(Note: Everyone has those days. As someone who deals with Seasonal Depression, a lot of mine happen in February. One of my ways of coping is by word-vomiting all the negative stuff onto a page, such as the post below. If you are struggling with depression and the word-vomit method isn’t cutting it for you, Google “resources for coping with depression” to find a ton of helpful links like this one. -AG)

There is nothing positive in my brain today.

Tidal waves of emotion…hopelessness, guilt, self-contempt…are raging. My leaking rowboat has no life jackets, and only one oar, to spin me in circles no matter how I struggle.

Look at all the things you should have done! The words pound in my ears with each crashing wave. The list of failure rolls out over the foaming sea, an endless scroll like Santa Claus’s naughty list in an old cartoon.

But I couldn’t, says the tiny helpless me in the boat. It was too much, I was too tired, I didn’t know what to do…

The stormy sky finds a way to sneer. Lies! screams a bolt of lightning. Liar, and weak! You didn’t know what to do?! You barely tried! You didn’t know what, how to clean your house, or make a simple appointment, or use Google? Save your pathetic excuses for the gullible. I know the truth – you want to believe you are special and will do great things, but you are a lazy, weak complainer with no talent and no discipline. You deserve your inevitable obscure and pointless fate! You are NOTHING!!

Each hailstone word pelts my cringing rowboat self until the water swirling around my feet is tinged red. The weight pulls the boat down down beneath the angry waves.

What’s left of my gasping frozen self knows there is a bird above the clouds…a great bird of belief, with shining hope wings that can pluck me from the depths and bear me safely back into the sun. It is there. I know it is there…

But I cannot see it from here.