Odds are that you’ve been through a dark period in life, or that you will interact with someone who is.
Either way, Hyperbole and a Half’s illustrated blog post on her experience with suicidal depression is worth a read.
An excerpt:
And that’s the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn’t always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn’t even something — it’s nothing. And you can’t combat nothing. You can’t fill it up. You can’t cover it. It’s just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.
It would be like having a bunch of dead fish, but no one around you will acknowledge that the fish are dead. Instead, they offer to help you look for the fish or try to help you figure out why they disappeared.
The dead fish being the protagonist’s inability to experience normal emotions.
It’s a very good explanation of one person’s emotional journey, or lack thereof.