overyourhead

Low...
I'm generally a very happy person. I smile a lot and laugh a lot. I love life. However occasionally I will inexplicably feel sad. Low. I don't know what brings it on. It just happens. Sometimes it lasts a few hours - but it has been known to last for days, even weeks. More occasionally still (maybe once a year?) these periods of sadness can turn into something much worse. I can get into a black mood. Black moods are dreadful. Sometimes they manifest themselves as a dissatisfaction with any- and everything around me - I end up hating things that I normally love, or believing people hate me (paranoia). Sometimes it is simply depression, a blackness that descends upon me, suffocating me. I hate myself when it happens. I can't stop it though. It's like falling from a great height - you can't prevent yourself from falling and you are so very painfully aware that sooner or later something hard is going to break your fall. I can't talk myself out of these moods either. I just have to wait for them to pass. Luckily I can spot the signs so I tend to avoid people when I'm starting to feel low just in case it turns into a black mood. Mark (who is a Trojan in these situations) thinks I should talk to someone about it professionally but to be honest I don't want to discover that deep down I hate myself. I'd rather be happy 99% of the time and deal with the other 1% sadness as and when it happens.

Somebody once said to me, "whenever you're feeling low remember that every night, someone thinks about you before they go to sleep." That helps. A little.