A history student is tasked with sorting through an abandoned asylum's archives. The asylum is rumored to be haunted, but Lena dismisses this as merely town folklore. When her research brings her to venture inside the asylum's walls, however, the fr...
I'm fifteen and a thick blanket has wrapped around my mind that I can't quite see through. If I do, it's a heavy maneuver just to lift my eyes to it. Bricks in my brain. Some weight kept bringing me down - into myself, or into the bed; wanting to fold inward, drawn down by a tired magnet no matter where I was. So incredibly fatigued - no emotion but fatigue; no energy to lift me out of it in order to feel even one inch of anything. Things that used to interest me held nothing anymore but the drudgery of burden - mechanical movements, always putting on a show of being a person but really feeling quite thin; I thought if anyone looked too close they might see through the thinness. Skin like tissue paper, betraying the hollow of my insides.
The colour of life drained out of it; all monotonous grey - even the flavour of food dissipated and left it brittle as chalk. Since it was wrapped around my mind, this fog, it followed me everywhere; it is not the blinds of a window you can lift and peek through into the sunlight. It is wrapped around the ends of all your thoughts, padding behind your very retinas, so that everything - even the sun - must filter through it and be drained of its colour in the process. Why should I try to come up with metaphor after metaphor? I'm not the first one, far from it. Sylvia Plath said it best: "because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."
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With the 17th century came interest in defining different forms of madness. No longer would people be flattened into the one-size-fits-all category of "madde". Those who were manic were seen as most destructive, and were often locked up for the safety of themselves and others. There were those who were distracted (nonsensical) and those who were mopish (withdrawn).
What most fascinated so-called "mad-doctors", though, was the affliction called melancholy. Based on prevailing notions of medicine, it was thought to arise from an imbalance of humours – excessive black bile to be exact. It was in vogue to be a little melancholic. It still is, really – the mad, brooding genius and all that. It showed intelligence and seriousness, but there was always a very fine line into the threshold from normalcy to madness.
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I wasn't in Paris or Bangkok, though. I was in highschool; and I think the most disorienting effect of what I'd come to know as depression was the way it bended time. I couldn't tell you what month it was or how many had passed; even my memory went wonky. It took all my brain power to stay upright in any given moment - I couldn't bring my brain to extend itself into the past or into the future and form any kind of chronology. My mind, my bones, everything in me, was anchored back home in the tangle of my bedsheets, bending back toward it; mentally I was in the hot, stale air of my dark room - but there I physically was, in a desk, tired eyes looking up at the blackboard, or walking though the hall, mechanical laughs and forced small talk. Going through the motions. When you're not in the throes of it, it looks a lot like laziness. Depression is far, far from laziness; it is carrying a heavy stone right there in the pit of your mind that you have to exert all your energy - more energy than anyone else around you - just to hold awake. Taking a shower can be just as much a feat as working a full-time shift; sometimes more. It's a silent and secret battle, but a violent, gripping one all the same.
