The Shrunken Twin

We are all different I suppose. Depression affects us all differently, time of year, time of life, time of day even, any number of factors in the environment, or in life. What did I leave out, I wonder?

Some of us, the unlucky ones, are unaffected by it. Yes, I say unlucky because I think a bit of it in life is worth having, a degree of perspective can't be bad. You'd probably be a fairly un-empathetic person if you didn't go through the full range of human swerves and spins.

Then there are the really unlucky ones, who get dealt the full, all-you-can-eat, slap-up. I found myself close to that position, close. There's always someone more unlucky though, so I consider myself to some degree fortunate.

It can hit you for a while, briefly, or for a long while. Quick onset, rapid departure, or the opposite.

I began to experience depression, I think, along with developing my own mind. Pre-adulthood, pre-teen, just a youngster going from a little kid to becoming a more thoughtful 9-ish, 10-ish year old. I believe that as I grew up, the depression developed. So, it had no real onset, I just merged along into it. I say that as though it was a separate thing, a pair of trousers that I gradually snuck into, maybe that's not it, it might just have been a part of me. I certainly didn't just "catch" it from a passing infectee, I didn't simply wake up with it, it just grew in me as I grew, like a shrunken and suffocating inner twin.

Then it stayed, with varying degrees of excellence, for ages. For most of my life, so far. There's a fair chance that I have quite a lot of life left. I feel at this point that what remains of my life will be spent without that little companion in my head, little but with limitless greed for my oxygen. Just as anything major in a life though, it forms you, one is formed by it. When it's gone, it'll never be gone.

That's what I intend to write about in these posts, my depression. A barrel of laughs that I got saddled with after someone else had had all the fun and scraped it clean. I expect there will be other posts also, centred on things that excite my mind about the world. Then I'll be back to the misery. Lovely.