Note: Recently I was challenged to try and describe a mental illness to someone who does not suffer from it. This was the result.

I didn’t wash my hair again today.

I told anyone who crinkled their nose in my general direction that I’m doing this hipster organic experiment where I surrender my shampoo and general hygiene for at least a week. You know, to get more in touch with myself, to place proper emphasis on the cleansing of my aura or my chakras or some other spiritual doo-hickey.

I sagely nod, like some priestess I once saw in a film (or was it a nun), as if that was correct, that was right, that I am alright and even thriving.

Their face smooths instantly, and they make a remark about creative types that I don’t quite catch, but even if I did, I wouldn’t correct them. Somehow, it is easier to see me as eccentric, as bohemian, as a rule-breaker, instead of as what I am: mentally unstable, disturbed. Depressed.

Days later, when I see them again, they’ll notice my wet hair and tease me for my lack of resolve. And I’ll smile as if I have some delicious secret, as if I’m the new Buddha, having reached enlightenment in under two days, when really I finally started trying to live again.

They don’t need—and probably don’t want—to know that the only reason I washed myself today was because I had enough energy left over from the day before to drag myself to the streaming water. They don’t need to know that I ended up lying face down in my tub, as if I’m practicing some perverse form of yoga, where instead of cat and cow breaths, you gulp and sputter and spit out any water that attempts to climb up your nose.

No, they don’t need to know.

When my therapist sees me today, she only sighs as usual, bids me to sit down, and so I sink into the overstuffed couch with a bajillion and two pillows covering it. As I pick at the yellow thread on the third largest one, concentrating on that instead of her maternal brow, her sister quirked lips, her grandma sweater, I am no longer a hipster, a manic pixie dream girl or whoever else I am when my illness is romanticized. Here, I am allowed to be small, pathetic, and weird, with a gaping mouth and vulnerability more suited to a cardinal chick, hoping for some kind of wormy advice.

Today, we discuss how my depression manifests itself, how that black cloud brews in the coffeepot of my brain chemistry and then spills out on the tablecloth of my life’s breakfast nook....

Anxiety is an easier beast to deal with, I think. It makes sure that you can see it, be it pacing or jumping or screaming. It makes sure that you can feel it with its constriction. I don’t mind the anxious falling as much as you would think. I just hate the sudden drop in altitude and the sensation of my back breaking when I land, which is as close as I can get to depression with my metaphors.

Depression is a weight settling on your stomach, like a cat, and never knowing if it’s going to wake up so that you can go to the bathroom, or if it’ll be there after you fall asleep again.

Depression is the feeling that you have so much room to breathe, but life has allotted you this corner of air and Max from the fourth grade is taking it up again and everyone will cast you out if you dare take it back from him.

Depression is waking up in the middle of the night and knowing that you won’t make it out of bed in the morning—not because you’re dead, but because you want to be.

Depression is every sappy social media post asking for love being deleted and a sense of nothingness replacing it, therefore creating a weird void that seem to goes on and on until you accidentally scroll past a good post and you can’t go back because you can’t remember.

Depression is not pretty but people will pretend that it is. Depression, in relation to people, is like a bear mauling you off the side of the interstate and people are driving by, but they don’t even so much as honk to scare it away—they just pretend that you’re in some interactive billboard with Smoky the Bear, and that you’re preventing forest fire or whatever that grizzly’s shtick was.

Depression is all of that, and it’s not pretty. And it won’t be solved, cured miraculously, by some kiss or some sentimental bullshit. I am not a puzzle to pick at, piece by piece, to hem and haw over and to leave and come back to after lunch for your leisure. I am not to be put back together after a few hours and then taken apart and set aside for another day. I do not fit into a box like that.

I do not cry like they say I should. (I’m too dehydrated for that.)

Ask me about the static in my head, the monster lying next to me in bed. Ask me about the pit that curdles and vomits up from the hold in my middle, that tells me to get up anyways.