What is pushed down when a person is depressed is easily identified by its absence: emotion, the continual flow of feelings that remind us we’re alive. Unlike the wrangler of the beach ball, a depressed person doesn’t choose this submersion of life energy—it imposes itself, turning a once-vibrant emotional landscape into arid desert. The only “feeling” that remains, typically, is more sensation than emotion, a thrumming, indistinct pain that threatens to consume everything, and sometimes does.
