Is when you wake up and you wish you wouldn't, when you know you can't stay in bed as the consequences would be even worse so you get up and walk into the daily nightmare, aware that this is not yet the bottom.

Is when you feel mostly relieved when everyone is gone, still there is one person too much.

If you still have words for it, it's not it yet.

Depression is living in a body that fights to survive, with a mind that tries to die.

I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

Getting lost within myself
Nothing matters, no one else
I have lost the will to live
Simply nothing more to give
Emptiness is filling me
To the point of agony

In my own case, at any rate, depression was the soul's call to stop, turn around, go back, and look for path I could negotiate. If one ignores that call and doggedly presses on, the depression that comes from getting crosswise with true self can yield something worse than melancholy and lassitude: a deep desire to end one's life.

Such was the case with me, and looking back, I understand why. When I was living my outer life at great remove from inner truth, I was not merely on the wrong path: I was killing my selfhood with every step I took. When one's life is a walking death, the step into literal death can seem very easy to take. Medication may offer temporary relief from depressions of this sort, but the real cure goes beyond drugs. We can reclaim our lives only be choosing to live divided no more. It is a choice so daunting - or so it seems in the mids of depression - that we are unlikely to make it until our pain becomes unbearable, the pain that comes from denying or defying true self.

(Why am I depressed?)