Down the stone steps

Depression is a nasty thing. It robs you of joy and leaves a bleak, hopeless feeling. Nothing matters, and everything seems pointless. Harry Potter's Dementors are a metaphor for crippling depression, taking away all the joy from the world, leaving only cold and eventually sucking the souls of their victims entirely. 

To me, depression has always seemed like being in a hole from which one cannot simply escape - maybe a prison or a dungeon is a better metaphor. A deep dungeon, which allows no daylight - only the memory that there is a sun somewhere out there, somehow making it worse for the prisoners.

Maybe the worst thing of all is that in this dungeon there are other prisoners - you know there are - and there are people standing above with large rings of keys trying to figure out which will free you from your imprisonment. Yet with depression, you are always somehow in solitary confinement no matter how you try to reach out or who's reaching out to you.

I don't mean to be totally black. I know there is sun somewhere. That there is a tunnel out, that laughter and joy still exist in the world. I've just misplaced mine, hopefully temporarily.