The difference between depression and despair is that despair is static, whereas depression, underneath its lassitude, is all about transformation. Depression is a temporary opting-opt, to enable you to adjust to life more successfully. The process has its own dynamic, like water, and you can float on its surface, if you trust its buoyancy.
Despair is much more dangerous because it insists on a fixed position. Even when adopted as part of an intellectual fashion, it doesn’t allow for a way out of its own stance. It won’t release you, as depression does, as a matter of course. No doubt it has its pleasures, but it’s a mask that merges eventually with your face..
When despair is a statue, depression is a waterfall.
For wisdom moves more easily than motion itself; she is so pure she pervades and permeates all things…she is but one, yet can do all things, herself unchanging, she makes all things new.”
The Wisdom of Solomon, Chapter 7: 24-25, 27. The Apocrypha. The Revised English Bible.
* Comment: “…depression is a temporary opting out..” is a great way to say that I am no longer able to stay focused on what is before me…only what is past and what lies in the future. I cannot and will not stay in the present. My opting out is a way of saying I am attempting to gather my thoughts and senses, so that I can figure out why I feel the way I do and what is the way out for me. I need this time away from me and my pain to lick my wounds. I was trying to escape and run from whatever was chasing me.
Hugh