The first thing you see when you wake up is Depression’s glassy gaze. Unconsciousness lingers, heavy in your bones. You’d love to shut Depression out, but the familiar burn in your joints forces sleep to slip away like water through a sieve. With a groan, you prop yourself up just long enough to grab your phone before collapsing back onto the bed. Your muscles cry out in relief.
“Do you have to be here?” you ask Depression while you brush sweaty hair from your eyes. Your fingertips ignite, and your lips twist in pain. Depression shrugs, then rolls back onto the mattress, staring up at the ceiling.
“You’ve been sick lately.” Depression turns to face you, and you wish you didn’t see your own reflection in their eyes. “I didn’t want to miss out on all the fun.”
Once upon a time—in a world, no, a galaxy far, far away—you had a body that worked. Or at least one that allowed you to walk your neighborhood like a regular civilian, one that blended into the rhythm of daily life without tallying the cost of every step. Back then, Depression lingered in the corners of your mind, a vignette at the edges of your life. Now, Depression stands front and center, hand-in-hand with Pain. In this world, your existence is something to justify. The world wants to see you overcome your limitations, but success is based on your endurance, your ability to push past discomfort, to pretend that effortlessness is still within reach. But effortlessness is a myth now, a relic of when your body was a given and not a negotiation.
Crushed under the weight of living. Yet again.
“I need to get up.”
Depression scoffs. “What’s the point?”
You try to roll your eyes, but the tendons and ligaments surrounding your eye sockets twinge. Every part of you aches. Is there anything that doesn’t? There are a few good days where the pain is less, where you feel like you can function the way society demands. Then, your body reminds you with a vengeance that it was only ever loaning you that ease, not granting it. The debt comes due in waves of exhaustion, in joints that grind like rusted gears, in muscles that feel wrung out before the day has even begun. You should be used to the cycle of hope and betrayal. But it still blindsides you. Every time.
So you don’t fight their words. You don’t waste the energy you don’t have. Instead, you exhale, slow and measured, because sometimes that’s the only act of defiance left.
Funny to think some people wake up alone. No Depression in their bed. No nerves screaming. People who wake up every morning with bodies that haven’t abandoned them. Betrayed by your own body. Your own mind. Haven’t you suffered enough?
You hate those people. You want to be those people. Your jealousy courses through your body, burning with every step you cannot take, every effortless motion those strangers don’t even think to cherish.
Depression hums a pop song you once loved. Denying their words would be a waste of your finite energy. They’re not wrong. The very thought of leaving your sweat-drenched sheets is exhausting enough. Another weekend spent in bed recovering from a job you will inevitably need to quit. Another weekend ghosting friends who will inevitably forget you. Another weekend being too afraid to broach the widening gulf. Better to be remembered as your old self, right?
Each joint, each muscle, each atom of your body aches and throbs. You’d move if your nerves didn’t mistake the sheets’ touch for a threat.
“I need to shower.”
Depression laughs, because you both know there is no way in hell you will shower. The energy spent crawling to the bathroom will leave you lying on the floor for the better part of the hour. A book hides in the sheets, half-buried. You pick it up with electric fingers. Depression makes a tutting sound, echoing the doctor who asked if you were faking it, if you were faking the way your body refused to lift your head off the pillow.
“Really? You don’t have the energy for that.”
Exhaustion has seeped into your bones from entertaining this argument. A poison in your marrow, eating you from the inside out. Not even compression socks or a heating pad can help you now.
Depression picks up your phone, tapping through Instagram stories. Each one is a pointed reminder of how “normal people” live. How you could have been living if your body hadn’t betrayed you.
“What’s the point in doing anything today?” Depression taps on another story. “You’re going to get sick next week, and no one is going to care. They’ll judge you for it, actually.”
How do you explain to the world at large that your body hates you? That one day you woke up and didn’t know normality was over. That you would spend so much mental and physical energy begging a doctor to take you seriously. That you would expend so much mental and physical energy trying to regain your past body, your past life. Even though your blood tests are normal, you’re limited to the four walls of your bedroom most days. You don’t want this.
You’re not an attention seeker. You’re simply a person at war with their meat suit. You’re simply a person holding a never-ending funeral for the version of yourself who vanished. A vigil for the person you were and the futures you could have had.
Depression pats your cheek. Not gentle. Not cruel. Just there.
“Doomscroll a bit. Then nap.”
You don’t argue. You just do.
Alice Lyon (she/they) is a chronically ill writer and editor based in Northern Europe by way of Missouri. Their work has been in Paragraph Planet and will be in the upcoming 2025 National Flash Fiction Day anthology. She is currently at work on a novel.
Website: alicelyon.com
Instagram: @alice.stea
Bluesky: wordsbyalice.bsky.social