It crushes you like a rock on your back. Depression is what you feel and you don't know why. It is what you feel when you get stressed, when you are alone, when you have done your best at something, when you believe everything bad that people have ever said about you and a little more, when everyone likes you but you believe that they don't. It is when you wish the world would stop, or at least your life. It is when you wish you could sleep forever.

Depression can come from hiding who you are because you think that you aren't good enough.

But it comes back. Once it is there, it never goes away. It lurks behind your thoughts, ready to find any new excuse to destroy your mind. It is unpredictable. Even when the cause is gone, the depression stays.

But sometimes the depression comes and you don't know why.

You don't know why you feel that way. Just that you feel bad. You feel so bad that you don't want to feel anymore. You think that you are the most horrible person on earth, but you don't know why. It sneaks up on you. One moment, the world is perfect, the next, I am its only fault. It is a time when you want to harm yourself, but you don't want to feel anymore pain. It is a time when you want to die, but not be dead. Then you blame yourself. You blame your feelings on yourself. You think that if you were better, you could stop these feelings. You desperately want someone to help you, but you desperately want to be as separated from other people as possible.

All you want is to die or feel better, but you don't want to die, and somehow feeling better doesn't sound like something that would feel good. You feel trapped; sucked into a pit.

For a long time, I refused to admit that I am gay. I did things that I am ashamed of now, and I thought things that I was ashamed of then. I tried so hard to change myself, but a person's mind is like a puzzle. A puzzle can only be put together one way. I thought that I could tear apart the puzzle and put it back together the way I wanted it to look, not the way it was made. I thought that if I didn't like a certain piece, that I could just reshape it, or get rid of it. But instead of recreating myself, I only tore the pieces apart.

I mangled pieces out of hate and spite. I used parts of myself to destroy other parts of myself. Until one day, there wasn't enough of me left to hold together. Just a shell for people to see and a pile of trash inside, as if the mind is also a filing cabinet, and I had crumpled up everything inside, thrown stuff away, and spilled sewage on it all. Then there wasn't enough of me left to fight myself and my mind shut down. I finally came to realize that the puzzle that is my mind can only be put together one way. Either that one way had to be acceptable, or it shouldn't continue to exist. Fortunately, I chose to live.

I let the pieces of me fit back together. But some of the pieces were damaged, and some of the pieces were missing--lost during the years of disuse. because of this, the depression can never go away, because I can never be the person I might have been before.