Today we are publishing the fifth and last of a series of blogs written by Mary. Our thanks to Mary for these astonishingly descriptive blogs. Thank goodness your words don't desert you at this time Mary. The Moodscope Team

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day."

As so often, another poet got there first. This time, Gerard Manley Hopkins. When it comes to depression, it seems to me, he said most of what there is to say.

Like him, I wake in the small hours, hunted and haunted by nameless dread.

It is in these hours the human spirit has least resistance, when the ill and injured are most likely to die, when one's spirit rattles, loose and untethered, in one's mortal shell.

I am clinging to the side of a black basalt cliff, with a fathomless abyss beneath.

(O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there. Yes, Hopkins again.)

I could not tell you what substance this fear has, only that it is all encompassing, that it makes me tremble and shake so I fear my husband will awake from his peaceful sleep beside me.

Beside me, but far away.

I do not know him and cannot love him; this man who shows me nothing but kindness through these times.

The love of my family and friends is a fantasy.

My God is a joke only the gullible believe.

It is in these hours that experience and common sense are worthless. I cannot believe that this will pass. I cannot believe that the darkness will lift and that day will come.

I fear my tenuous grip will give way and that I will fall deep and deeper into the black. I fear the demons of the depths will reach up with their clawed hands and drag me down. I fear being eaten up entirely. There will be nothing left.

What is worse is that sometimes I want to let go. I want to fall. I want to become nothing. That dark emptiness calls me with a siren's voice. Surely to give in and fall would be easier than hanging on. It would be easy, the voice assures. Just a little effort, just a little pain, then peace. Nothing but black. Nothing at all...

So I weave a web of words around me, anchored with pitons of faith without belief. The words are my cradle and rope harness. If only I can find enough words to describe this, then somehow those words will create a safety net. The words will protect me from the monsters.

Words are my comfort blanket. And if I curl up inside them, sucking my thumb, then there is no one to see but I.

I do not even need to pass these words on. Just to weave them is enough. The words sustain and support me.

Enough to keep holding on to dawn.

Mary

A Moodscope member.