The Badges We Wear

I wear this badge, tucked gently inside my pocket where no one can see it. When I reach my hand in, it is there to remind me, always. Sometimes it taunts me and sometimes it encourages me, but lately it is just there.
You see this badge is called depression and I’d been doing so well for so long. Until it started to creep back in this past winter. It is something I learn to live with while everyone else learns to walk around like a broken sidewalk.
There was a pretty significant trigger I suppose and I never pulled back up from its grasp. But it never let go either. So I remained the same, drained and sad, and waiting for the next go round, the next blow to my ever fragile self that was holding on for dear life.
I’m not winning right now.
But the fact is, I’m not sure I ever was.
I don’t think that depression is something that ever leaves you, I think it just hangs out waiting for a new reason to fill you up with sadness and leave you clinging to life as you thought it was. If you’re lucky enough to remember.
I know what it is to be happy and doing well. I know what it is to forget that there was ever a battle at all. I was doing so well for so long, that I stopped waiting for the edges of that miserable badge to catch on my fingernails and rip them back when I reached in my pocket. I forgot that it was there, waiting. I forgot until it was all consuming.
When I’m sad and hopeless it is hard to remember being happy. It is hard to accept happiness and it is nearly impossible to embrace life, it is easier not to. I forget about the things that truly matter and I’d rather just not think at all. Not about the past, or the present, or the future. Because I’m watching someone else’s story on the tv and it is good enough. I go through life doing the bare minimum of everything, everything.
I’ve never had to try so hard to remember the good parts before in my life. And when I’m happy it is easy to forget being so miserable. I forget to guard myself against my depression.
I know what it is to feel so sad and so helpless that I have suicidal thoughts. I know that it is not logical, I know that I have no reason to feel that way. But when the deep dark parts of my mind consume me, that is just the way that it is. I think that people fail to realize that suicide doesn’t feel like a choice to someone considering it. It looks like a legitimate option. It looks good. I think that when you lose all hope and all logical reasoning, it is the only option you have left. Because you don’t remember anything else. But when suicidal thoughts return, it is like they are reaffirmed in their origin somehow because they are familiar.
Life mantras go from logical thinking uplifting words to get through the tough spots, to grasping desperately for reasons your depression is wrong right now. Mantras start feeling like lies you use to manipulate yourself into living. All the while the deep dark thoughts are telling you how much better everyone else would be without you, when you lose the logic to know this isn’t true, you’ve lost the reason to live.
I imagine this is could be incredibly hard to read.
Imagine how it must feel to move that badge from my pocket to my chest where everyone can see.