The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against– you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
- In the blackness of myself, I could see that my thoughts were not myself at all: my self is only a nothingness that exists in a state of pure terror and hatred, and my thoughts rotate around it as debris in a tornado. My thoughts were imbecilic, disgusting, vicious, superficial, detestable, but by this point I could no longer stay with them long enough to hate them. They distracted me, but I couldn’t attend to them. I said in my mind: “Oh god, oh god, oh god, nothing, nothing, nothing; oh god, nothing, nothing, oh god, I’m nothing, it’s nothing, there’s nothing, god, god.”
- Periodically I would see what I assume was a phosphene, and it would transform into something real; I saw a glowing purple shape become the sun, and the sun became the blond hair I had in childhood. And I realized that I had murdered that boy, had murdered my own boyhood self, had destroyed this innocent child, and I ground my teeth to silence myself, as I wanted to scream so loud that I would tear myself apart, would explode in a bloody spray. I was sick with guilt and fear; I had nothing inside myself any longer; I felt I had betrayed myself, had orphaned myself when I needed someone most. I heard in my mind: “Why did I kill him? Oh god, he needed someone, he needed someone, why did I kill him, I’ve killed him, oh god, I’ve killed him.”
- I was seized with a desire to gain physical access to and destroy my brain, an urge I felt in childhood when I had severe headaches. I grasped my hair and attempted to pull it out; I wanted to rip my scalp over and reach into my skull and destroy my mind, scramble and tear apart this malevolent and pathetic apparatus with my fingers, rip out the guts of my whole nightmare self. I couldn’t get my hair out, hated myself for it, lost the thread of this thought, and resumed my silent shrieking and sobbing.
About depression, Jamison writes:
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