What the darkness is like

After an evening of dark thoughts and strong sobbing, some questions move through the front of my mind.

I definitely have too many books. If I got rid of bunches of books, would I feel liberated in some way? Could it help me to then lose bunches of weight, maybe? -- that sense of liberation, however limited it might be?

Am I trapped within the fences of my everyday life, as I so often feel I am? Or am I trapping myself, allowing the endless tangled skeins in my brain to overwhelm whatever clarity and determination might still exist in there?

Can I write my way out of the confusion, if not out of the depression? Even if the sentences I can pull out aren't any good, the act of writing is good in itself, and therapeutic, always. The writing can suck, yet still be "valuable," in that it helps me just to try to express what the darkness is like.

Why do I still have these moods when, for the most part, my anti-depressants seem to keep the worst feelings at bay? I don't want to think about changing medicines. Is there something else I can do to ease some of the pain, to stop myself from breaking, or being broken?

I realize living with a depressed person is not a walk in the park ... or maybe it's that walk through the park after your car died and there's a storm pouring down on you, and a rain-wrapped tornado not too far away. How can a relationship withstand that kind of stress, on-again and off-again, month after month, years upon years?

I'm tired now, and finally might try to go to sleep. I hope to wake feeling better (or even less bad would do), well enough to get some decent reading done tomorrow. To hell with everything else, if I can just steady my mind for a while and read.