Before I begin I should probably warn you that I'm about to use you for my own personal gain.

Basically I'm trying to vent this stuff to make myself feel better.

Maybe you'll find it interesting, maybe you'll think I'm a whiney bitch, in the end it's my blog so tough shit.

Perspective is a fascinating concept.

I'm a great advocate of thinking and I've spent a great deal of my life so far doing just that, even at the expense of everything else.

One of the benefits of thinking about everything is that it can give you perspective. The more you understand something you understand how it fits in with everything else.

Understanding something's nature, (eg. how big it really is,) AND it's context, (eg. how far away it is,) gives you perspective.

What's the value of this? Well it enables you to respond to situations as they truly are rather than as they appear to be and so allows you change the world about you.

Or at least that's the idea.

Of course what can happen is you gain the perspective but find yourself just as powerless to change anything. Bridges burnt there's no blissful ignorance for you, just painful awareness and frustration.

The courses of counselling I've completed over the last year or so have enabled me to gain perspective on my depression. I can see it from the outside now and have a better understanding of how it works.

This power born of thought, however, doesn't allow me to simply dodge or switch off those feelings. Over the past few days a combination of things has crept up on me until I've found myself in the state I am now.

I've been incredibly stressed at work this week, covering two full time jobs is really kicking my arse.

I've been working longer hours than usual, including my trip to Milton Keynes on Tuesday.

I've spent today with my Grandma, whose dementia is significantly worse than that the last time I saw her.

My domestic situation is still not brilliant.

As a result of all these things I've been eating REALLY badly and not sleeping much either.

Getting home today I could feel it starting and over the course of the last few hours I've watched it build.

It's so weird to see this happening to me, to observe my own mood and experience my own emotions in this not-quite-detached fashion.

Paradoxically the big D makes me isolated and removed from the world on one hand while heightening my physical senses unbearably on the other.

I notice my sense of touch particularly is cranked up. I'm suddenly very aware of how fabrics feel against my skin, of how hard and sharp objects are. Everything feels somehow dirty and uncomfortable, especially my own body.

My tolerance of sound plunges way down as I lose the ability to filter out chatter. Almost everything seems spiky and garish, the TV seems to scratch against my eardrums while my own voice turns my stomach.

Exactly the right music is about the only thing I can stand and I should mention it's also one of a very short list of things that can have any positive impact on my mood at all. This is because I can actually let it fill my mind, ie. occupy my attention so thoroughly that I pay less attention to how utterly shitty I feel.

Then there's the hole in my chest.

It's something I described very dramatically ad nauseum in some of the bad poetry I wrote as teenager: the feeling of there being a vacuum about the size of a melon right in the centre of my chest between my lungs.

I guess it is a peculiar sensation but it's so familiar to me by now I can't think of it as such. It feels like my chest is being dragged in on itself, no pain, just a kind of relentless tightening.

This ties in neatly with the perpetual state of panic that slowly takes a firm grip of me.

Thankfully this has only ever overwhelmed and developed into a full blown panic attack a couple of times, ever, but it regularly makes its presence felt to a less dramatic extent.

It's as if my body can feel that depression spreading through it and all the self preservation instincts start to kick in. Glands start working and hormones appear, screaming at me to do something, fight or flight just get out of this right now!

But of course there's nothing to fight and nowhere to run.

Instead the heart races, the stomach clenches, the breath quickens, the teeth grind, and nothing changes.

I find it difficult to stay still and harder to sleep, yet feel as tired as I ever have in my life.

Everything I hear and read, all messages, adverts etc from society around me make me feel sick.

Making small talk with someone turns my stomach as well and both of these thngs make me want to scream.

Sometimes it's a struggle not to just scream and thrash, and I have to constantly watch out for the random fits of tears that are always waiting to burst in when they get an opportunity.

Everything is hopeless and nothing is worth the effort. I have no desire whatsoever to kill myself, far too much effort for one thing, but the relief and release of death is appealing.

An HP Lovecraft short is the only place I've ever found the word nepenthe, but I believe it refers to the soothing nature of the void, the peace of non existence, not to mention serving quite nicely here.

Of course Mary helps a bit. Her smoky kiss takes the edge off the panic and gives me an appetite, something that disappears completely once this monkey gets on my back.

Without the munchies I just slip down and down the blood sugar cycle: not eating because I feel shit and feeling shit because I’m not eating.

Mary can hold my hand and mop my brow but she can’t make me ‘better’. There are no magic cures, no quick fixes, this is just the way things are, it’s a part of who I am.

Of course I’m not actually helpless and there are several things I can do to make these spells of hideous shitness less intense and less frequent. Healthy living, resolving problems at work and home, basically giving my body what it needs to deal with it and taking away what keeps my mind from dealing with it.

Like I said at the start, this is all about venting, about losing myself so deeply in analysing the thing that I forget about actually experiencing it.

Now I have no use for anyone’s pity, and this isn’t a cry for help, but externalising the thing does seem to loosen it’s grip.

There’s only one aspect of this that’s stranger than the fact that I’m watching and writing about this happening to me like some independent observer while it’s happening to me.

That’s the fact that, come sometime in the near future, maybe later tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe a little longer, all this heavy, heavy shit will slip away again.

It never goes completely, that’d be like losing a limb, instead it perpetually echoes, murmuring along in the background like a static hiss under music.

Once it drops back down to that level however, I won’t be able to imagine how I feel right now. This emotional state will become a distant land that I know I’ve visited but can’t really picture.

Of course I can always look at my souvenirs. Some of them are carved in my arms, their not so good, but others are written on paper and I’m pretty happy with a lot of them.

You know what? I feel a little better. Still shaky, but calmer than I did half an hour ago. If you’ve actually read this then thanks, you’ve followed me on a brief but valuable journey and I appreciate your time.

It’s about this point in these kinds of posts that I start feeling guilty and self indulgent so I think I’ll kick this in the head now.

Don’t worry though, I’ll get back more the usual politics, philosophy & weirdness next time. Plus I’m seeing about a million films over the next few weeks so there’ll be plenty to bang on about there.