What next?

Met up with two dear girlfriends and ended up feeling more down that I've ever had in awhile.One of them said I've changed. That I no longer see things as an optimist but rather as a cynic.That I now choose to see the negative side of everything and everyone first before being proven otherwise.They said I've lost an essential part of myself.
Yes perhaps I have deadened parts of myself. It really is easier sometimes to do nothing, think nothing and feel nothing. 
Many things have lost their pretty sheen.

In the haze of nullity, it's like a really slow way of dying, and yet on the surface, life goes on. I appear normal. Happy even. Facebook is a farce.

And experience is the lousiest teacher, because it gives you the hardest tests first before teaching you the lessons. 

I used to think that I could shut it out. The all consuming, permeating sadness. 

Shut it out with exercise, friends, work, the kids. 

My friends say "get on with your life", "you have to fix yourself first", "you don't need anyone to make you whole", "you have many things to be thankful for"

Ironically I am most enslaved both by what I have and do not have.

Trying to shut out the depression only strengthens it. 

While I mask it with a flurry of other things, it insidiously creeps back up with renewed fervor.

And it can be debilitating. 

Getting out of bed seems like too much effort.

Putting together a bowl of cereal with milk and then spooning it into my mouth. Chew. Swallow. 

I can't handle it.

I even try to delay moving a muscle just to get up to the toilet. 

The kids create a ruckus around me, demanding my attention with shrieks of sibling bullying and injustice, and I just sleep through it all. 

Blocking out the sound.

Blocking out what I should be feeling and doing.

This is not simply a feeling of sadness.
It's too much sadness and futility at too trivial a cause.
Today the car doors were jammed and I wanted to burst into tears from being unable to lock them.

If I look at myself out of body, from a filtered place at a distance, I am lucid.

And I know it's ridiculous to feel like this. 

I know that I should get up, put on some decent clothes, eat some breakfast. 

It's not a big deal, everyone puts one foot in front of the other and do all these every single day. 

But it is a big deal right now.

The opposite of depression is really not happiness, but rather vitality.

My friends probably have already started thinking of me as whiny and needy. 

Why can't she snap out of it? She has so much to live for. Why is she being such a weakling? 

Perhaps those who tolerate and acknowledge their depression are the ones who are truly resilient.

So I don't really want to talk about it anymore.

And yes I am too weak to tolerate it, choosing to continue to mask it under layers of punishing alternatives. 

This is not a romanticized and glamorous portrayal of a melancholic soul. 

It is crippling and inexplicable. 

And right now I am unable to figure out a way through this fog of numbness.