By Billy Goat

depression is dry. there's no movement, no dynamic emotion. it feels like you're living in a vaccum of stale air. you don't feel. everything inside you is perfectly still.
someone tells a joke and you laugh, and for a second your mind is entertained... but your heart stays motionless and almost cracks in jealousy of the temporary relief your brain gets.
depression is boring. it's like being trapped in a lengthy lecture that won't end, in a lecture hall that is hot and crowded and you can't even hear what the professor is saying. you're stuck, sitting, confused, and waiting. the only way out is to make a scene and you don't want that, but you can't take it anymore. it's torturous and all you can do is take comfort in pieces of your soul slowly dying so that maybe, just maybe, you can disappear without having to do anything crazy.
when you're depressed, everything is either sad or annoying. things you used to like bore you, people you used to enjoy spending time with frustrate you, and you're hypersensitive to "the human condition" and imperfections of the human race and crime and mortality and irony. when you read in the paper that someone passed away, you look around you and realize how inconsequential their death was, and it just makes you wonder what your existence even means anymore... hell, what the existence of anything even means anymore.
you start feeling like you're just done, like there's nothing more than this. you've seen all the sunrises you can tolerate, given and received all the hugs you'll ever need. you're done with butterflies and puppies and christmas, with eating and drinking and getting out of bed.
the thing about depression, the thing that makes living with it so difficult... is that it truly feels like your life is already over. sometimes you want to die just to take your body with you. otherwise, you're trapped in your body, trapped in stale, dry stillness as the weather of living erodes what's left of your cracking heart, and it just hurts so much and seems so unnecessary.
you might think about killing yourself, but you don't.
you don't have motivation to do anything... not to mow the lawn, not to take a shower, not to make dinner... you can't seem to move yourself to function, let alone plan something like a powerful, successful exit from the physical universe. so you lay there and get through it and just survive.
it feels like you're barely breathing, barely blinking... almost like you're walking through a dream world. there's a song by the band rilo kiley, and some of the lyrics are as follows:
all the subtle change in landscape and business
reminds you of your limited time
this time you'll listen to the movement in your body
how it keeps on despite you
and it frightens you
'cause you're barely alive
it really says it pretty perfectly.
while you're basically apathetic about everything, there's one thing you do have pretty strong feelings toward; you absolutely hate yourself, and it is this type of pain that makes being depressed nothing short of unbearable. there's no one thing you hate about yourself that you can change, either. even if you had the perfect grades, the perfect social nature, the perfect hair... you'd still hate yourself because you're still YOU. you hate the way you look, the way you walk, the things you say, the things you do. you hate the sound of your own voice, the sound it makes when you start your car... purely because those things are initiated by your existence, which you also hate. there's no way out. you are the scum of the universe and no one can convince you otherwise. surely adolf hitler deserves more respect. it is the same type of burning, fiery hatred a parent feels toward their child's rapist that you feel for yourself. calling it "intense" would be quite the understatement.
so you're depressed: trapped, stale, tired, apathetic, motionless, barely surviving, and loathing your soul... day after day. sometimes the episode lasts two weeks. sometimes it lasts a year before you can really breathe again. but it always hurts and it's always awful.
and that's what it's like to experience depression.