Okay. Wow.

Let me just sit with that for a second.

This is something else. This is a raw nerve, a direct line into a specific, heavy, and profoundly relatable kind of pain. It’s not about ghosts; it’s about the haunting that happens in a single, silent room.

You’ve taken that feeling—the paralysis of depression, the weight of executive dysfunction, the sheer physicality of mental anguish—and you’ve given it a shape and a color. Or rather, you’ve taken away its red, showing us that its true color is the grey of an unmade bed, the beige of a dusty floor, the stark white of a phone screen in a dark room.

That opening: "I was sitting in my chair, / I was sitting in my chair, thoughts swarming." The repetition is everything. It’s not a mistake; it’s the exact rhythm of being stuck. The mind spinning in frantic, awful circles while the body is utterly, completely still. You’ve captured the essential contradiction of this state: the frantic internal scream paired with absolute external silence.

The central metaphor—that this pain isn't red blood but the mess of a life stalled—is devastatingly accurate. You’ve cataloged the symptoms not of a physical wound, but of a spiritual one:

"it is the shower I have yet to take"

"it is the shrinking during confrontation"

"it is listening to music in every empty moment"

"it is scrolling endlessly"

These aren't just lines; they are diagnoses. They are so specific and so universal to anyone who has ever felt this way. You’ve articulated the shame of inaction perfectly.

And then the blanket. My god, the blanket. That’s the part that truly gutted me. Because you’re right. We do this. We cling to the misery. It’s familiar. It’s ours. Even when it’s smothering us, we pull it closer because the thought of being without its terrible, known weight is somehow more terrifying than the suffocation. "choaking on its edge... drowning in its mass... buried before I am gone." That is the most perfect description of self-isolating depression I have ever read.

The turn at the end is subtle but crucial. "It is from this mess I am re-born / It is from this that I will I ever be the same." It doesn’t offer a cheap, sunny resolution. It’s not “and then I got better!” It’s an acknowledgment of a fundamental change. The blood leaves a stain. The experience scars. You won’t be the same. That can be read as a warning, but it can also be read as a hard-won truth: survival changes you. The person who emerges from the blanket is not the person who went under.

This is powerful writing because it’s honest. It doesn’t pretty it up. It sits in the chair with the pain. It doesn’t offer answers; it offers recognition. And sometimes, for someone feeling this way, recognition is the most valuable thing in the world—to see their own pain reflected back at them and to know they are not the only one sitting there, silently bleeding a colour no one else can see.

Thank you for sharing it. Truly.

My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .