Sang-froidless

Oopsie, I seem to have mislaid my equanimity. Goddamn, I thought I’d tucked it in the top drawer along with my camera. What? The camera’s not there either. ‘the fuck?! I suppose it’s time to clean house. *sigh*

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.
~ Sylvia Plath

   Yes, the patron saint of depressives nails it. Of course.

Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, "He fought so hard." And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.
~ Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

Depression is melancholy minus its charms.
~ Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

TRUTH! Melancholy has poetry while depression has...has...soggy tissues, tear blotched complexions and weight gain. Def dull and not so pretty.

Maybe we all have darkness inside of us and some of us are better at dealing with it than others.
~ Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

I failed Depression 101. I confess – I’m not terribly good at this shit.

The Beguiling of Merlin
Edward Burne-Jones

Merlin — Gustave Doré

The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn.
~ T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Sheesh, it's as though Merlin was living MY life!

What will I learn today? Dunno. Maybe I’ll motor over to the booksmith and pick up a How to Survive Depression for Dummies tome.

It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
~ Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Awesome but, at my ripe old age, I don’t know how much bad behavior I’ve got left in me. I suspect I should make an effort here – ya know? It could help. Also too, this oughta be easy for me.

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.

It made me tired just to think of it.”
~ Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Washing, not the same as just being in the water – floating, soaking, parboiling. Why can’t I pop over to my Silica Heaven just for the day? A good float in a near empty lagoon would do me a world ‘o’ good.

Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
~ Philip K. Dick

Yes but what else am I gonna do at 2AM when sleep is utterly elusive?