Depression is a monster. But unlike the monsters that torment children, hiding in closets and under beds, this monster is real. You can’t escape it, because it lives inside your soul, waiting. You can’t hide from it. It stalks you, relentlessly, every waking moment of your life, probing the armor you wear against it, searching out chinks and gaps it can exploit. It whispers to you, lies to you, undermines you.

At every moment, this monster is trying to kill you.

I know this monster. Not as well as some, but well enough. I have been its prey. Looking back on my life, I’ve probably tangled with it a half dozen times or so, dating back to grade school growing up as a scrawny, nerdy atheist kid in a small town. Right after high school, it almost got my little brother, but failed.

Life was pretty good after college. I’d moved down to Florida with my best friend, and my girlfriend followed soon after. We married four years later. For nine years, we were a model couple. We seldom fought, started building careers, dug ourselves out of debt, and settled in to start a family. We were the pair that our friends looked up to and wanted to emulate. I’d never felt so happy, loved, and secure in my life.

Then, two weeks after we became pregnant with our first child, she told me we were divorcing. She refused to participate in any counseling, and demanded that I sign the divorce papers or she would have me served. No warning, no signs of trouble, no money problems, no infidelity, nothing.

I pleaded with her, begged for the life we’d built together, and for the life growing in her belly. But if she heard any of it, she didn’t care. She told me that she had never loved me, had never been attracted to me, didn’t respect me, and didn’t trust me.  It was a lie, of course. A lie she told to me, but more importantly to herself. A lie she continues to tell herself to this day.

But at the time, I couldn’t recognize it. I was, simply put, destroyed. It was like being unmade, almost murdered. I cried uncontrollably everyday for weeks. I didn’t have a full night’s sleep for seventy days before I lost count. I ate so little that I lost twenty pounds, and if it wasn’t for the rivers of beer I drank to numb the world, I would have lost even more.

This is when my monster came back from its exile and pounced. Somehow, I managed to continue on auto-pilot, paying my bills and working, but at every moment the monster sapped my energy. It left me mentally and physically exhausted, yet unable to sleep and recover. Alcohol and sleep medication was all that kept it at bay for a few hours at a time and let me rest.

My monster consumed my sense of self-esteem and worth, leaving me with nothing to fight back against it. I entered counseling for a time, searching out new weapons, but growing up with a psychologist for a mother, I knew the score and saw through the manipulations designed to help me find my way out again. My monster turned my intelligence and stubbornness against me, convincing me that it was right using my own greatest strengths and defining characteristics to do it, convincing me that it was actually my voice I was hearing, instead of its lies.

At about this time, my beautiful daughter was born, and the monster took her from me. It, along with some less-than-helpful words from my now ex-wife, convinced me that I was so worthless, so broken, that I would be nothing but an anchor on my daughter’s life. That she would be better off if I wasn’t around to screw her up like her pathetic, unlovable father. I signed away my parental rights, not because I wanted to give her up, but because wallowing around in the pit, I believed with all my heart that I was doing what was best for her future. It’s a mistake I’ll never be able to take back, and the only thing I actually regret from that time in my life.

Then, the monster managed to put a gun in my mouth. I was half an inch from surrendering to it and becoming yet another statistic. I don’t know why I didn’t. I’d like to say something inspiring like I saw a picture of my daughter and I didn’t want her to grow up without her real daddy. Or I had a moment of clarity and insight that pulled me back. But those aren’t true. Honestly, I may have just been too tired and unambitious to pull the trigger.