Dolor Comedenti

2022. There’s nothing quite like coming out of a depression and later hearing the songs that wrenched your guts when you were wishing you didn’t exist.

I thought I had experienced depression before, with the loss of a relationship or a passing of a loved one. I tried medication. I was on medication when I really felt the depths of depression.

For a lot of people, 2020 was a year that was impossibly bad. It was disturbing to me, but it was also the year that my deep depression broke, likely because I was given the opportunity to isolate and process how I felt rather than patch up my feelings. I suffered long periods where I hated existing from the end of 2018 to the early months of 2020. I never thought to kill myself, but I was surely tired of living.

It doesn’t really matter the specific events that led to this, let’s leave it at grief. It was the first time I was preoccupied with death. Not my own, at first, but others. I was terrified that someone I cared about was going to die, so I did not want to care about anyone. I did not want to experience the feeling of loss again.

Then I realized that there was no way to avoid that feeling. It was too late. I had already attached myself to too many people and there was no turning back. I have kids, attachment to them is unavoidable. Pain at the loss of them would be unavoidable and crushing. These thoughts consumed me and would leave me feeling hopeless. I was stuck in a world where suffering is inevitable. I wanted to disappear. That is not to say that I am no longer stuck in that world, I am just no longer suffering constantly with the thoughts of it and a desire to leave.

As I was living in this world, songs began appearing. I thought I had identified with songs before. I guess I had, but not these kinds of songs, in this kind of way. Three come to mind:

“Coming Undone” by Korn

“No Rain” by Blind Melon

“Ghost” by Badflower

I’m not going to go over lyrics here, I’m not one for quoting others often. These three songs fit how I was feeling pretty well, though. I listen to them now and I marvel at how different I feel and I really don’t know how it changed. Not entirely. I know where it started. December 2019, I went to a concert. I went to see La Dispute. I almost didn’t go because I was introduced to La Dispute by someone I was still very angry with. And here we have more songs, one of which is now my favorite song, that I still will never skip over, “All Our Bruised Bodies and the Whole Heart Shrinks. During this concert, Jordan (vocalist) came down off stage (several times) and was allowing the audience to sing parts of the songs into the mic. The girl next to me was one of those people. When Jordan walked away, she was shaking and crying. I went home and devoured their music. My climb out of depression began there. I listened to them for 3 months straight.

I know that I have not described depression fully. My best simple explanation is it feels like every day is a task that you have completed for no reason–and each task is the same task as the task before.

2025. I wish I could say that I was out after I wrote that and done with depression. I was not, but is anyone ever done with depression? I made a go of isolating myself from everyone as best I could, until I couldn’t anymore. I started therapy earlier this year to address the years of subtle abandonment, then the repeated losses and betrayals I have experienced that led to my trauma response of near complete emotional isolation. I’ve come a long way and will have more to say about bits and pieces of those things in the future.

Two other notes: I will be seeing La Dispute again in 2026 and I still never skip “All Our Bruised Bodies and the Whole Heart Shrinks.”