The Monster

 Having a tough time with my depression recently.  It truly feels like below. 


The Monster

It attacks when I am most vulnerable

It has no actual appearance but is huge and dreadful

It winds it's hooked claws around

My neck, my arms, my legs, feet, toes

It sinks those talons into my exposed tissues

And presses deeper and deeper

Needling into my arteries and muscles



I lose my breath, my ability to logically think

I pain all over in every vessicle and fissure of my body

My very cells scream out for release

And with anxiety I follow

Sinking into a fathomless abyss

Whose walls, like a well, circle around me

cutting off all view of hope and happiness



Sometimes a fellow victim crawls near me and I can call out for help

Though no help is forthcoming

But most often I'm all alone and I struggle to regain the surface

While the behemoth pulls stronger and stronger down and down

Until I begin to wish never to be in the open air ever again

Never to have to suffer like this

While others continue to blithely work and live and love and play



The colossus never lets go

Even when I begin to feel a fragment of hope,

The fiend returns to press inwardly and shadow my being

How to rid myself of this unspeakability

How to press out of the claws and hooks and well without fathom

How to return to the sunshine and knowledge of the possibility of happiness

How to lose my vulnerability and become stronger

Such that I no longer succumb to it's grasp

And hurdle out of that well of hopelessness



Time and the mercy of stronger beings

Understanding and the sharing of unspeakability

Compassion and the knowledge of better things

Compassion from others but also compassion for myself

Which has always been so hard for me to obtain

Since self-loathing is the foundation of the ogre

And knowledge as well as love of self may be the beginning of strength

And unconquerability





By Chrissy Bell