In the morning, I met Ana in the hallway. She too is suffering from depression. She had a blank face. Her only solace used to be putting on makeup. Every morning at 5 a.m., when she couldn’t sleep and couldn’t manage to get any more rest, she would get up and start beautifying her face, carefully applying makeup to her tired and droopy eyes, covering her pale face with foundation. But even makeup couldn’t hide her glassy eyes and lifeless expression. She walked past me. She wanted to say good morning, I could tell, but she didn’t have the strength to muster the words. She just looked at me and walked away.
At midday, I saw Ana again in the hallway. She was talking to a nurse. She was crying. “You are not alone,” I overheard the nurse’s comforting attempt. But I don’t know how much these words help a person at such a time. They don’t help me!!! They don’t correspond to my subjective reality. Because depression is nothing else but isolation and loneliness. This is the most fundamental and life-sustaining feeling of the illness. From the outside, you hear words that don’t match this reality. “You are not alone!” Hm… how? Am I not standing alone in front of the demons? Am I not fighting alone? Would they say these words to a person undergoing surgery with excruciating appendicitis? Would they say these words to a person undergoing chemotherapy to fight lung cancer? Then why should these words help with depression? I don’t know, I don’t know…
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