it’s as if you were in an endless (and beginning-less) traffic jam. The road is cramped and narrow; there are tanker trucks slowly pouring black smoke into your car’s vents, you can’t hear your radio or car stereo because of the low RPM rumbling of cars and trucks and semis all around you; any act of kindness you commit, such as leaving space for some dented, banged-up machinething trying to merge, is immediately ruined by someone else, scampering into the space you had left, foreclosing the chance you had of feeling you were being kind? noble? anyway, no; you are both starving and nauseated at the same time, and your stomach hurts from both; there are no exits where you can get off escape this, even temporarily, even shabbily; there are just jersey barriers and grey vehicles covered with grime, it’s drizzling now, and your windshield wipers don’t really work, they scratch and smear the grime across your windshield with a piercing, repetitive shriek, and when you try to look to your left or your right to see something besides damp, gritty, gray, fumy highway, the most you can see are the oblique outlines of institutions that could be factories covered in graffiti and litter and ragged advertisements for products not even sold any more, but you do realize that the space between you and the car in front of you seems a little greater, now, how? and you look in your rearview mirror and see that the car behind you is no longer looming, but instead is a spacing back, is not filling the view of the mirror, and as you cautiously press down on the accelerator, glancing to the left and right, afraid of what you might see, the cars move faster and are now farther apart; you press the WASH button and you’re going fast enough that the blue fluid sprays delightfully across the windshield, and the wiper blades automatically activate and clear it all, smooth and clean and fast, and is that sun? you now see greater distances, you see before you a world full of light and shadow, the sedan purring smoothly at the right speed. Things flash delightfully by, the car thrums, you can feel, in the center of you, that moving-forward feeling of progress, progress, progress. How could it be that just moments ago you were in a trench of grime and shuffling? Those trucks that were so sinister are now shinybright and obligingly staying to the right, their engines working better too, the sun glinting off their carefully custom-machined grilles; there are some curves and dips in the road that you follow with precision; there are grass and trees and the possibility of exits; even the paint on the road is whiter, and the road itself is blacker, and as you fly along you remember why you took this trip in the first place.
That's what it's like :')
Parnate, an antidepressant, began working after 6 weeks. I am indebted to the late Jane Kenyon and her series "Having It Out With Melancholy" for many reasons.