What My Depression Looks Like

You make me unrecognizable.
To myself.
To everyone.
You’ve erased everything I was.
Now you’re all that I am.
For years you’ve forced me to evolve.
Evolve into someone who hates so deeply.
Hates so deeply everything about herself.
You’ve made me dig a hole I’ll never escape.
Such loneliness.
Such nothingness.
The only two feelings on the surface of me.
I’m suffocating.
What you’ve created can’t be undone.
I long for a rewind button.
A way to get back to my normal.
Any way to erase you.
But you’ve become a part of me.
A part that I hate but can’t let go.
Even though you’re toxic to my very being.
There’s something romantic about it all.
Like a long lost lover in a fairy tale.
But this is no fairy tale.
You are no knight in shining armor.
You’re a disease that has consumed me.
You have a hold on me.
Pulling me deeper into an abyss of nothing.
You’ve changed me forever.
Not for the better.
But you’re all that I am.

- Asia Aneka Anderson, What My Depression Looks Like 2016©