Thank you, everyone, for sharing what depression feels like to you. It all sounds so familiar.

Does anyone else have trouble recognizing when depression is going to hit? I'm falling apart. I see the long slow slide, and at the same time the suddenness of bottoming has taken me by surprise.

As I look back, I can see I've been crying off and on for a few weeks. Today, I started being short-tempered with students -- who probably deserved it -- and that made me feel more guilty. I have been withdrawing, and last Sunday for the first time in years my mother did not call, but I've been making her cry the past few weeks, too. She's 86 and does not deserve her loser of a daughter.

This past week is the first time in my life I can ever remember using such totally negative language toward myself -- loser, jerk -- and truly feel like hate myself. Hate everything about myself. Not for any particular good reason, just because I take up space on the earth.

I have not had a f/t job since 2008. I am now working four p/t contacts, and for what? I'm not sure how much longer I can even pay the mortgage on my apt, which has changed to a bankrupt near-slum in the housing crisis. And that's a huge part of it for me -- being a rank failure who cannot even take care of herself.

I look back, and I see the long slow slide and yet today, I just feel as if it all somehow hit, like going down under the wheels of a truck. Sorry, sorry for venting.