Depression: Cornering the [Black] Market

©2017 Susan Noyes Anderson

image by Gianfranco Grenar on Unsplash

You don’t understand me,
he said.
No one knows
of the suffering
stored in my soul.

I told him of dark days
I stumbled
and bled,
days when life nearly
swallowed me whole.

But it wasn’t the same,
he insisted;
his pain
was unique and mine
could not compare.

My empathy suspect,
my counsel
in vain,
I held back things
I wanted to share.

It bruised me to look
at him,
caught up in
misery, claiming
it all as his own.

He holds the black shadow
so close to
his chest
that he’s left
to do battle alone.

∞§∞

“It’s an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.” – John Joseph Powell

“No man is an island, entire of itself.” – John Donne

“Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.” – Thomas Carlyle

“Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer.”
– Dorothy Rowe

“The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.”
– Mother Teresa

“Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind.”
– Jeffrey Eugenides

“In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression.” – Elizabeth Wurzel

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