Meet My Friend: Melancholic Smith

I find solace in a dark room. The soft raindrops against my window actually feel comforting, but once again I find myself stuck inside my own mind. I’m racing through hallowed corridors, trying desperately to find a way out. It’s actually darker in there than it is outside right now. I can see through the iris, but can only decipher the numbers on my alarm clock. There’s a sharp pain in the right side of my head and I wince.

If I don’t get up in the next 10 minutes, I might as well call in sick, I think to myself.

After a brief moment of contemplation, I reluctantly get up. I sit on my toilet seat for another 5 minutes and start drafting up an email. Defeated.

I type: I don’t think I can make it to work today. No further explanation.

I go back to my own bed feeling completely defeated by my own mind. I curl up in a ball and start crying.

The routine is too mundane.

This is what they don’t tell you post-grad.

It’s this inexplicably deep and hollow feeling of emptiness and loneliness that only accompanies those who feel 10 steps behind... even if objectively they’re not. They’re haunted by their own minds, stuck in their own whirlwind of thoughts, empty corridors, and glass doors... locks locked and keys thrown away. Who the hell is in charge of this place?

This is depression at its finest moment and I wish I was a little bit stronger than he was. It gets me every time though. Meet my friend, Melancholic Smith.

Sometimes I visualize them in the form of a real person munching in the kitchen on my snacks, mockingly nodding its head and smirking at me, telling me to try again next time. Though it knows fairly well that next time we’re going to be down the same road wearing different outfits.

Depression, i.e. Melancholic Smith, appears to me in different forms. Sometimes it’s just a paradoxical feeling of numbness. Sometimes it’s taking my ability to speak. Sometimes I can feel very manic and euphoric. Then, when it gets really dark, I’m conscious enough to realize that I can’t be alone.

Melancholic is not an immigrant. It certainly didn’t board the plane with me in the summer of 2003.

I think he may have made his informal introduction at an empty lunch table in seventh grade where everyone else thought it’d be a good idea to leave me eating alone.

His voice was inaudible. It felt like an echo. It felt a million miles south. I tried to ignore it, turn my head the other way... he forced it his way, though. He made it apparent he was here to stay.

Then it just started showing up unannounced... at the worst of times... scaring the shit out of me.

At my first homecoming dance, at my first “big girl” date, the first time I was used by a guy, broken up with, and even while on the road while I was traveling…

He really crossed the line when he appeared at one of my coverage events, arms slung around his sloppy drunk ‘date’...

“Hi, I’m Social Anxiety. Heard a lot about you, babe. Can I buy you a drink, love?”

And took away the number one precious thing I cherished the most: live music.

Suddenly, big crowds and noise was no longer something that gave me comfort even though I loved and craved the chaos... It was what fueled me for so many years and kept me feeling alive.

Melancholic creeped into my work life where screaming into a pillow after a long day was no longer enough of a relief for me... which is when I resorted to self-medicating apologizing frantically to mom and dad for becoming ‘that girl’ in my own head.

It cut deeper when it joins forces with grief. Unfortunately, though, as much as I yearned for happiness during the three most tumultuous times of my experience with loss, I quickly realized a synthetic will not supplement the real feeling.

That’s the brilliant and cruel work of Melancholic Smith, irrevocably unapologetic in his craft and surreptitious in his execution.