and yet you have no energy to stop them. And so, you watch as they leave, as you become as truly and utterly alone as you feel. It is then, and only then, that you realize that death is no longer a loathed entity, but a welcome visitor."