Fish in water

Have I written about depression before?  It is worth the rewrite if I have.  Last summer I very nearly commit suicide.  I was planning it and I knew where I would do it and I now that it would be a week or weeks before they found my body.  I would have built a noose from extension cords and tied it to the roof of the garage where I work.  It is a garage but no vehicles get parked there until Winter.  It is hot there and there is hardly any ventilation, they would not have discovered my body until body parts started falling off and local dogs started quarreling over my bones; no one goes there in the summer.

Last year was the second lowest point of my life.  Perhaps the lowest point.  But that is not saying much because I have chronic depression.  And it is not caused by an imbalance in my hormones, it is a side effect of AS.  There are two types of AS people, introverts and extroverts.  Extraverts are happy go lucky and when they are younger they get in a lot of fights and they always seem happy.  Introverts are depressed a lot.  They look within themselves and they notice things.  They notice they are not normal and there is no one like them.  They notice that they are alone and they start to notice where they are different and see that they can't do what other people are doing and this depresses them.

Chronic depression is really difficult to diagnose.  You are always depressed, you are never really happy.  Occasionally there are times you feel joy, but they are rare.  You begin to think that this is normal.  Everyone feels joy and unhappiness and so do you, but no one around you seems to be unhappy as long as you, nor do their happy days seem as short as yours.  But since this is how it has always been, you think nothing of it.  A fish lives his entire life not knowing what water is, until he discovers air.  Chronic depression is invisible until true happiness comes to them that have it.  

I was depressed from about age 7, maybe sooner until age 30.  Really depressed, chronically depressed.  I tried drugs, I tried cognitive therapy, I even tried a relationship; nothing.  What did work?  I broke thought the happiness barrier and looked around and I was happy, for the first time in living memory.  

What happened later, I was ground down again and I forgot what happiness is and but could still remember something of it.  That is worse than depression, it is something to kill over.  I am better now, I hope.  I hope I find a reason to live, I am working on one that does not involve people, but that is difficult.  Writing.