Depression Party

it's all bullshit

[depressionparty]

Felice, beware of thinking of life as commonplace, if by commonplace you mean monotonous, simple, petty. Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often—and in my inmost self perhaps all the time—I doubt whether I am a human being.

Franz Kafka, Letter to Felice Bauer, 1913

[depressionparty]

It's very very hard indeed to die in your own way, without some blasted bunch of relatives that come fussing around and insisting that you go to a hospital, that you get fixed with the tortures of being fed through tubes and things to keep you alive indefinitely and waste the family savings.  It's even a crime to commit suicide.  This is simply nonsense.

Alan Watts, The Inevitable Ecstasy

[depressionparty]

Something funny happens to people who are lonely. The lonelier they get, the less adept they become at navigating social currents. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired. Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself. Once it becomes impacted, it isn’t easy to dislodge. When I think of its advance, an anchoress’s cell comes to mind, as does the exoskeleton of a gastropod.

Olivia Laing, Me, myself and I

[depressionparty]

The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait until you arrive there yourself.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature

[jdeadbird]

[depressionparty]

The lad raised himself with a low cry and clasped him close. "Let us lie down and die together," he murmured. "Men have no need of us, and we are all alone."

Marie Louise de la Ramée, A Dog of Flanders

[anatolae]

To associate with others is sheer torture for me. And the others are in me. I’m forced to associate with them even when they’re nowhere near. All alone, I’m surrounded by multitudes. There’s no escape possible, unless I were to escape from myself.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

[silencemadenietzschecry-deactiv]

Pain has lost its refreshment for me. If I were offered all the glories of the world or all the torments of the world, one would move me no more than the other; I would not turn over to the other side either to attain or to avoid. I am dying death.

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

[kaylynn-doll-deactivated2013081]

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

No-one can truly love me because this requires the precondition that a person knows who I am.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters

[blackestdespondency]

I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel—drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have—that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.

Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters

[pocket-full-of-stones-deactivat]

I’m sure that all this, I mean other people’s attitudes towards me, lies principally in some obscure intrinsic flaw in my own temperament. Perhaps I communicate a coldness that unwittingly obliges others to reflect back my own lack of feeling.

 Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (via pocket-full-of-stones)

[depressionparty]

Leonard Cohen - There's No Reason Why You Should Remember Me

[larmoyante]

I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.

Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

[fargleblarflaffin-deactivated20]

[depressionparty]

One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not: we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs or seem to seek them, who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic, and above all survivors—we are not that way from perversity, and we can not just relax and let it go. We have learned to cope in ways you never had to.

Piers Anthony, Fractal Mode (author's notes)

[depressionparty]

A man from nowhere, without a past, without a future, without a present. I wanted nothing; I was no one. I advanced step by step towards the horizon which receded with every step; drops of water sprang forth and fell to earth again, each instant destroying the last. My hands were forever empty: an outsider, a dead man. They were men, they were alive. I was not one of them. I had nothing to hope for.

Simone de Beauvoir, All Men are Mortal