What depression feels like
🔒 This password-protected post may not be used or reproduced for teaching, research or publication. A few weeks ago, I was following a conversation on twitter about whether depression is an illness, and I remember thinking that, while it's certainly true for me that depression seems like an illness, I couldn't clearly remember what it actually felt like to be very depressed. I could still remember what I looked like in the mirror at my grey-faced worst, and I could recall some of the things I could and couldn't do when I was depressed, but I found it hard to bring to mind what it felt like, physically or emotionally. But, this week, a dark cloud that had been hovering for months has descended and I'm writing this now, at three in the afternoon on a Sunday, tapping the words onto a screen, with my head under the covers and tears running down my face. For reasons I don't want to go into here, I have deleted a whole trail of my posting history from social media...