Agitated Depression

Agitated Depression... a 'mixed state' in which symptoms of depression and hypomania collide into a volatile mixture... In my experience, nothing good ever really comes of it. But this one... state that I'm going through... feels... like a relief. Like a prisoner who has been starved, beaten, and tortured, and - finally - as he is being lashed, hit, beaten, and sliced... has a glimmer of relief, of joy. He rejoiced because he knows that it's all going to end soon. He'll be free soon... as he bleeds out in the mud and the life fades away from him. In my agitated depressions, everything... intensifies. I'm aware of everything around me, unlike mania (in which I'm often laser focused, and can't seem to pay attention to more than one thing), and... everything, EVERYTHING has some sort of feeling attached. The lifting sun outside bothers me because... it feels like a timer has reached its end and is buzzing, and I'm going over some sort of never-spoken, never-seen time limit. The chair I sit on brings pain, and the keyboard drives me mad with urges that I simply can't deny... Urges for communication and purpose. The screen is a portal, a gateway... It's indiscriminate and can show both the most awful and the greatest of things. The blanket brings comfort and safety with it's weight as it rests on my body and wraps me up. The pillow brings comfort in its softness, even if the comfort is more psychological than physical. Well, those are examples of idle things, at least... Trivial things.

But every emotions, every feeling... even my empathy, it all becomes... magnified, more like through a telescope than a magnifying glass. My brain bursts with sorrow and joy, with elation and despair. When someone else is sad, I'm depressed, and when someone else is happy, I'm joyous. But, most of all, I'm conflicted, even to the point of tearfulness about everything, good or bad. My heart is in a tug-of-war between numerous different forces, different feelings. The chemicals in my brain seem to be pouring and washing over my brain without restraint, without purpose, sometimes mixing and clashing with other chemicals. Sometimes causing paradoxical effects. I see life through a kaleidoscope that changes and fluctuates without ceasing, impossible to grab hold of any one solid image. Everything morphs and changes as if liquid or gaseous. Nothing is solid anymore, and everything is flowing, drifting, swirling, or sloshing. The world, particularly that of my mind, turns into a sea of green liquid metal that will swallow up any poor soul who falls in. It looks so, so cold, but its scolding and burning. The world around just fades into an intoxicating bile-green fog, while the few 'solid' things that can keep you out of the liquid metal are constantly morphing and changing, a maze of pathways where at any moment a hallway can become 10 times the length you thought, or when you thought it turned left, it may suddenly turn right. The inorganic, hard metal flows like a living creature, moving at a whim, shifting and morphing.

The pain amplifies... My head feels like it weighs a hundred pounds and my neck struggles to support it. I just wait for the spine to snap after taking so much strain. My shoulders feel like they've turned to stone, and my back struggles to hold that up. And then.. my poor lower back... taking on the burden of it all - the entirety of the slowly solidifying, petrifying flesh. The knives and needles stab me willy-nilly, the nerves shoot with electricity along their roots, their branches. I feel like I was in a car crash, and then the car flipped into a garbage truck right as it was compacting the garbage. I'm filthy, smashed, and contorted. Oh, my head... It's like someone wrapped an iron band around it and then tightened it more and more until they couldn't tighten it any further, like a belt on a man who denies he's gained a few pounds, and insists on the notch he remembers being able to squeeze into. And this is but a fraction of all I feel... But a minute, almost meaningless, sliver in the grand scheme of things.

I tire... Exhausted and beaten, I envy that prisoner... I envy his escape... He didn't take his own life, he didn't avoid further punishment... He endured it and endured it until... it ended. He was released. He was free.