The all consuming void

It’s always been said that life isn’t easy, but no one ever explains to you that the darkness will continually be hunting you as though its stalking you from the shadows. Maybe this is because not everyone has the same infliction, maybe not everyone is aware of this existential unhappiness that hides around the corner. Unfortunately for me I am not everyone, I am me, and my darkness is never far away, constantly following me. If you have seen the movie IT Follows, that’s how I see my darkness always walking slowly after me. Like Nancy running from Freddy, no matter how fast she runs he is still always ahead of her.

When it catches me, and it always does, it’s an all-consuming enveloping void of unhappiness and despair.

For many, depression is brought on by trauma and/or events that have happened in their past and in their upbringing. But for me, none of that rings true. I grew up in a loving household with no abuse or loss, no separations or drastic changes to the way we lived, no upheavals and no mental scars. For me it’s just there, and as I grow older and look back over my life, it’s always been there, smiling back at me.

It can be a bitter pill to swallow by Tell Tall Tales

When I was little, we used to live in an old house, built after World War 2. It always felt big to little me, but there was always something about it, and that wasn’t just the lovely 80s style of brown and red that run through it!, there was a foreboding about it. It didn’t help that my imagination was massively overactive when I was little, and for a long time I was scared of the dark. Every creak, every noise had my imagination going.

My memories of my bedroom from that house are vague, but I remember that it felt big to me, huge in fact. The walls looked like they went on and on to a ceiling that even a giant would have struggled to reach. As you walked through the door into my room there was a fitted cupboard directly in front you with a big heavy solid wood door. To the right was a large sash window that overlooked the flat grey roof of the kitchen below. With big panes of glass and white frames, it let in flooded the room with light in the daytime. To the left was the rest of the room. The obligatory kids’ road rug was on the floor where I would spend hours playing with my toy cars. and then there was my bed. For some reason I had bunk beds, even though there was only me in the room. They were brown and battered like they had been around for a while. I always slept on the bottom, probably because I was too small for the top, but I would spend many nights staring at the bottom of the top bunk trying to get to sleep.

The bed sat in the corner of the room and on the opposite side of the room by the cupboard was a desk and chair. I would sometimes sit here and do some drawings. Dressed in my brown corduroy dungarees, red t-shirt and my super blond, almost white curly hair, looking like a miniature Doc Brown (from back to the future). In truth though I preferred to do my art on the lounge floor in front of the TV, so my desk and chair became a dumping ground for toys and clothes.

It was in this chair he used to sit at night, in the darkness, just staring at me. my parents would tell me it’s just the dressing gown in the dark and it was all in my imagination. But now I know the truth. It was him sitting there. An all-consuming void of self-hatred and loathing, just sitting and staring with a big smile across his face. He had his victim in his sights and was just waiting for the right time.

The eternal battle of depressions by Tell Tall Tales

You see, monsters do exist, just not all of us can see them, some of us just feel them and that’s when they latch on and squeeze tightly, so tightly that’s it’s hard to breath.

Some people may think it’s weird anthropomorphising emotions and mental health, but that’s how my mind works, that’s how I visualise the world around me and this bleeds into my art. So why not into my eternal battle with my mental health. By giving it a character, by making it my demon, my Darth Vader, my Jason Vorhees, Micheal Myers, and whomever else you can think of, I can visualise the fight, the struggle, and hopefully the win. 

The problem is that the win is generally short lived. A brief time of happiness that allows me to feel some semblance of normality (what ever that is!) before I start to see him out of the corner of my eye again, smiling. All good horror movies have a sequel right? and this is no different, the only problem is that with each fall into darkness it feels like a shorter time in between. Why? Because I feel like I am always on edge waiting for the inevitable.

There is no rhyme or reason to when the darkness comes. The only constant is that it will.

Cover photo by Eilis Garvey on Unsplash