Rae

“A friend called the other day.
'How are you?' she said.
The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was in bed because, as usual, I could think of nowhere else to go. I said that I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair.
She said: 'How can you be depressed on a day like this?'
I wanted to say: 'If I had flu, would you ask me how I could be sick on a day like this?”
― Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

“A part of my depression lies, I think, in my unanswered question: Where is home? I feel a sense, always, of trying to find my way back to a place that doesn't exist.”
― Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

“I had carried on when all I wanted was to be dead. I had stayed alive for other people. I never stayed alive for myself. I cannot begin to describe the intensity of that effort.”
― Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression

“Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, "He fought so hard." And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.”
― Sally Brampton, Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression