Decent

The sales clerk at Target asks if I found everything okay, and I realize I’ve been standing in the checkout line for 8 minutes without moving. “Sorry,” I say, my voice too bright, compensating. “Holiday brain.” She laughs. I don’t tell her I bought three dresses at 11 p.m. two weeks ago and can’t remember why. That I haven’t slept more than four hours in ten days. That I am currently holding myself together with the same effort it takes other people to run a marathon.

The descent into depression is not predictable. It begins the way an undertow begins, quietly, beneath a surface that looks almost inviting. There is no marker, no visible warning. Only the sense that the water has changed temperature around your ankles. A subtle resistance. A shift that registers in the body before the mind catches up.

December does not arrive gently. It rolls in bright and loud, crowded with light and expectation. Music spills out of open doors. Calendars swell. Late nights are framed as connection. Indulgence is recast as tradition. I tell myself each year that I will remain vigilant. That I know this water. That I can keep my footing if I pay attention.

And each year, December pulls anyway.

The first signs feel almost benign. I am sharper, quicker, more animated. Thoughts arrive in clusters. Conversation feels effortless. Sleep becomes negotiable. The world briefly seems to move at my internal speed. Mania and hypomania rarely announce themselves as an illness. They present as participation. As competence. As belonging. I stay up later than I should. I talk faster. I say yes when my body hesitates.

Cocktails soften the edges of vigilance. Sugar stacks itself on sugar. Indulgent food feels grounding until it doesn’t. Money moves out of my hands with an ease that feels like confidence rather than acceleration. I am not reckless, I tell myself. I am enjoying my life. Everyone is doing this.

That is how the undertow works. It does not grab at first. It glides.

December is uniquely suited to conceal danger. Excess becomes normal. Overstimulation is expected. Fatigue is universal. My illness blends seamlessly into the season. I look engaged. I look functional. I look fine. The shoreline still feels close enough to reach.

What I do not yet acknowledge is that this stretch of water is not open. Something sits beneath it. Something fixed. Something I have learned, instinctively, not to look at directly.

There is always a moment when the water changes.

It usually comes at night. I go to bed expecting sleep, and instead my body begins to hum, a strange twitchy buzzing just beneath the skin. Not pain. Not energy. Instability. Like standing too close to exposed wiring. My limbs jerk faintly against the sheets. My jaw tightens. My heart feels too present. I know then that rest is not coming.

I become aware of my mind misfiring in real time. Thoughts form but fail to connect cleanly. Sentences arrive half-assembled. When I speak, I have to slow myself deliberately, force pauses between phrases, concentrate on finishing one thought before the next pushes forward. I hear my own voice and recognize the cadence as off. Fragmented. I am conscious of my own unraveling as it happens.

This is when vigilance is supposed to begin.

I set aside the credit cards, physically placing them out of reach, an act that feels both responsible and quietly humiliating. I cancel plans where I can. I make lists. I reduce stimulation. Part of me wants full containment. A lockdown. Fewer people. Fewer inputs. I know what would help. I know the protocols. I have rehearsed them.

But another force intervenes, just as reliably.

I am afraid of judgment. Afraid of the familiar disappointment that follows the unspoken question of why I am not better at this by now. Afraid of ridicule disguised as concern. Afraid of punishment disguised as accountability. This fear is learned. Conditioned. Built over years of being taught that my body’s responses are excessive, inconvenient, and something I should have learned to manage quietly.

So instead of asking for help, I negotiate with the water. I self-treat. I rationalize. I tell myself I can manage the pull if I stay alert enough. I reach for control that feels autonomous even as it destabilizes me. I tell myself I am fine. I tell myself I am handling it.

What I do not yet name is that the undertow has caught on something solid beneath the surface: the accumulated weight of sexual trauma, suicide attempts, years of self-medicating terror with alcohol, and a support system that taught me my illness was something to manage quietly and alone. The pull is not random. It tightens around this fixed point, and my body remembers all of it even when my mind refuses to look directly.

January arrives, and the surface changes. For most people, it brings a mild disappointment. A letdown. Fatigue. A return to routine. For me, it is the moment my feet leave the ground. The body begins to tally the cost of December with ruthless precision. Exhaustion settles into muscle and bone. Inflammation flares. Sleep dissolves. I feel poisoned by excess, bloated and aching, squeezed into clothes that are technically new but no longer feel like they belong to me.

