The love you need ain't gonna see you through

...telephone line / give me some time / I'm living in twilight...

There are people who assume that depression is a choice, that a person can dig one's self out of depression, if that person tries hard enough. It doesn't work that way, if it's clinical (read: chemical) depression. It's not something one has control of, any more than a person can control their heartbeat, or the synapses firing in their brain. It's just something that happens. Some people take meds to help even the playing field, help control the degree of the downs, help deal with the inexplicable and unpredictable beast that is depression.

Some of us opt not to take the meds. The meds stripped me of my personality, my desire, my passion, and I'm unwilling to repeat the process. So I have to live with the depression, and I've learned to live with it. I've learned how to manage it.

But there are still days where I feel that depression as part of the manic-depression, rather than pure depression. When it's manic-depression it seems threaded with something like madness, and it loses coherence. Then it seems...it seems...

...it seems like something closer to reality. To the authentic soul. To the primal, yes, near to the instinctual, yes, but somehow more real. Without the veils and filters of the civilized and the appropriate, without the controls that demand coherence and relevance, without the normal moderation, the soul seems more on fire, the mind more clear (despite the incoherence). Expression may be more difficult, but feeling, experience--they become clearer. Or, at least, appear clearer.

And then? Depression, with the taste of madness, becomes an ally, a friend, a means of true survival, rather than a means of destruction. It becomes a way of experiencing the world, of processing experience, of becoming more of one's self. It becomes creation and re-creation, it becomes a muse and a means of understanding.

At least, that's what I tell myself when I feel the way I do today--so near to the soul, so close to the carelessness that comes out of mania, and the misanthropy that makes me nearly cast aside social convention, because somehow that seems to be a means to the maintenance of the self. It's hard to tell if it would really help, but I like to entertain the idea that it would, it could.

And I dream of a day, of a time, of a place where I'm brave enough to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.