the pain that cannot be transmitted to anyone · S4
It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing.
Context
The theme's absolute limit case, stated clinically: a suffering so total that the very faculty required to share it — empathy, the reaching toward another mind — is one of the first things it destroys. The pain seals its own exits. Even a second sufferer in the identical state can't be reached, because each is walled inside the same incommunicable circuit, which is why the essay's last word on it is not a description but a census: a hell built to hold exactly one. [sweep · shared-ground depression-anhedonia]