Stealing from another

I have mixed feelings about the lovely and talented Heather of http://www.dooce.com/. On the one hand, she is lovely and talented, on the other hand, why does SHE get to make her living blogging and I don't! Why, why! Okay, its because she's much more talented and eloquent than I. Heather has suffered from depression for years and writes shockingly precisely about what it feels like to be depressed. Every time she writes about her mental illness I wind up either bawling or gaping at the screen, shocked by how well she writes what's in the depressed person's head. On the 24th of October she wrote this:

"One minute I'm perfectly fine, sipping a cup of coffee, flipping through a magazine filled with photos of meticulously art-directed living rooms, thinking I'd very much like those square acrylic tables or that pillow covered in suede. An hour later I'm having a panic attack at the thought of taking a shower, the energy it would require, how it seems so dumb that we keep having to do it over and over again, and then extrapolating that to every task in day-to-day life, making the bed or washing the dishes, it never ends. It just keeps going on and on, there is no destination, just the work of trying to get there. Maybe I'm just too sad to push that rock up the hill today."

That, my friends, is depression in a nutshell. If you can't fathom that paragraph, COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS, you have never been depressed. If you can fathom it, be grateful that there are others out there who know just how you feel.