My nervous system buzzes with irritation and dread. Light feels too sharp. Sound feels intrusive. I tell myself this is normal. A reset. A recovery. I do not yet see how far out I have drifted.

The crash doesn’t announce itself. It hits sideways.

One day, I am still moving too fast, still convincing myself I am managing. Next, everything stops. Speed vanishes. Thought slows to a crawl. My body becomes unbearably heavy, then exquisitely painful. Tasks collapse under their own weight. Decisions evaporate. I am dragged backward into a state that feels immediate and absolute.

This is where depression reveals itself not as sadness, but as system failure. Not a mood. Not a mindset. A neurobiological crisis that hijacks every system in the body.

Most people understand depression as profound sadness, a heavy gray fog. What they don’t understand is that depression can also be electric, agitated, and violent—the body and mind at war with themselves.

I live with treatment-resistant ultra-rapid cycling bipolar I disorder with mixed features. The language is accurate and sufficient. It does not convey the violence of switching states, sometimes within hours. It does not convey the terror of mixed episodes, where manic acceleration collides with depressive despair. The brain floods itself with contradictory signals. Agitation and hopelessness occupy the same space. I am driven and immobilized at once.

Layered into this is a neurobiological vulnerability that winter exploits mercilessly. Reduced daylight. Disrupted circadian rhythms. A nervous system already prone to dysregulation. Add genetic inheritance shaped by mood disorders, addiction, and trauma. Add hormonal fluctuations that have grown more erratic and punishing with age. The undertow is no longer subtle. It pulls with force, tightened around something immovable.

Depression is embodied. Muscle spasms seize without warning. Electrical shocks run down the spine. Tremors rattle the skeleton. Feverish sweats soak the sheets. Migraines hammer the skull. Jaw clenched, teeth grinding, heart racing as if trying to escape the chest. I lie in bed and feel every nerve misfire. The body behaves as if danger is ongoing, unresolved, present tense.

The mind offers no refuge. Thoughts accelerate into catastrophe. Shame resurfaces with surgical precision. Every insult, every fear, and every failure assembles itself into a relentless internal prosecution. This is clinical black mania, a severe mixed state where the mind combusts while the soul sinks. It feels like being pulled under while fully conscious of the surface above.

I have survived more suicide attempts than I can count. Some were loud enough to demand intervention. Others passed quietly, unnoticed, absorbed into silence and avoidance. I learned early that people avert their eyes from pain they cannot fix. I learned how to float just long enough to avoid disappearing.

I have been told my addictions have always served as coping mechanisms. Trauma responses. Maladaptive behaviors. Alcohol. Disordered eating. Self-harm. The language is tidy. It does nothing to address the fact that my body learned something long before it had words for it, and that learning has never been revoked.

Depression amplifies everything. The noise. The expectations. The enforced closeness. I move through it suspended between visibility and absence. The world celebrates continuity. My body braces for rupture. Time warps. Days stretch. Survival becomes a series of negotiations with a force that does not loosen its grip simply because I understand it.

And yet, understanding matters. Not because it loosens the grip, but because it creates a kind of presence within the pull. A way of staying conscious even while being dragged under. This is why I write.

I write because it matters. Because naming the current is possible even when I cannot yet name what lies beneath it. Writing does not stop the undertow. It does not excavate what remains fixed below. But it creates a record of survival that exists outside the body’s memory—a way of marking what happened when the mind could not yet fully articulate it.

This is not avoidance. It is an acknowledgment that some truths surface slowly.

This is what depression looks like for me. It is seasonal, cyclical, neurobiological, hormonal, inherited, and reinforced by memory that lives below language. Familiar and still devastating. I cannot promise reprieve. I cannot promise full excavation.

But I know the water now, even if I cannot yet articulate why. I know the pull is not random. I know something sits beneath the surface, fixed and immovable, and shaping every current that moves above it.

And even when the undertow takes me under, I remain present enough to witness it, to survive the pull without yet understanding its origin.

That presence, incomplete as it is, is what I can offer. For now, it is enough.