Depression: feelings of severe despondency and dejection. That hardly covers it, this condition that affects many a person throughout the world can tear apart lives. Mine being one of the many. First of all, I’m on the road to recovery, I’m taking anti-depressants on a daily basis and talk to a therapist on a weekly basis but these fixes can’t truly recover the years I’ve lost to this condition. Sadness is only one way to describe it, the way it affects a person can change, for me it was a constant low attitude with bouts of dropping to near suicidal levels of thought on the simplest of actions or words. Sadly this lifestyle simply copied itself into my writing over the last four to three years.
I can confidently say that my writing style has changed because of my condition, when I think of depression I think of the nightmares I had back in middle school. Those of a large dark cave surrounded with the desolate ruins of destroyed city, standing in the center of this cave is a rise leading to the lone, stone cold form of a standing colossus, and there’s me looking up at it. These cold feelings and lack of any emotion besides fear and sadness copied across into not only my life but my writing style.
If I could find you examples if my past writing I would, (and I’ll try) but before that my writing was creative, and lively, filled with a passion that I can only wish for. Even through the paragraphs above you can see that my writing is dark, using words like “desolate” and “suicidal” it sets you off for a dark tone even before I get into the main meat of the story.
Poems were always “my thing” back in high school I remember that we had to write a poem back in 9th grade or freshman year of high school I think it was more like a short story but I tried to get by that by writing two shorter poems. The first one I wrote, I remember as being dark, using imagery similar to that used in traditional horror.
You see something move
shift in the dark
you feel yourself slip
slip closer to insanity
Something snaps
as the fog rolls in
encouraged by your fear
slipping closer to insanity
Running, Running
your heart thumps as if trying to free itself
as the fog rolls in covering you like a blanket
as you slip closer to insanity
Tiring, tiring
you fall to the ground
shaking as the fog engulfs your mind
consumed by insanity
That was my first poem, I remember writing that when I was 15. As you can see, that poem is generally pretty dark, frankly I don’t remember the thoughts I had while I wrote this but it’s pretty easy to see that it’s possible this was the beginning. The second poem I wrote was in response to my teacher telling me to write a second one to share.
The sun sinks below the horizon
sinking into the ocean
soon the last light dwindles
and slowly goes out
silence, till the moon moves from hiding
to begin soaring across the starry sky
and the sounds of the night
shatter the silence
an owl hoots
a wolf howls at the moon
and the light of a firefly
sparkle in the shadows
a moth, the color of emerald
emerges from the leaves of a tree
glittering as if stars are caught in its wings
glowing with moonlight
the waves wash against the beach
seemingly insignificant till midnight
when it explodes with life
as if trying to impress the moon
soon puddles of light spot the surface
trying to imitate the stars
and the waves grow calmer
till they nearly stop
as the moon disappears into the ocean
and the first light breaks the shadows
the symphony of sounds and lights cease
and once again the world laps into silence
Comparing the first and the second one you can see that right off the bat it’s not nearly as dark. The imagery is whimsical and calm bringing forth images of calm nights and flowing waves, a far cry from the dark imagery of the first poem. Funnily enough I remember spending an entire day on the second poem and I never thought it was very good, at the time it felt like I wasn’t putting any emotion into this piece. I believe that first poem to be the beginning signs of my depression.
The more I continued into my high school years the more I feel like I’d lost, I don’t remember any of my second year, and I got worse and worse grades as the years continued on. Finally I got help writing from Kirsten down at The Old Boar, a study hall just down the street from the high school. I can easily say that those were some of the best essays I’ve ever written.
Moving on to the end of high school I got through the last of my classes and I don’t really remember having to write many poems or short stories besides one in particular. I have it here printed out beside me, basically it’s a short story about a woman and a man where the woman is kept in this house instead of being let free. At the time, this was me trying to put what I was feeling at the time into words. That story was before I actually got diagnosed with depression, that actually happened during the summer between the last year of highschool and the first year of college.
I’ll skip over that first year of college because literacy wise it was pretty uneventful, I wrote a few short stories in my own time which I was never happy with, I had a few essays assigned but I never really got good grades. This probably worked to give me my worst year of depression. Luckily all’s not doom and gloom, this past summer I started on anti-depressants and am hoping to recover. I just hope that this experience will give me the ability to write better poetry and that hopefully distancing myself from my depression will allow me to write better in the future. Thanks for reading.
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