Depression is cruel, yet loving. It breaks you down, it sucks the will out of you, and it feels like someone has thrown you into an all-encompassing suit of sand. You hate it for slowing you down, you hate it for keeping you from participating in all that life has to offer you, for even taking away the simple joys of your loved one's smiles. You hate it. But you also love it.

Although it takes away almost all love and motivation and causes a zombie-like autopilot life, it also embraces you.

You see, depression doesn't just hit you like a spear in the heart, no, it sneaks up, it wraps its arms around you, making you numb to all other feeling, and making its own love of self-loathing the only love you can feel. It's a cruel lover, but it's the most comforting arms you've ever felt in your life. Because it is always there for you. Always.

To know and feel depression, is to know and feel complete defeat.

You see, when you first feel the arms around you, you squirm, you fight, you try everything you can to get out, and for days, months, years, you are in constant battle with depression. Then after fighting for so, so long, when you have exhausted every resource you have to overcome depression and yet its grip is as tight as it's ever been, you sink. You are so exhausted, you sink into its arms and you feel it, not as the chains that strapped you down, but as the tight hug that never loosens around your chest. It lulls you into sleep, you often feel weak, and spend time and time again alone with your new lover, the stockholm syndrome truly setting in.

But you don't want to be in love.

You don't want the cruel lover to be around you, to even be in you. It hurts, you can't breathe, you can't eat, you can't feel any of the emotions to your core, only the depression. So you fight again, you give depression another fight and you try your best to free yourself, but always to no avail.

You see, the first defeat isn't the only defeat, oh no, it is the first cycle in many to come, and when you are fighting the world sees you and not the depression still happily clung to your back, and when you're defeated for yet another time, they don't see you at all.

There are many things theorized and proven to rid someone of the horrid circumstance of depression.

There's turning around to face the depression, to see it's face and understand it, and then it slowly disappears the more you grasp to comprehend it, similar to fear and its relation to understanding. There's medicine, that makes you incapable to feel the depression and its mighty arms around you, until you are at a time when you are strong enough that the creature has no chance. And there's time.

The cruelest medicine of them all.

If only time is what can cure your depression then you have my deepest, and utmost compassion. Nothing is worse than struggling and fighting and knowing that it will be to no avail because it has become a prison sentence. No amount of work or struggle or fight will stop this kind of depression, only time. This person is the most susceptible to death.

You see, when a person takes their life, it's not really themselves they're trying to kill, it's the monster on their back, the one that won't let them go, has never let them go, the one that has been inside them and consumed them. It's not themselves they're trying to kill, it's depression. It's not a cry for help, it's a final act, after being put through the cycle over and over again.

So, what can you do for a person whose depression will only go with time?

Be a buoy. Lift them up. They will fall, they will embrace depression and weep into its arms and love it when there is nothing else around to grab onto. Be there. When the person tells you to go away, stay, albeit at a distance. When they tell you they don't love you, know that it is the mouth of a cruel puppeteer. Your loved ones with depression are accountable for their actions no doubt, and you shouldn't allow yourself to be berated, so take a step back, but be there, because this isn't easy, it's never been easy.

Let your love for your loved one with depression be what holds them up when depression's grip tightens, and they become too weak to do it on their own. Be a buoy.