The thing that most people never tell you about despair, either brought on by clinical depression or anxiety, trauma, or by unshakable existential unease, is that it is a heightened form of feeling. For the year that I lived in Kerr there seemed to be a permanent knot in my chest. On good days that’s all that it was. On bad days it was all that I could do to get out of bed. The sense of looming dread would recede only for lengthened periods of apathy, where everything from God to eating breakfast lost any meaning whatsoever. For a time I found identity in this place. Though I was undeniably miserable I convinced myself that at least I was authentic. Life was purposeless pain and the mass public was merely blind and naïve to the reality that I knew so well.

One of the things that caught me most off-guard when I recovered was that normal life did not match the emotional high that I had been living under in Kerr. I expected that if I were ever to somehow escape the pit that I’d been in that the constant dread would be replaced with an equally constant happiness. What I found instead was that in “normal” life I seemed to exist in a rather feelingless plane and that my emotions were more directly correlated to specific stimuli rather than being ever-present. When this happened, there was a part of me that missed the despair. It had become such a part of my identity that its sudden absence was actually hard to deal with. This was only exacerbated by visiting relatives and old friends that had never experienced what I had experienced. They carried on as if everything was normal, but even though I was no longer depressed, I was most certainly different from the person I had been before my experience. It took several months for me to feel like I wasn’t putting on an act every time I made small talk. I still feel a similar disconnect on occasion even now.