The invisible cost of illness

Some people don't believe illness is an illness.
Then some people believe it's a personal illness.
Even though the second group is already a little more aware, they still have a flawed, or at least partial, perspective.
Depression is not an individual illness.
It's an illness that, through the individual, affects the entire ecosystem in which they live.
Family, friends, work, partner, children.
Everything.
No one is excluded, no one is safe.

In my case, despite having done everything to stem the avalanche effect of depression, it has devastated everything.
It has profoundly undermined the foundations of a relationship that has lasted 20 years.
It has made my relationship with my children difficult and uncertain.
It has distanced first many friends, and then my family.

Not out of malice or conscious will.
Out of a desire for protection. Because I thought, wrongly, that by pushing everyone away, locking myself and my discomfort in a chrysalis, waiting for a butterfly to emerge from that ugly cocoon, I would avoid making the ecosystem sick.

Today, almost three years after my diagnosis, I know I did everything wrong.

Everything.

And I'm paying the consequences.

And paradoxically, to try to fix something among the thousands of things I've destroyed, I have to go back into a chrysalis, I have to go back and lock away all the rottenness, the ugliness, the pain, the fatigue, in a secret place, and try to seal it up properly, so it can't even be seen again.

Because if I want to cultivate a modicum of hope for a future now, the chrysalis must be strong enough to contain whatever I decide to put inside, and I must be strong enough to nourish the chrysalis so it doesn't explode.

Because I am the chrysalis.
And I can no longer afford to make mistakes.