Instructions for Living with, and Surviving Depression.

It is imperative to note, before reading this manual, that you are powerful, you are beautiful, and you are not alone.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR LIVING WITH, AND SURVIVING DEPRESSION:

1. See a depressive episode descending before it lands. Like the moon crashing lazily into your home, there is nothing you can do to prepare. The sky is falling like it has so many times before, so close your eyes, and let gravity take over.

2. Watch your eating habits deteriorate, along with your social life. Try to force repair to both, and withdraw, feeling defeated when you find yourself bringing down those around you, and come home to vegetables spoiling in your fridge beneath a half-empty pizza box and beer you bought with bill money.

3. Open up to friends and be prepared to be met with a mix of uncertain support and inexperienced advice. They can't all see the crater where your bedroom used to be. Hear, once again, that you are choosing to feel this way, and that the amateur psychologists that live in your social circle-jerk know your mind better than you do. Spend the day feeling like a waste of everyone's time.

4. Read everything you can about depression. Online sources, comics, books, anything you can get your hands on for a quick boost. Solidarity becomes your morning coffee.

5. Feel weak, horrid, and alone. You don't get a choice in this matter; your mind has taken over. Realize that the energy it costs to want to get better is more than you have right now. Find yourself wishing, not to die, but to simply stop being.

6. You are chained to a telepathic stalker that periodically reminds you why you don't own any good, sharp knives. Your logic in this state is faulty in its eyes. Try to tune it out as best as you can, it knows all your secrets and will use them to press its lips to your wrists and siphon blood from your veins.

7. Suicide is not an option.

8. Suicide is NOT an option.

9. Acknowledge your nothingness. For all your inability to move, you are not allowed to stop moving. Focus on the paradox of what others would call your "wasted days" and let it anger you. Let your heart become rage and thunder because feeling hate is better than feeling nothing when you've lost faith that feeling is still possible. Scream and curse, spit vengeance at your pillows, you are a beautiful disaster and this is your reckoning.

10. Hold tightly the memory and energy of your outburst. Channel it anywhere you can, making sure that its destructive potential does not exceed your creative energy. Draw pictures in the ashes, and push yourself to new challenges, breaking apart typical conventions because your glory is anything but typical.

11. When the dust settles, step back and observe your creations. Draw conclusions about the artist as though you were in any gallery, speaking in hushed whispers of the power and beauty exhibited here. Collect it all together as an instruction manual on building a new moon whenever yours falls from the sky.