Every day I wake up tied to my bed,

Depression, the torturer who tightens the straps with each little movement I make prohibiting my progression but today I can breathe out and am able to wiggle free from the confines.

I walk to the bathroom and look in the mirror and see Depression running behind my eyes powering the circuits in my brain that tell me I’m fat and worthless and should go back to the bed I was just stuck in because at least it wanted me there.

And it always gets worse.

Depression hires its best friend Anxiety to come torment me making every air molecule I breathe an enormous struggle because Anxiety loves to wrap its flaming cold hands around my throat while Depression caresses my ear over and over repeating I am not even worth a single drop of sunshine that touches my skin.

And I’m homesick.

Homesick for a place I’ve never even been. A place where the rain actually waters the flowers and where I feel whole. A place where I can wake up and leave my bed with ease going about my day like a human being that isn’t trapped with a mental illness she can’t seem to get rid of.

Mom tells me to sleep more so I won’t be so tired every day but when I say I’m tired it’s a permanent state of exhaustion that sleep will not fix because I wake up every morning fighting to stay above the black depths of the ocean in my head, fighting to avoid the tendril fingers and arrowhead claws of my demons trying to drag me under.

At night the darkness slithers out of my mind like snakes, my demons closely behind playing sick games with the shadows next to my bed that no amount of counting sheep can fix, I cannot sleep for fear when I wake up my day will be miserable again, for fear in my dreams I will be tortured further by the monsters that aren’t under my bed but inside of my head.

The only thing I can feel anymore is Depression’s soft fatal touch because Depression made me paralyzingly numb to everything else in the world keeping me a hostage wrapped in its love making it the most twisted form of Stockholm Syndrome the world has ever seen.

Except you can’t survive.

Because if you give everything to Depression you won’t survive, you will need to feel so much that you will look for it everywhere, you will be at the end of your rope no longer feeling able to cope with the constant pain and instead of holding on to the end of your rope for life you will tie a noose because maybe death will be something you can actually feel.

But then you fall into petrifying sleep and wake up the next day and do it all again.