During my Health 101 lecture the other day, we were going through mental illnesses, and a brain gear creaked when I jotted the following definition down:

Depression: a sadness that does not end.

..and it hit me that I’ve never really though of the two concepts — depression and sadness — as separate sorts of empty. From which I figured, sadness is the hole, and depression is the pit (or chasm, if I were writing a song).

And I like the idea of sadness. Being a hole, it indicates depth; I like feeling the necessity to look upwards, the punch in the face that wakes me up, the insurmountable climb from which people are staring down at me and saying, “Dude, you’re laggin’.”

Being depressed is just digging. Ya can’t dig upwards, mate.

I feel like if I carry around these dense little bundles of sadness for long enough (shouldn’t be hard to guess what sorts, I do write for that other site), by the time I throw them off, I’ll be 30 times stronger with those huge rippling arms like that screaming informercial man. Then I, too, will be on late-nite TV, furiously jogging on an elipsoid exercise machine. “You too can be happy, functional, and without the occasional debilitating bout with gloom! (Cut to audience: GLOOM! BOO!)”. Operators are standing by, you miserable emo squat!

The other thing I noticed in Health that day was that guy who always wears sunglasses. It was like 50 degrees and overcast. Seriously bro, let ‘em go.